Vikram Murthi

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.

To his credit, Lorentzen never guides the audience’s moral response, allowing us to make up our minds about the Ochoas on a scene-by-scene basis. He also provides ample rationale for their actions by depicting their hand-to-mouth lifestyle alongside the on-the-job drudgery.

While the contemplative tone and measured pacing are definitely features instead of bugs, Light Of Light is so anodyne at times that it borders on inert.

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

The Irishman’s ending illustrates that even the toughest men, or the most celebrated filmmakers, still crave a sliver of light to guide them through the encroaching darkness.

Mikhanovsky and Austen even allow for genuine budding romance to filter through the struggle, with love operating as a balm for beleaguered souls.

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

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.

The footage astounds, but the competing contextualizations breathe new life into the experiment, especially when Lindeen allows the surviving members free reign to confront past emotions.

The Last Black Man plays like a poetic portrait, part tender ode and part cartography of lived experience, bringing a nuanced and hard-earned perspective to the screen.

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!

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.

One of the great performances of the 20th century.

It plays like a compelling, genre-inflected advertisement for the Indian tourism board, even as Winterbottom toils in the country’s seedy underbelly.

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

When it’s all said and done, however, the whole thing just feels a little tired.

The vast majority of the people watching The Brink have their minds made up about Bannon and will not be swayed by his flamboyant rhetoric. At the same time, it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly Klayman accomplishes with her film beyond a mere political horror show one can safely view from behind proverbial Plexiglas.

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

Zemeckis has crafted a work that may be dismissed and forgotten by the general public, but will inevitably remain a curiosity for cinephiles and auteurists everywhere. Not a bad feat for a guy embarking upon the fourth decade of his career.

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.

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

Spider-Verse feels fresh precisely because it breathes new life into an old story without abandoning the basics.

Tyrel is essentially Microaggressions: The Movie.

It’s sad that Fantastic Beasts pulls off what I assumed was impossible: It turned an imaginative fantasy world into dreary wallpaper.

The original "Shirkers" might be a product of a bygone era of pop culture, but its new nonfiction form scans as a second attempt to reach those fellow weirdos who are desperate to make something real, established structures be damned.

It’s just a shame that the edge-of-your-seat suspense negates The Kindergarten Teacher’s preceding psychological power.

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.

As it stands, however, Free Solo still has plenty to offer in the edge-of-your-seat department.