Told with no frills, less personality, and just enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), Howard’s serviceable “Thirteen Lives” is a far cry from the kind of souped-up spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries might create out of this material. And yet, its let the story speak for itself approach feels misjudged in the aftermath of a documentary so rich with big personalities, knotted with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

It’s always been clear that Ayer is a sensitive guy, and you can tell that he delights in forcing Statham to embrace his vulnerable side.

[An] unevenly written but good-looking directorial debut that gradually runs out of steam.

We can appreciate the righteous good of putting something like “Rustin” into the world at the same time as we lament how sorely the film lacks its namesake’s inspirational flair for defying convention.

Small edits could have propelled the film into a dark drama instead of something resembling a PSA.

Body at Brighton Rock is the happy work of someone who misses when scrappy genre fare could have low stakes and still feel slightly dangerous; when filmmakers were empowered by the knowledge that a VHS of their schlock took up just as much real estate on video store shelves as a tape of the biggest Hollywood blockbuster.

The more engaging question is where Bernadette disappeared to for the two decades before the movie begins. It may not be much of a mystery, but where Bernadette went is far more believable and broadly real a story than where she ends up. It’s a story that’s too complicated for Linklater to tell here.

Firebrand pays frequent lip service to the courage it surely required for Katherine to do her royal duties with a straight face at the same time as she cultivated such radical ideas in secret, but little about the film itself reflects the courage of her convictions.

While platitudes about how this is really just about love — not money or industry or good old-fashioned greed — are far too simplistic, at least the movie attempts to make its issues feel personal enough to make people care. Sure, it’s cheesy idea, but that doesn’t mean that the bedrock truth isn’t real. The same logic applies to the film.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

There’s a fine line between resilience and false hope, and All Day and a Night walks it with purpose even when it’s tripping over itself.

While too muddled and morose to hold together as a psychosexual thriller, Wash Westmoreland’s Earthquake Bird can be compelling for how it both explores and subverts the idea that everyone gets a little bit lost in translation.

The film’s bent towards revisionist superhero history is certainly compelling, but stuck in the confines of the horror genre, it flames out far more than it flies.

This is a movie of remarkable scale; on the level of sheer craftsmanship, it offers some appeal. If only Gowarikar had put the same level of effort into the story.

Steal This Story, Please! is the kind of film that has no problem sacrificing artistic merit if it means inspiring a few more people to get out and protest.

An aggressively competent spy thriller that has less use for logic than its lead actor does for his smile, this globe-trotting Robert Littell adaptation would have us believe that no one is more dangerous than a math nerd who refuses to think of himself as a killer, and the film makes a compelling enough case to sustain itself across the entire television season’s worth of plot that it packs into two hours.

Dunki is far from the best film about its chosen topic, but with global reach comes great responsibility.

Even as it celebrates the spirit of committed journalism that rises above the powerful forces designed to contain it, Kill the Messenger displays the same anesthetized quality that Webb's dedication to his job was meant to counteract. Renner is a different story.

In the process of merging formulas, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things recycles the same material it seems inclined to rejuvenate, one step at a time. There may be endless ways to make “Groundhog Day” feel fresh, but this one’s little more than another harmless retread.

Mohawk offers a very clear commentary on the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, which is apparent through the American militia’s ruthlessness and crude racism.

While there are flashes of originality in the film’s script — which quite artfully builds on Bowie’s worries with a distinctly personal edge — most of it is relatively straightforward, never as psychedelic or sophisticated as its opening shot, which finds Flynn stuck in spacesuit and unable to engage with the world around him.

Allied can never settle on a consistent tone, bumping along from smooth spy adventure to stylized war picture to treatise on marriage, all peppered with stilted attempts at humor for an added dash of incomprehensibility.

With a more streamlined script, or even fewer characters and more developed relationships, Abe could have made a real impact. As it stands, there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

The origins of the room in question are never explained, which is half the intrigue, but mostly the frustration. The core conceit is enough to make The Room a not entirely wasted ride. Still, enter with care. It’s a mixed bag, but upon exit, it somehow runs through the mind.

Zippy at first with the charisma and verve of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie, before it way outstretches its welcome across multiple encores and a 132-minute running time, Fly Me to the Moon has the patina of a straight-to-streaming movie tossed into theaters due to a backend deal or to appease filmmakers.

The story ultimately frays apart by tugging at its flimsiest threads, but Onah hits on too many things with too much force for his debut to be dismissed as a result.

Devotion can be stiff and hackneyed at the best of times — it’s nothing if not a war movie that has seen too many other war movies — but it lifts a few inches off the ground whenever it locks in on the loneliness that Brown must have felt as he flew towards an aircraft carrier whose landing signal officer may have wanted him to crash, or soared in formation with people who might have been happy to shoot him down.

A loud, visually assaultive assemblage of genre tropes as technically accomplished as it is difficult to watch, "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears" has plenty to impress while simultaneously offering so little.

It’s a bold, angry, provocative indictment, but because Franco zooms back to the state-of-the-nation big picture, he loses sight of the characters who were sketched so sharply in the opening scenes. They’re still in the film, but they have so little agency and dialogue that they are reduced to counters on a board – or ants for him to scorch beneath his magnifying glass.

Hill embodies everything that’s best about the film around him: He’s funny, daft and broken in a way that’s more fun to gawk at than it is to fix. In a story that’s supposedly about the payoffs and perils of taking big risks, he’s the only one who puts his money where his mouth is.

Once Lee establishes what he can do with technology in Gemini Man – and it’s a lot – it becomes difficult to refocus emotion onto anything more human. By multiplying life, Gemini Man too often merely dilutes it.

By virtue of its style and high stakes scenario, End of Watch is impressively tense, but then so are most episodes of "COPS," which don't suffer from the forced melodrama found here.

While Wright, making her feature directorial debut with tough material, exhibits an appealing unfussiness, so much of Land is painful not for its subject matter, but because of its predictability.

Less of a soft reboot than an emergency root canal for a series at risk of being removed from the release slate forever, this dogeared new chapter “from the Book of Saw” might lack the discipline to escape from the same traps that have always shackled its franchise to the grindhouse floor, but it still manages to squeeze a few drops of fresh milk out of Lionsgate’s oldest surviving cash cow with a back to basics approach and some unexpected political bite.

For true crime fans, Last Stop Larrimah isn’t an urgent must-see, and I am told that the “Lost in Larrimah” podcast from five years ago is an even sharper recounting of the mysterious events. But the unsettling unsolved nature of the tale remains pungent, and so do the Missing posters throughout the community.

The film has more success in smaller beats, when it’s not hamstrung by over-the-top performances or obvious drama. It has just enough going for it to hint at the deeper story beneath the surface: a film only about half measures, not the kind that dishes them out on its own.

Kim Jee-woon will always gravitate towards the bleaker side of the things, but “The Age of Shadows” suggests that his stories might benefit from just a little bit more light.

In emphasizing how art allows us to make sense of the past, and consecrate even the most banal of sins, Von Donnersmarck loses his grip on the emotional payoff of the present.

It’s a natty-enough twist on the survivor story — what if you were stuck inside, not outside? — and one bolstered by the inherent watchability of star Willem Dafoe, one of the few performers absolutely up to the task of this particular feature.

American Symphony greatly suffers from a lack of focus.

While it offers some necessary growth for all of its characters, The Kissing Booth 2 can never resist looking and acting like dozens of other offerings of its genre ilk, unable to grow beyond basic complications and done-to-death dramas. And yet there are hints that its evolution has a few more tricks left to employ, its winking conclusion only one of them.

And while some viewers may brace while watching (or avoid altogether), the overwhelming feeling of watching this adaptation in a packed theater was solidarity and catharsis. As dark as the dirt is in this story, “It Ends with Us” is a film focused on what can grow out of it.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

Life may have been very beautiful in this mountain town but even during its most tumultuous years, spending time within it isn’t exactly fascinating.

It’s director Wes Ball who emerges as the real hero here, the former visual effects supervisor proving himself to be the rare filmmaker who can force some genuine vigor into one of these banal modern blockbusters.

While Mantzoukas and Revolori charm – consider them your new, unexpected go-to buddy comedy duo – The Long Dumb Road soon runs out of gas, chugging through a series of increasingly unbelievable contrivances.

In between the meandering exchanges lies an unquestionably thoughtful interrogation of a broken system.

Child’s Play at once repudiates Mancini’s franchise by attempting to make it bigger and bolder while falling back on ingredients we’ve seen before, and seen better. While it sets out to skewer the algorithms that could destroy the world, the remake hews to a mechanical formula — and winds up a product of the same tendencies it’s trying to indict.

Ultimately, The French Italian has far more to say about navigating the mundanities of a stable and pleasant relationship in your thirties than about theatre, revenge, or noisy neighbors.

Watching Turner learn to accept his weakness is ultimately satisfying, even if this gentle documentary loses a lot of texture with every shuffle.

A movie that’s scary enough to get under your skin, but not scary enough to stay there.

It’s both way too much and also somehow not enough, but even the most exhausting stretches of this bloated import blockbuster are fearless enough to make you wish that American films would follow suit.

While depicting a landmark moment in humanity’s efforts to understand our place in the universe, Good Night Oppy renders the rovers’ journeys with such oppressive sentimentality terms that it can be hard to feel the full weight of the awe and wonder the movie drops into your lap.

A supremely dense coming-of-age drama steeped in weighty blather at the expense of emotional validity.

“Blood and Honey” feels like a throwback to a simpler era of filmmaking. Not an era where movies were better — because it’s not particularly good — but a time when a film could be produced, marketed, and turn a profit just by promising audiences an image they hadn’t seen before.

Even when the storytelling falls short, Pedro Páramo never fails to offer up ideas worth pondering.

The mystical allure of this long-awaited "lesbian werewolf movie" turns out to have more value than the real thing.

Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared “Alien” into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own.

If nothing else, it joins “Trap” in an expanding canon of mid-career Josh Hartnett movies that are memorable for their utter ridiculousness. And perhaps we all ought to be grateful that a film that promised us fighting or flight had the generosity to deliver on both.

This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest.

Though it falls short of its goals, Tallulah is an ambitious first film for Heder. A valiant effort, but ultimately, like its characters’ lives, a missed opportunity.

The only thing Östlund’s po-faced characters can’t afford is to recognize the absurdity inherent to their lives, and so the movie keeps our response muted to a low chuckle, as if anything louder might reach the people on screen and cause the whole charade to fall apart.

While the new Ghostbusters successfully empowers female movie stars, that’s not the movie’s selling point. However, it’s the only justification for its existence.

Ver Linden’s film may play out mostly in a straight-forward chronology, but that choice doesn’t do “Alice” (or Alice) any favors, expecting major revelations and revolutions to happen in the exact minimum of time.

Seance doesn’t just grow more mysterious, gory, and spiky as it goes on, it also grows more convoluted. Yes, many things can be true at once, but “Seance” might benefit from being pared to a more streamlined story.

Schloss compellingly combines the rangy wildness of hormonal teenagehood with Sadie’s more terrifying instincts, toeing the line between pissed-off teen and possible psychopath with ease. Her Sadie is both brutally dead-eyed and weirdly charismatic; you simply can’t turn away from her, even when you really, really want to.

Ellen Barkin puts on a bold, candid performance in Cam Archer's Shit Year, but the enigmatic movie is composed of too many fragments to sustain her efforts.

Broken Tower feels stationary, repeating the same motifs and attitudes ad infinitum until the credits finally roll.

It’s a little bit of a slog even if you’re already a fan.

Scarlet amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story.

Another smirking and vaguely satirical psycho-thriller that wants to have its cake, eat it too, and then soil the plate for good measure, Fennell’s immaculately crafted follow-up to “Promising Young Woman” might have a lot more fun pushing your buttons if it had any clue how to get under your skin.

This muscular and often brutal depiction is chiseled with authenticity, but it’s too psychologically schematic to make much in the way of an emotional impact.

Second Act never recovers from its big reveal, a cataclysmic (and nearly catastrophic) piece of narrative nuttiness that derails every scene, every performance, every subsequent revelation.

My Salinger Year often trips on the self-serious nature of its premise, and struggles with an antiquated quality out of sync with its timeline, as if trapped between the character’s genuine experiences and her idealized vision of a literary world that doesn’t really exist.

There’s too much movie here, but isn’t that better than none at all? Patterson’s big swings in filmmaking transcend the occasional shakier sum of their parts.

Instead of leaning into the ambiguous tensions and uncanny experiences, Watcher fails to live up to its inspirations, ending up a heavy-handed, predictable trip through genre tropes with a rather lifeless cast at its core. Watcher spells out every plot point to a tee, when we wish it would slowly, playfully tug at the threads of our anxieties.

Much like “Precious” and the Daniels-produced “Monster’s Ball” before it, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is somehow overbaked and raw as a bone at the same time, at all times. And much like those previous films, this one swirls around an astonishingly real performance that centers everything around it like the eye of a storm

While the movie sometimes hides behind its own derivativeness in lieu of daring to play things straight — the references fly fast and furious long before a punchline is made at Vin Diesel’s expense — “Red Notice” never loses sight of the visual shorthand that comes with bonafide stardom, nor the simple joy of seeing very famous people make total fools of themselves for a laugh.

Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard’s convincing but unfocused documentary “ACORN and the Firestorm” firmly contextualizes the group’s targeted debasement and eventual downfall as a landmark event of this modern political moment — not the epilogue of the previous era, but rather the prologue of the current one.

Those expecting a balanced perspective might be tickled by the couple's chemistry but disappointed when the film opts not to make that relationship more central to the plot.

By its final act ... “The Lost King” picks up enough steam ... yet even this last 40 or so minutes highlights how plodding the rest of the film is, how dull this story about literal grave-digging feels, when nothing less than elemental truth and a singular mission in life are reduced to, well, just a story, and not even an altogether real one at that.

A serrated but superficial portrait of how capitalism distances the rich from its consequences, Michael Winterbottom’s damning sendup is often right on the money, but its broadside attacks on the ultra-rich are too obvious to draw any blood or raise our hackles.

Van Aart and Windhorst make brief forays into interrogating the morality of what Femke is doing; they are fascinating and layered, and in too short supply. Hebers bridges many gaps with a fluid performance that moves between zippy joy and stone-faced sociopathy.

Like a time-traveler who sets into motion the same fate they’re trying to undo, Submission is so desperate not to become a cliché that it ultimately wastes a golden opportunity to become something more.

Even as the Shinkansen decouples some of its cars at full speed and performs death-defying track changes in order to avoid crashing into other trains, it never really feels like anything is meaningfully at risk, and Higuchi’s setpieces are seldom intense enough to offset the lack of danger that’s baked into this project from the start.

Unformed but deeply understanding, this super lo-fi two-hander is too sketchy to sustain itself all the way to the Pine Tree State, but it finds all sorts of promise along the way.

Like Luther’s latest nemesis, Luther: The Fallen Sun goes big, and not always in ways that work to its benefit.

Mostly, though, it does only that: Shock. Basic, trite, and without any hope for anything better ever happening.

The action delivers, but the film’s third act suffers from an excess of set-ups, cameos, and minor deaths played up as major losses. After all, they have two more to go.

Trumbo works well enough as a general survey of Trumbo's life and career, a primer on a complicated man who endured a terrible injustice, but it fails to really engage with the material, to dig deep for significant themes and salient meanings

Whipping up a proper tone for the big screen versions of E.L. James’ wildly popular novels was always going to be the films’ biggest problem, and while director James Foley might not quite nail it, wily injections of humor prove to be an unexpectedly helpful addition to the kinky franchise.

By its later scenes, Chef only finds respite from its bland qualities through the scrumptious-looking dishes constantly on display. As self-indulgent vanity projects go, this one's pretty innocuous, if only because it's always easy on the eyes.

As it stands, the Forgers’ cinematic debut is more poop than truffle, albeit an enjoyable one that fills the hole fans are forced to strain with while we wait for season three.

While it may seem instinctual to want an R-rated “Batman,” especially from a graphic novel that would deserve the rating without alterations, Batman: The Killing Joke is borderline unsettling — and not in a good way.

However refreshing the plotlessness and relative purity of Mary Poppins Returns might be, there’s a fine line between “nostalgic” and “out of touch” — between revisiting the past and living in denial of the present.