Vince Mancini

A pleasant enough and consistently chuckle-worthy comedy while it lasts that could maybe use one or two more ingredients.

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.

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.

There’s a lot of beauty in First Cow, I just wish I could turn the volume up a little.

Palm Springs is the perfect kind of art-comedy. It comes on like a brilliantly silly little lark and eventually lands on you like a ton of bricks.

Babyteeth, from director Shannon Murphy and writer Rita Kalnejais, always keeps us half a step off balance. Their film has that a sense of casual naughtiness, a straightforward love of innocent mischief common to the best Australian movies, which in this case serves to leaven the central tragedy.

Greyhound is an exciting, non-stop battle scene from start to finish. Which might be enough to make us watch it, but is not enough to make us love it.

The strength of Eurovision is that it’s well-written enough that it might work even if it was neither a Will Ferrell vehicle nor a comedy, which isn’t normally true of Ferrell vehicles.

Judy and Punch may not be as thought-provoking as it wants to be, but what it lacks in cultural critique it more than makes up for in escapism, eccentricity, and eye candy. It’s transporting, in every sense of the word, and it comes along just when we most seem to need it.

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.

Miss Juneteenth is a promising debut feature in a lot of ways, but like a lot of tweener indies, it has trouble transcending its own pitch.

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

The vague title is a tell. There’s the general tone of uncovering something shocking and nefarious, but Bad Education is far more interesting when it’s sympathetic toward its stated villains.

Extraction is constant, hyper-stylized murders and maimings, shot clearly and intelligently without too much unnecessary plot. It’s exactly what I’d been missing about action movies.

Where gangster and mafioso stories so often seem epic, taking the shape of classic rise-and-fall narratives, Arkansas is elusive and ephemeral. Its characters struggle to survive against a universe that doesn’t really care about them. It’s not the most escapist quarantine content, but there’s a simple beauty to it.

The humor is stylized but sharply-structured, slightly shticky but well-timed and mostly gentle in tone.

Greed is solidly entertaining throughout, but its attempt to mix comedy, tragedy, reality, absurdity, exposé, and mockumentary… is maybe biting off a little more than it can chew.

Movies that make you think are great, but most of our finest filmmakers attempt that (even sometimes when they shouldn’t). With Leigh Whannell, we have a hyper-competent craftsman who seems like he’d rather make us shit our pants. It’s nice.

Onward is a perfectly fine movie made up of elements of Guardians of the Galaxy, Zootopia, Coco, Wall E, and assorted other Disney products that it doesn’t employ quite as well. Your kids probably won’t notice, but you will.

In The Way Back, Gavin O’Connor has made another reasonably entertaining sports movie.

Bloodshot‘s bad composition doesn’t give us enough space to appreciate its cleverest conceits. It trades lucid composition for “emotional truth,” but mostly it conveys the emotion of someone throwing energy drinks at your head.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn’t shout at you. It whispers gently from the porch of another house, leaving its message to be carried on the breeze.

As a storytelling exercise, Birds of Prey is mostly pretty bad, but aside from a sneaky wit and committed Margot Robbie, what it does have going for it is consistently spectacular stunts.

Just Mercy is a “true story” encased in amber. Its politics are inert. The story only works as escapism, where we clap at hearing the least dangerous of truths spoken aloud and once again entertain the delusion that one man calling bullshit on a corrupt system is enough to defeat it. These days that only seems to work in superhero movies.

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.

“Fred Durst and John Travolta team up to ineptly recreate Big Fan” is a compelling pitch, perhaps the most compelling pitch, and the movie itself mostly delivers on the kind of train wreck absurdism that it promises.

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.

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.