Vikram Murthi

American Symphony greatly suffers from a lack of focus.

While Much Ado About Dying strives to be a tribute to caretakers and Chambers’ dearly departed uncle, its baggy structure, dictated by David’s declining health, renders the film frustratingly inert.

Hacking Hate can charitably be construed as a subversion of social media incentivization, a filmic attempt to channel free-floating rage towards powerful entities who make money off of human fragility and social discord. But as an exercise in positive or progressive radicalization, it falls short of its aims by communicating well-known problems without offering solutions beyond the need to soldier on in the face of such vast hatred.

The Kid Who Would Be King’s arrhythmic pacing proves to be a liability, particularly in the homestretch when Cornish establishes three separate endings and decides to power through all of them

Colette too frequently coasts on its timeliness, preferring catharsis to nuance.

Despite their best efforts, Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville can’t rescue Ordinary Love, a bland drama about a late-middle-aged couple grappling with a cancer diagnosis.

Ultimately, there’s just too much extra baggage for Mary Poppins Returns to soar to great heights.

Bumblebee may sport a thoughtful character arc and a throwback vibe, but it’s not meaningfully different than the other five entries in the Transformers series. There’s still plenty of laughably stupid junk to wade through in order to find the good bits.

Alita works as spectacle, but there’s so much conspiring against that endgame that its best moments hardly feel worth it.

As much as Questlove probes his many interviewees with questions about the expectations and responsibility that comes with “Black genius,” his film doesn’t live up to the ambitious framework he puts forth.

As much as Tuesday strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.

Aside from the Mexico City setting, it doesn’t really accomplish anything unique either. A Cop Movie feels in the end like, well, a cop movie, only with an eye for society instead of the unit. That’s not enough to separate it from the pack.

Cole clearly deserves as many posthumous tributes as the culture can afford, especially since he received so little in his lifetime, but reverence, particularly as a way of combatting decades of indifference, isn’t necessarily the best solution

Too often, The Gentlemen creaks through the motions of Ritchie’s patented vision, absent the spark necessary to bring his fast-paced action and profane zingers to life. It’s like watching a reunited band struggle to recapture the energy of its glory days.

Piranhas generally succeeds whenever it leans into its hangout vibe. The teenage gang isn’t particularly memorable (names and personalities are eschewed for rowdy homogeneity) but their collective energy can be fun to watch, especially because it allows Giovannesi to document youth as currently lived.

Gladiator II” wouldn’t be the first sequel to become bogged down in its resemblance to its forebear, but the various superficial modifications made to characterizations and action sequences operate under faulty bigger-is-better sequel logic.

It’s everything and nothing at once.

Though undoubtedly a flawed enterprise, After Love is a formal wonder, due to the efforts of Lafosse, photographer Jean-François Hensgens, and production designer Olivier Radot.

"One Love” plods through an inert, and-then-this-happened structure that neglects to illuminate or entertain. It’s watchable only because of performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch, who admirably attempt to imbue Bob and Rita Marley, respectively, with genuine life absent from the rest of the film.

It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.

There’s plenty of complexity to be mined from a scenario in which perception carries more weight than the truth, but director Anthony Mandler, a music video and commercial veteran making his feature debut, takes a broad-strokes approach to Steve’s plight.

The film’s tone is less cheeky and more serious, especially in the first half, but Vaughn and co-screenwriter Karl Gajdusek have their cake and eat it too by doling out standard “Kingsman”-esque thrills in between heady conversations about non-violence, colonialism, and the horrors of war.

Greed fails because it’s overstuffed with subplots and organized via a maddening time-hopping structure.

West of the Jordan River works best when Gitai involves himself in the interviews. Gitai is a compelling screen presence—empathetic and patient, but also skeptical and necessarily forceful.

Though technically a film, with all of its corresponding qualities, After The Wedding primarily exists as an actor’s showcase for its main quartet.

For better or often worse, It Happened in L.A. has a vision.

The many logic-defying developments in “Missing” make it difficult to hold one’s attention, especially considering that the film gives viewers plenty of time to think about the countless ways it doesn’t make sense.

The Biggest Little Farm has many valuable points to make about the connection between how our food is grown and eco-friendly living, but style betrays substance so often here that the message gets lost in the shuffle. Unless that message is simply We Bought A Farm!

Ferdinand’s most saccharine moments end up being its most potent, even if they’re often more cloying than emotional.

Everything from Peter and Emma’s inane backstories to their sweaty attempts to win back partners who were clearly not right for them in the first place mark this as a case of a creative team going through the motions. The ending hinges on a callback so obvious and manufactured that it provokes eye rolls, even as it slightly subverts expectations.

The sincerity of Without Blood can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.

The result is an uneven paean to a man who deserves a more complicated portrait.

It’s obvious that Robles can inspire people, but the film constantly pokes the audience with explicit reminders of this fact — including a scene where Lopez reads Anthony multiple letters written by children saying that they’re inspired by Robles — that it feels downright insulting.

Despite committed performances from most of the cast (especially Ejiofor, who imbues Pearson with a gentle yet stubborn spirit), Come Sunday can’t shake its middling script and perfunctory direction.

Unfortunately, I Think We’re Alone Now stops being interesting right when Grace (Elle Fanning) comes to town, mostly because she brings screenwriter Mike Makowsky’s trite ideas about loneliness and community along with her.

Franklin’s real life was obviously rife with drama worthy of the big screen, but Wilson and TV-trained director Liesl Tommy take a comprehensive, arrhythmic approach that treats major life events like soapy episodes or grist for the pop-psych mill.

From beginning to end, The Six Triple Eight never trusts its audience to actually engage with the material beyond its inspiring surface, evidenced by a lengthy coda featuring title cards that literally restate the film’s plot over archival footage of the 6888th Battalion. Unsung heroes deserve better.

The story never even grazes the sublime; it’s dull and banal, coasting on familiarity from beginning to end. Here, the clichés don’t celebrate a reunion. They’re at war.

It’s a cliché to praise a film by saying that an actor “is having fun” on screen, but Hardy having fun with a weirdly bland character and his absurd, sassy alter ego goes a long way to giving Venom a reason to exist.

One irony of Malcolm & Marie is that its vindictive bellyaching about judging a film on its own terms is much more interesting than the actual relationship at the center of the film. The performances remain trapped in a self-conscious mode, merely mimicking the cadence and tempo of a romance-fracturing fight.

Simply put, Swan Song would be dead on arrival without Ali’s dual performance, which manages to ground the film’s tearjerker premise in credible human emotion.

Shot and directed like a sitcom episode, The Parenting runs on (good, awkward, creepy) vibes, which is probably why Parker Posey, who plays the home’s “mysterious” owner and exposition dispenser, injects energy into the film just by being her off-kilter self. . . Unfortunately, The Parenting isn’t a hangout movie where tone can reign supreme.

The Beast Within has nothing much to offer except the domestic violence allegory at its center, so Farrell repeatedly emphasizes, spotlights, and underlines it in red, just in case anyone was unclear about what the film was really about.

An insipid, boring mess, Three Christs doesn’t even have the decency to be amusing, apart from Stephen Root’s forced delivery of the film’s title followed by a what-a-world head shake.

The palpable sincerity behind “Back to Black” almost makes its myriad weaknesses more glaring. Everyone involved in the film approaches the late artist with love and respect, but its tawdry instincts and misguided sense of responsibility let her memory down.