Vince Mancini

Booksmart’s version of specificity mostly feels like old tropes sporting new stickers. It seems to take place in this weird bubble, where everyone is sexy and Yale-bound and achingly cool (even its supposedly uncool protagonist is the class president). That it never really acknowledges this makes you wonder if the filmmakers know it exists.

To its credit, When You Finish Saving The World is only 85 minutes long, so even if it doesn’t exactly set the world on fire at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome. There was maybe something here but it feels a little undercooked.

Apatow’s movies are always notoriously too long, but this time it isn’t self-indulgence that’s keeping The King Of Staten Island over two hours (137 minutes, to be exact) it’s more a failure to choose between four or five different stock storylines.

There’s a gulf between Pacifiction‘s promise and the crushing burden it is to actually sit through — which is numbing and banal in a way that doesn’t inspire flowery prose. It mostly inspires curmudgeonly grumbling (foreshadowing…).

The idea of a movie about an Asian-American basketball prospect is compelling enough, but Boogie is also saddled with the baggage of seemingly everything writer/director Eddie Huang thinks is cool. Some of it fits, some of it doesn’t, and lots of times his attempts at a fresh angle come off achingly corny.

The frustrating thing about Mary Poppins Returns is that it’s constantly teasing us with something more.

As great as Triangle Of Sadness always looks, Östlund has a frustrating tendency to go more broad when you expect him to get more pointed. The film is meant to explore the relationship between beauty and power, which it does, in a broad sense, but I’m also not entirely sure what to make of certain scenes.

The movie glows. And yet, something about this coming-of-age tale feels transparently self-preserving, trapped in an adolescent’s point of view. It offers a story about race where everyone gets off too easily, where it seems the most important thing a white person can do is to acknowledge that racism exists while carrying on.

This Lion King remake isn’t a bad movie, it’s just… why? To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it took a lot of money to look this cheap.

In a lot of ways, Child’s Play seems like a good idea that the people involved didn’t have either the time or the talent to execute properly.

As always, it’s impossible not to be impressed with Soderbergh’s ability to stage and shoot a scene, a talent he has historically put to use in some of my favorite stories (The Knick, for instance). But when he uses that talent to just sort of breeze through a rough draft story before flitting off to the next project, it’s a kind of disrespect to the subject.

In the past, this kind of character, who abhors swear words but kills with obvious relish, would’ve been positioned as an interesting contrast. In The Equalizer 2 it just feels like unexamined orthodoxy. It feels like the symptom of a very American kind of brain sickness.

Oddly, the most compelling part of Unhinged is seeing just how much mayhem director Derrick Borte and writer Carl Ellsworth can squeeze out of this most mundane of premises.

The remake has the right tone, an interesting angle, a delightful supporting cast, and Anna Faris acts her butt off, but there are times it feels like she’s doing it opposite an upturned broom.

The action set pieces are hit and miss, mostly not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and if there’s one thing Tomb Raider is actually good at, it’s giving death more gravity than you usually see in these kinds of movies, where faceless henchmen are dispatched with nary a second thought. For the most part, though, Tomb Raider is content to be the kind of movie that reminds you of other movies without differentiating itself from them.

It offers, mainly, the vague sense that this is all supposed to be a fresh and intriguing way of telling a story. And this intrigue is meant to be enough for us not to mind that the characters are all ciphers performing a series of illusory bits and homages amidst a frozen wasteland. This dearth of recognizable humanity and situations made me feel, presumably Kaufman-like, trapped inside my own head, both lonely and bored.

The film morphs into an action thriller in the final act, but by then I’d lost interest. It didn’t feel thrilling, it felt like a way to bring some resolution to a story that never quite finds its reason for existing.

The Batman wants so badly to be hard boiled, to be “a vibe,” but it attempts to squeeze in so much that it feels frantic.

Little would’ve required Oscar-caliber writing and a once-in-a-lifetime child actor to pull off, and it just doesn’t have those. It has Regina Hall but it can’t use her.

The Father is brilliantly structured and executed, but in the end it’s just a cleverly constructed way to depict the mundane. It never finds that level of the fantastic or allows for the kind of magical thinking necessary to escape its dreary reality. Ultimately it wallows in the pathetic. Who needs this?

Red Notice is content to merely mimic the rhythms and pacing of a fun movie the same way Ryan Reynolds has become adept at delivering lines that have the tone and cadence of jokes without the comedic value.

Nobody shoehorns Odenkirk into a stock action movie with no real regard for, and without especially utilizing, any of his particular skills.

Painstaking subjectivity maybe isn’t the prize it seems when the subject is syphilitic, incontinent, and senile. Context is not the enemy.

In Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Raimi seems to only be granted occasional cubes of autonomy, within which to shoot charmingly out-there set pieces with a characteristically bombastic score, and periodically remind us that he’s the guy who made Drag Me To Hell and Army Of Darkness.

Father Stu is exactly this kind of intriguing mix, of illuminating religious philosophy and utterly baffling narrative choices. It’s vaguely inspiring, slightly tedious to sit through, and ultimately unknowable, like any good Catholic sermon.

The cinematography looks great and the cast (Pugh, Styles, Pine, Nick Kroll, Kate Berlant, Kiki Lane…) are mostly acting their butts off. It’s all very alluring and sexy and intriguing right up until the point when it reveals that it has nothing to say.

Sure, the characters fight a lot (it is an action movie directed by a stunt guy, after all), and the fight work is consistently above average and sporadically funny, but they spend so much time talking about why they’re fighting, and whether they should fight that Bullet Train often times feels more like a yak-fest than an action movie

Halle Berry seems to have discovered that there are lots of stories in the world of MMA. Sadly it seems no one could convince her not to try to tell all of them at once.

The smartest thing Eric Bress did in Ghosts of War was to cast Billy Zane, and the dumbest thing he did was keeping Billy Zane off screen for 90% of the movie.

Mom And Dad feels like a concept that got pitched, sold, and shot without ever getting written. It’s premise and pantomime. It’s set-up, an hour of running and yelling, and the end.

My Policeman does precious little exploring of the joyful side of this unconventional three-way relationship and lots of wallowing in the sadness of it all. And if I’m going to wallow, I’d at least like to have it feel like a fresh wallow. I never like to repeat a wallow. And My Policeman feels decidedly like an echo of wallows past.

The Highwaymen seems to want to be reactionary but comes off merely crotchety.

It’s a conceptual joke in search of actual jokes. Like a C- term paper delivered on time, the most impressive thing about Fatman is that it’s finished.

Gotti is technically inept, where every scene feels like a disconnected sizzle reel for a different movie than the previous one, but the fascinating thing it about is less what it fails to do than what it’s trying to do.

Usually when you overtly acknowledge the tropes and standard story beats in a movie like this, it’s for some purpose, some comment about what we like about or what it means to be a comic book movie. Samaritan is really none of that, it’s more like discount comic book movie slurry.

90% of the jokes in Me Time are just Kevin Hart doing an excessive act-out for a C+ bit, which will occasionally go on so long that they will, Baba Booey-like, circle around to being funny again through sheer commitment to tedium.

Beast feels slapdash and detached to the point of being disdainful. It offers the barest idea of a movie about Idris Elba fighting a lion and nothing more.

Blacklight’s filmmakers seem to have spent a lot time trying to figure out why Neeson would have to bonk some heads, and not nearly enough time storyboarding and staging elaborate, gloriously executed head bonks.

Shut In is boring, inconsistent, imbued with some kind of inscrutable code, and above all lazy, a perfect reflection of the rightwing media ecosystem.

If Without Remorse has any value at all, it’s as a headscratcher. You know it doesn’t work, but what were they attempting here?

The movie shouts things that should be subtext so loudly that what’s actually happening tends to get drowned out.

Historical analysis aside, even if you’d parachuted into the theater from the early aughts and knew nothing of politics or the future, 12 Strong still wouldn’t be very good. In fact, the closest thing it has to a redeeming quality is that you can hate it irrespective of politics; it’s objectively bad.

If anything, the trouble with Wrinkle is that you never really get a sense of DuVernay’s personal touch. In fact, it feels a lot like Brad Bird’s big budget, equally smarmy 2015 Disney film, Tomorrowland. Both attempt to be so broad and universal that they feel disconnected from anything human.

The “social commentary” feels exactly as derivative as the rest of the film, like someone artlessly smushing together imagery they’ve seen, a sort of uncanny Muzak of hip provocation written by a less coherent Bret Easton Ellis.

Fifty Shades Freed is meant to make us believe that a matching tea towel marriage doesn’t preclude shirtless Fabio romance novel cover sex, but everything is so catalog-ready and scrubbed free of humanity that it actually does the opposite.

Dare To Dream delivers The Secret‘s philosophy in classic Nicholas Sparks movie format, complete with deferred scholarships, single mothers finding love, and copious Spanish moss.

Spencer treats Diana as if she was kidnapped into all this, being held against her will. It depicts her life as such a demeaning, excruciating, maddening spectacle that you wonder why she doesn’t just leave. That Diana was a prisoner is a perspective meant to flatter that actually flattens.

Yesterday isn’t really about the Beatles. It isn’t about art, or career, or cultural context, or the music business, and it’s only about “love” inasmuch as Hallmark cards and McMansion word art are about love. It isn’t really about anything.

From the very beginning of Angel Is Fallen, the camera is far too close to everyone’s faces while the frame jiggles slightly and parts of it cycle in and out of focus as if the action is happening down on the field and we’re watching it from the nosebleed seats through a telescope. Is this an artistic choice or a logistical compromise? Either way, it sucks.

Even on a technical level Breaking In is shockingly inept.

The Son plays disturbingly like an obtuse memoir written by a deadbeat dad who, try as he might, can’t figure out why his clinically depressed son’s vibes are so bad.

I can’t think of many less valuable experiences than sitting through some bored rich guy’s extended series of inside jokes and half-baked complaints about smartphones.