Vince Mancini

The Laundromat doesn’t do a good enough job tying threads together.

Waititi spends so much energy trying to convince us that this story is universal that he often loses what made it novel in the first place.

The Spy Who Dumped Me‘s action is just so big and loud that it obliterates any quiet character moments or clever wordplay.

No Time To Die belatedly reveals that what we were watching wasn’t an action thriller or a kooky spy caper at all, but a melodrama, a kind of massive budget telenovela about an incorrigible heartbreaker finally allowing himself to be vulnerable and find true love.

Tag never transcends the basic fact of being the kind of movie with a slow-motion rap walk scene, and even when it’s decently funny and reasonably entertaining (which it usually is!), it remains ever constrained by the basic shticky irreality of the format.

It’s scholarly to the point that it’s bloodless, a dowdy tweed jacket of a film.

In spite of how visually dazzling and legitimately entertaining it is, Ready Player One is at its heart, a celebration of the gormless rube. It is a paean to the schmuck. To celebrate it uncritically is to become one.

It’s an impressive movie in many ways, dizzyingly complex and intensely brainy, but if you don’t buy into the complex plot and its many (MANY) twists, they tend to be more tiresome than exhilarating. It’s a loving, labyrinthine homage to a genre I’m not sure deserves it.

Goofiness and occasional sub-par acting is forgivable in YA space fiction. Less acceptable is the consistent disrespect and disregard Voyagers shows toward its own characters and premise. If the eternal question is “what did you want this movie to be?” Voyagers’ consistent, unmistakable response is “sort of like other movies.”

It’s a movie that’s been in the oven forever yet still comes out feeling half baked. Still, it’s hard not to sense the kernel of something good here. Chaos Walking is a bit like a house with “good bones.” The framework for something beautiful is there, but you’ll have to squint to see it amidst the cracked windows and trash-strewn lawn.

It’s hard to say Game Night is entirely bad. I laughed a lot and its creators are clearly capable of crafting a joke. Yet they seem to have either an incomplete or an incredibly cynical conception of what a movie is.

To be fair, Cold Pursuit is rarely boring. You’re never particularly invested, but its shrill unpredictability is like a circus performance. It’s impressive the sheer amount of calories being burned despite the lack of believable characters or compelling situations.

Pieces Of A Woman, is proof that arthouse filmmakers still haven’t tired of exploring grief.

Roth and Carnahan’s motivations here remain murky and Death Wish never justifies its existence. Divorced of context, it’s like sauce and tomato without the burger.

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.

It’s weird more in a desperate, humanity-pushed-to-its-breaking-point kind of way, like it had so many commercial requirements pressing on its artistic sensibilities that the whole thing popped like a zit.

In the end, the timeliness of 2067’s premise is matched only by the clunkiness of its execution.

At times, watching Nic Cage over emote every single line and bad guys get iced by killer monkeys is as sublime as it sounds.

It seems to attempt both schlocky fun gore and disturbingly realistic gore, which feels like an uneasy mix. Whatever line there is between fun, cathartic gore and enervating, off-putting, borderline mean-spirited gore, Apostle crosses it, at least for me. Not exactly a fun time by the end, and it was hard to divine a higher purpose for it (something about religion, I guess?). Hell of a premise, cast, and setting though. And points for boldness.

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.

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.