Martin and Lindsay’s Tina all too often struggles to show Turner as a three-dimensional person — her wants, her beliefs, her passions — in lieu of her being a product of the abuse she withstood from Ike. As a tribute, it’s a disappointing slog for an always-vibrant legend.

In spite of sensational direction from Trey Edward Shults and raw, emotive performances by Kelvin Harrison, Jr. and Taylor Russell, the polarizing two narrative halves of Waves don’t gel to produce a satisfying whole.

A passion project from the sing-talk god David Byrne, Contemporary Color is a concert film, but a finicky one, unstable and unfocused.

While Long Strange Trip is full of rare or untouched archival video and audio, there are very few revelatory treasures to tell those seriously interested in understanding the Dead’s impact something new.

Watching John Wick: Chapter 4 sometimes felt like watching an above-average assembly cut. At an unwieldy two hours and 49 minutes, your eye will immediately be drawn to what cuts through the noise — and there are plenty of these moments. But “moments” does not a well-told “movie” make.

Personal Shopper might be a failed, if noble, attempt at transcending genre, but you’ll leave psyched to see what its star does next.

It’s a shame, given all of the film’s strengths, that Dheepan takes such a precipitous nosedive in its final act.

The script, although endearing, is too poorly edited to lift its quirks to the next level, no matter how many stars show up for roll call.

There’s a lot to sink your teeth into with Emily the Criminal, between its strong Plaza turn and a pitch-black moral core that refreshingly commits to the bit. But outside of those devilish comforts, a lot of Ford’s debut is frustratingly thin, more concerned with giving Plaza plenty of opportunities to bore through the screen with her eyes in extreme close-up than in really breaking down her psychology and the perverse romance at its center.

Get Me Roger Stone offers its audience an unblinking, if disappointingly straightforward, look at the infamous operator.

Though Raya and the Last Dragon is a visual and audible spectacle anchored by an all-star cast, the film’s lack of originality and paper-thin characters leave it on the less memorable end of Disney animated films.

The movie is too vividly realized to be boring, but it spends a lot of time scrambling out of the gap between pulpy fun and serious allegory. It’s also hobbled by the fact that it’s very much, as the opening credits say, Part 1; no real resolution is offered by the end of its 155 minutes. It’s just half a movie.

Gray’s many fans will probably love Armageddon Time, and it may even win over some more neutral viewers who respond to his decidedly non-nostalgic look at a pivotal (and not especially promising) moment in U.S. history. But anyone who has found his movies less articulate than the ideas behind them will only get occasional respite here.

The film’s most poignant moment comes in an interview that took place near the end of Zappa’s life. He’s asked how he wants to be remembered, and he responds, “I don’t care.” That doesn’t mean we don’t care, or that we aren’t allowed to care, but this isn’t the film to make us do it.

The more affecting moments in Sully come when the film puts aside its posturing and really examines what it is to be heroic in a cynical age.

Wind River is also a potent example of how form isn’t always enough when the story is as frequently unnerving for unintentional reasons as it is for the horrors it aims to present.

If Julieta weren’t such a crushing bore, it might have been a lusty little delight.

Captain Fantastic loses its intriguing premise in a muddle of ideas about the redemptive power of family and the right of all people to live as they please.

Through a distinct sense of style and riveting performances, Fennell’s debut is as bold as it is self-assured. Promising Young Woman eschews the familiar rape-revenge formula and injects a subversive female gaze, yet doesn’t cover any new ground that hasn’t been touched on already.

Bugonia, the newest movie from Yorgos Lanthimos, features a simple-enough structure, some stunning performances, and some twists that make it damn hard to write about without getting into spoilers.

The faults of Gemini are in its screenplay, and Katz’s inability to sustain interesting character dynamics and maintain a consistent narrative. As a director, Gemini is easily Katz’s most confident outing to date.

There is an unpredictability to the film that is, at times, refreshing. This unpredictability turns into meandering, however, leading to narrative incoherence at many points.

For as well-intentioned as Jarecki may be, The King starts with a conclusion and works backward from there, and the results are more than a little tenuous.

For a film that takes such pains to position itself within the feminist tradition, Belladonna of Sadness has a bad habit of lingering on the body of its protagonist, coming across as more pornographic than progressive, more exploitative than revolutionary.

With its wacky space shit, off-kilter gore, creepy atmospherics, and hammy breakdown, most of which happen all at the same time, Colour Out of Space is, inarguably, one hell of a trip. It’s just not a trip that everyone is going to enjoy taking.

Unfortunately, the 99-minute run time on Norwegian zombie drama Handling the Undead feels infinitely longer, and lands more as a meditation on grief than an intriguing entry into zombie cinema.

The Little Hours is reasonably entertaining, but it hints just enough at something deeper that it may well leave you wanting.

Green Book means so well, and admittedly, it just gets by on its leads and its good humor.

The Death of Dick Long offers its share of amusing dark comedy, but the film leans too much on Alabama stereotypes and inherently stupid character decisions to advance the plot.

It’s a sequel full of more that still feels like less.

Patriots Day sits right on the line between exploitation and tribute. The star power is dicey, and the action relentless, but Berg means well and likes the people in his recount.

The Monster is worth watching for Kazan and Ballentine.

Between its continuous insistence on broad humor and its lack of broader context about the industry period in which Paige came up (she was among the first womens’ wrestlers in WWE to break out when the division gained traction after years of public degradation), Fighting With My Family ultimately reveals itself as a shallow take on a genuinely fascinating story.

Cohen still has it in fits and starts. That “pedo radar” from Who Is America really ruffled feathers. He’s a performer of chameleonic qualities; see his immersive, anarchic turn in The Trial of the Chicago 7 for a nice contrast. But applying his talents to a sporadically funny, 90-minute SNL political cold open of a film is a little bit of a bummer.

To have seen a disaster movie before is to have seen The Wave. But if there’s not necessarily anything remarkable or new about the film, Uthaug finds ways to make the familiar immediate, with a fraction of the money usually involved.

A lot of fandom went into this, but Popstar is relentless to the point where it eventually becomes plodding.

To commend The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is reasonably easy. Here’s a film that’s pro-science, and sheds new light on a world that Western audiences don’t normally see. But it’s all so dramatically meager and obvious as well.

As it lurches into its second act, Before I Wake begins slavishly following the beats of its studio horror contemporaries, (mostly) abandoning its nuance for rote investigations into the cause of the phenomena and horror set pieces that defy the previously established logic of the dream manifestations.

Concrete Cowboy is visually engaging, and might appeal to younger teenagers (its R-rating is primarily for language). But anyone already familiar with the dynamics of summer-vacation character-building may find it unsatisfying—even unconvincing.

The performances are so strong in Other People that they just about make up for the weak storytelling. Maybe “weak” isn’t the best definition for writer/director Chris Kelly’s debut feature film, but its structure definitely pales in comparison to all the effort given on screen.

Vox Lux wants to be everything and winds up being nothing. By the end, when the whole thing devolves into a dubious concert film, and we’re watching fake fans go crazy over fake songs, there’s this uncanny valley of universal bliss that’s just achingly hollow.

Lofty ideas of class, thwarted ambition, the superficiality of L.A. life, the nature of love, and the meaning of art are all explicitly addressed – and maybe discussed in a pretentious conversation or two – and then just as easily dropped, as if the simple act of naming themes is enough to establish their continued relevance in the film.

Halloween deserves credit for its efforts to balance old and new, for taking us back to Haddonfield in a way that isn’t purely for cheap nostalgia, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s something more that it could have been achieved.

Juliet, Naked could have been great. Hawke and Byrne do have a chemistry, but they’re always on a separate bill, to crib from the musical theme. Even worse is the ensemble of supporting characters, which tends to be the strongest facet of any Hornby adaptation.

Patti Cake$ is a rags-to-riches story that too often comes off as a carbon copy of other, similar rags-to-riches stories.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is an incredibly mixed bag, a complicated story told with an approach that would have made more sense as a follow-up to Good Will Hunting in the ‘90s.

Peterloo is traditional, dryly historical, and all sorts of other Merchant-Ivory slang for stuffy and challenging.

There’s just no subtlety to any of the proceedings and while there’s an argument to made in how the film’s fairly transparent about these intentions, none of it rises above being anything more than an average historical recap.

The film is a friendly, warm, and inviting documentary that dances and shouts without ever shaking its body down to the ground. There aren’t any revelations, there aren’t any demons, and there’s zero drama. It’s simply another rolodex of talking heads — including David Byrne, speak of the devil — that want to talk about Michael Jackson.

While the film’s intentions are noble, and its story worth retelling, it struggles throughout to lend a lasting weight to its straightforward plotting.

Imagine all the best parts of E.T. (written, like this film, by the late Melissa Mathison) and all the worst parts of Hook, and you have a pretty solid picture of what it’s like to spend two hours with The BFG.

There’s little to latch on here apart from its purpose as an actor’s showcase for Boyega, Beharie, and Williams, and its bittersweet status as a sendoff for the latter’s illustrious career.

It’s handsomely made, and Erivo carries the film on her shoulders, but its movements are too clumsy to give Tubman the actualization she deserves.

Deadpool 2 likes to situate itself as the subversive alternative to so many bloated X-Men films, with all their grave self-importance and bombastic action, but even more of this go-around resembles those movies than its predecessor, and if it reads to you as more than a bit hypocritical, just know you’re hardly alone.

For a film that’s all about hope and rebellion, it’s kind of ironic how it’s such a conflicted mess in and of itself. The Force should have been stronger with this one.

It’s a treacly slog that’s regretfully forgettable.

The movie is like a second verse, sung a little louder and just a little bit worse.

It’s not that the film doesn’t have an opinion on Lewan, it’s that the opinion seems to change every few scenes.

In one corner, you have Scott, fighting to tell an existential thriller about gods, creators, and evolution, and in the other, you have this obvious insistence to pay an ungodly amount of fan service to the past.

It’s hard to imagine a movie much more aware of itself both as a movie and as a moment in a cultural progression of similar movies than Deadpool.

SpongeBob fans of all ages will find plenty to like about Sponge On the Run: It’s funny, well-animated, and high-spirited. But it’s ultimately more of a franchise play than a creative endeavor.

The performances are strong, and the film excels in isolated setpieces. It’s just a shame to see a neat idea largely go to waste.

MaXXXine can’t decide whether to be a showbiz parody or a giallo sendup or a cute ’80s throwback, and it stumbles when it tries to be all of the above.

The film is less effective, unfortunately, at trusting its audience to remain invested in Cedar Creek’s drama, which results in two grating subplots that become the A-plot in the draggy third act.

Bombshell is at its best when it’s an amusing behind-the-scenes look at Fox News and how the entire operation is setup to enrage your parents. But the film’s at its worst when it’s trying to tell a story of empowering women via problematic real-life figures.

XX is a horror anthology more admirable for its intent and concept than for its execution.

Besides the gags, there’s little to grasp onto, and try as it might to echo Barry Lyndon’s naturally-lit tableaus, Scott’s film lacks that film’s acid-dry wit.

Payne’s heart might have been in the right place with this one, but the execution feels flippant at best.

In fits and starts, the film matches the fire of its lead performance. Miles Ahead is far from a traditional, boilerplate music biopic, for better and worse alike.

As a Big Message movie about the racism inherent in the criminal justice system, Crown Heights succeeds admirably enough. As an effective drama, however, the film is frustrating in its unwillingness to engage with its characters beyond its broader strokes.

All of Ridley Scott's glorious pageantry is undercut by a script tragically burdened by cliches and characters who make stupid choices.

The joy of Ready Player One does indeed come from its world-building and kaleidoscopic mashup of pop culture—what Spielberg would likely dub its “movie” elements.... At a certain point, though, Ready Player One wants to be appreciated as a film as well as a movie, no matter what Spielberg says. And that’s where it begins to falter.

There’s a rich, hilarious novelty to the film’s juxtaposition of glittering pop and ultraviolence, but by virtue of the clear disconnect between story and song, that novelty quickly wears thin.

The problem is that something never adds up to much of anything. Even thematically, the whole picture feels all over the place, oscillating hazily between half-baked meditations on man vs. nature and unfinished portraits of family values. Even so, Saulnier’s scope and visual endurance is admirable, to say the least, and it’s clear that he could do something this brazen eventually with a much stronger script.

Despite great direction by Mortensen, who also delivers a strong performance alongside Henriksen and (briefly) Linney, Falling is a repetitive and exhausting exercise that never gets around to unpacking why the audience should care about its ailing patriarch character. It’s too long and too one note for too little pay-off.

Turns out crafting a happy ending out of today's publishing apocalypse is tougher than staying upright on five-inch heels.

Carell, Chalamet and their supporting players can only spit-shine a relatively rote addiction story so much; by the time the thrill of their work passes, it’s easy to find oneself waiting for more.

Despite Pazienza’s own pitfalls and perils, the film never registers as anything more than a boilerplate boxing drama, which is a shame because the material is all there, it’s just hamstrung by a flimsy screenplay that refuses to let its characters exist on their own.

If you’re looking for a heartwarming, affirming doc about how yes, you’re right to love Alanis Morissette, it’ll probably work for you. But don’t expect to learn anything new, or be wowed by its presentation.

It’s the awkward tween of gay coming-of-age movies: earnest and confident, but more than a little clumsy.

Eight for Silver works best as an atmospheric period werewolf film with outstanding gore effects and creature design. Working against the film, however, is Ellis’ padded screenplay chock full of rote characters, drawn-out human conflict, and an ill-advised flashback structure that rips apart its final act.

Writer/director Josh Baena (Life After Beth) bookends Joshy with dark moments, and while the first works perfectly, the second threatens to unravel everything that comes before.

To be clear, Dragon is not the worst live-action remake this year — congrats to Snow White on holding onto that prize. It’s just a slightly distorted copy of what came before. Its best attributes are fully a credit to the original, while its worst qualities all come from the foolishness of adapting a movie that was just fine the way it was.

For all its gorgeous visuals, comforting score, and strong non-verbal performances, there’s just not quite enough there at the script level to make Land‘s broader points, well, land.

It’s odd to see Elliott in a performance that involves him appearing so adrift, but the actor mines Lee’s insecurities for a naked honesty that makes his arguments and apologies alike ring with a lifetime of remorse.

As Stefan might say, this movie’s got everything (you’d expect from a Sundance movie): A period coming-of-age story inspired by the filmmaker’s own life, broader political themes, known stars like Linney and Harrelson playing eccentric characters, and a weepy conclusion.

While it flirts with some exciting and original concepts, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is plagued with an uninspired story, flat characters, and a pair of romantic leads that have zero chemistry. It’s not overtly offensive, but it’s certainly the kind of movie we won’t remember two time-loops from now.

John and the Hole is more of a collection of memorably uncomfortable scenes as opposed to a cohesive (w)hole.

The Front Runner is a naively misguided product of panicked, desperate modern times. But perhaps even worse, at least for the type of film it wants to be, it lands somewhere between irrelevant and a woeful misreading of the room.

To watch it is to open a pizza box that’s been jostled a few too many times. Inside, the cheese clings to the cardboard, sauce splashes against the sides, and pepperonis drip with grease. It might be sloppy, but you’ll be damned if it don’t still taste good.

Disappointing and confounding, Velvet Buzzsaw can ultimately be filed under What Could Have Been given the kind of talent involved.

While some viewers may get enough of a nostalgia kick out of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, the film doesn’t feel entirely fleshed out. There are elements that make for creepy experiences, keeping the viewer on the edge of their seat, but they often serve as short bundles of anxiety in a serviceable story.

It’s steamy and transgressive in a straightforward way, an in-your-face bacchanal of sex and violence of the kind Fennell so delights in depicting. But as the film barrels toward its bonkers but highly predictable twist, the shine on Saltburn begins to fade.

Director Matthew Vaughn’s latest film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is an attempt at finding a balance somewhere between Austin Powers and James Bond that doesn’t quite succeed.

The direction suffers because Aronofsky is so enthralled with the grotesque potential of the body at the heart of his film that he’s often unable to focus on anything else.

Take away the delusions of grandeur, and the film is a perfectly acceptable – even enjoyable – tour vlog of a particularly interesting set of shows.

Try as it might to blend the music-conscious idiosyncrasies of Portlandia with the varied persona of one of our weirdest, most valued artists, The Nowhere Inn ends up going, well, nowhere.

The pleasure of good company is Robin’s occasionally winning quality.