Vikram Murthi

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.