Jaw-dropping but often unfocused ... A rich film that nevertheless calls regular attention to any of the even richer (if perhaps less entertaining) films it might have been.

A mawkish coming-of-age story that marries Sundance vibes with a soft punk spirit, Peter Livolsi’s The House of Tomorrow never manages to flesh out its skeleton of quirks, but its heart is definitely in the right place.

The devil isn’t just on the screen, it’s in the details, and Latif’s film can’t pull those together.

Kong: Skull Island may include some clever period details and idiosyncratic asides, but it’s largely a blockbuster B-movie less interested in depth than scale.

It’s enjoyable enough, and the acting is comparatively looser than most of what comes before it thanks to the allowed improvisations on set, a first for the director

The film’s inherent messiness and unpredictability eventually settles into more expected charms, but Spinster is at its most appealing when leaning into the very ideas it seemed hellbent on rejecting early on.

The parallels between Watergate and Trumpocalypse are so boggling that they preclude any other reason for why Ferguson chose to make this film now. And yet, it’s the film’s deliberate timing that calls its value into question.

While Papadimitropoulos and his cast capture the perma-vacation feel that permeates Mickey and Chloe’s happiest moments, he’s less adept at navigating the heftier emotional elements.

Family is funny in bits and pieces, but so obvious in terms of its eventual direction that it might have been better served by less plot and more clowning around.

With its bisexual lighting and hyper-designed oddball aesthetic, Please Baby Please looks a lot more polished than its messier camp influences. Aesthetically, the film cobbles together its many cinematic influences with admirable swagger. But film isn’t solely a visual medium — it’s a storytelling one as well.

“Words of Love” struggles to thread the needle between a conventional bio doc and a more specific portrait of two souls who found some kind of refuge in each other.

Amid all the barbarity for barbarity’s sake, Jonsson carries the film with a deep well of unspoken regret.

A confident, entertaining, and well-upholstered historical spy thriller about a regular guy who stumbles his way toward saving the world, it’s the perfect movie for anyone who watched “Bridge of Spies” and thought: “If only that had been 30 minutes shorter, a bit less artful, and a lot more British.”

The Long Game is determined to ape the tropes of a feel-good sports drama, but only as a means to an end, and its struggle to balance the demands of the genre with the deeper concerns underpinning this story ultimately stops either side of that equation from going the distance.

It's a period piece composed of familiar pieces, none of which have much to say beyond surface elements that have been explored countless times before. Using a typical coming-of-age mold, Chase turns cultural ephemera into formula.

Mufasa has hidden charms that are arguably best described as Jenkins released straight to VHS.

“Spaz” works best when, within the film’s fascinating unpacking of cinematic history, Leberecht also interrogates the unfair practice of crediting and illuminates the work of Williams. He’s a man whose behind-the-scenes talent made every scene unforgettable, and it deserves a bolder documentary than this one.

While Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe’s script works hard to give all of its players dimension, such an overstuffed narrative tends to do the opposite, limping through sub-subplots and continually introducing new characters, leaving its main attractions to twist in the wind.

When Operation Mincemeat slows down enough to see into those shadows — when the film slows down enough to leverage the fictions its characters invent for the Nazis against the ones they invent for themselves — it finds a hidden war that’s worth fighting to the end.

This whirling vortex of dysfunctional friends and acquaintances feel like an unfocused and self-absorbed melange of frustration. It’s a parade of broken people, connected only by their fruitless pursuits of happiness.

It’s easy to imagine a performer more attuned to deliver intense, driven performances unlock the full potential of this character. As it is, The Cut never quite cuts as deep as you want it to.

[A] sturdily enjoyable if emotionally uninsightful heart-tugger that aims straight down the middle of the audience for a mildly reassuring experience mostly made with families in mind.

Shotgun Wedding falls flat as any kind of explosive or endearing couples comedy, but shines in moments thanks to the women anchoring its pirate antics. Maybe the script should have stayed in 2003, but what a joy to see these timeless leading women jetting off into the sunset.

Watching and processing Sansón and Me is a melancholy experience. As Reyes tells Andrade early in the process, this documentary won’t exonerate him or get him released from prison, but for Andrade, the opportunity to tell his story and have a living example of his memories saved is enough.

It’s hard to ever shake the sense that everyone would be much better off just queuing up Östlund’s film and moving on.

It is a fun time, just one that doesn’t need so many versions packed into it.

What follows is misdirection, flashbacks, visions, and wooden dialogue. At least the action is good, and Brown is game as ever.

The feature, Parvu’s third, blends suspenseful procedural with family drama but is missing a key point of view: That of the victim, whose assault is a Trojan horse into the film’s more macro interest in how bigotry and conformity entwine, and how emotionally repressed adults deal with teen homosexuality when it hits close to home.

While the moments focused on the kids’ lives are the best part of the film — James and Ramirez have natural chemistry and are compelling to watch — Baig occasionally falters on that front too.

Snyder casts her net too wide to paint a meaningful portrait of the kids, and follows them too closely to provide much lasting insight into the context of their campaign. And yet, the spirit of their mission shines through.

August 32nd on Earth takes way too long to get going, but the chemistry between its leads helps things along. More than anything, however, it’s the incredible economy of Villeneuve’s images that keeps things together, his shots becoming tighter and more expressive as the story falls apart.

If the emotions in Goodbye June are as transparently manufactured as the fake snow that falls outside of the hospital windows, they’re all bundled up in a warm blanket of truth — the truth of how loss has a gravity that can bring a family closer together if they let it.

While Gregg offers a cheeky sense of what it really means to gaslight someone, no one will feel as injured by the film’s final-act choices than its audience.

Marred by excessive sentiment, it has a buoyancy and a hook that makes it stand out -- but they're elements that would help it kill on Broadway (as it already has on the Australian stage) a lot better than it does onscreen.

In theory, Election Year offers a form of catharsis from contemporary anxieties by turning them into entertainment. Instead, this latest entry in a ridiculous franchise has become a victim of its own sick joke.

While it’s tempting to go easy on this frequently electric film, and forgive it for not living up to its full potential, the most satisfying thing about Lee’s spotty underworld adventure is the sense that we’ve been conditioned to expect better.

Tellingly, The Damned only threatens to become anything more than a ponderous — if immaculately convincing — Civil War reenactment when Minervini allows his characters to articulate their fading dreams of salvation in the clearest possible terms.

This tame exercise never quite jives and sometimes just bombs with one-note melodrama, but always maintains Thornton's conviction about the material.

A nerve-shredding space thriller that starts strong before falling prey to blunter dramatic twists, few of which are as thrilling as the original idea that sets everything in motion.

While the historical backdrop could have made for a compelling metaphor, the clichés and heavy-handedness of “Mercury” ultimately outweigh the novelty of its premise, while its sloppy social relevance angle does more to confound than clarify the disaster in question.

Predictability doesn’t have to be a sin when it comes to the often paint-by-the-numbers world of romantic comedy, but this awkward combination of expectation and disdain for it make for a film only fleetingly worthy of celebration.

Caught somewhere between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Wire,” this dark genre hybrid has a lot of flaws, but none of them are fatal.

Lee often seems unsure of whether he's directing a comedy or a civics lesson, and the film only finds its wings in the moments when he realizes that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

The 24th means well, and while it, sadly, mostly elicits a shrug, what the film lacks in pizzaz it more than makes up for in educational value, for better or worse.

It’s a whole lot less scary or fun the second time around.

Pavarotti, much like its subject, is fun and full of life for as long as it lasts, but as soon as it’s over you realize how little of it you got to see. Howard’s doc offers a crystal clear record of how Pavarotti brought opera to the world, but it leaves us guessing at what he might have left behind.

This Diane Von Furstenberg is plenty engaging, but as a tribute to the woman who reinvented the modern dress, it doesn’t reinvent anything itself.

In American Assassin, the violence is surprising and brutal. However, its impact is stymied by a predictable script and action sequences that feel like a watered-down version of “John Wick.”

Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is basically what might happen if someone transplanted “Fury Road” into Finland, lost 90 percent of what made that film into an unrepeatable force of nature, and tried to make up the difference by exploding as many Nazis as possible in outrageously violent fashion.

Aussie director Nash Edgerton loads up on some of his signatures, including lots of bad guys, tons of twists, and a dark sense of humor. Unfortunately, his sensibilities are dulled by a sprawling story that never quite snaps together.

The film rockets toward an ending that’s somehow both sewed right up and blown wide open. Since neither interpretation really satisfies, it dilutes much of the creepy power that has come before. Instead, Bull’s script offers answers no one asked for.

Though the well-crafted film makes use of a unique regional setting for some moving moments, its straightforward approach to well-worn territory offers few surprises

Kids are always in need of gracious tales about the power of being yourself in a world not necessarily built to embrace differences (of all sizes, of all kinds) and stories like Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken can do that, with fun to spare. But why not get more splashy, why not take more risks, why not get bigger and weirder, when that’s also the aim of the very story you’re telling?

That it’s able to split the difference between Nicholas Sparks and “Nell” with any measure of believability is a testament to Daisy Edgar-Jones’ careful performance as Kya Clark.

While “Otto” may reach fresh audiences who’d otherwise balk at subtitles, this sluggish rendition is unlikely to inspire anyone to seek out the original.

Like its heroine, Official Secrets is shouting into an echo chamber.

Little of 21 Bridges ends up being that shocking — it’s tough going when the face a character makes after accepting a phone call can so easily tip off that something’s amiss — but Boseman and Miller make a solid team and creative plotting keep things moving right along.

In just his second feature, Burns exhibits a real knack for world-building, mythology-making, and crafting real tension, but a series of stumbles in the film’s final act — the worst of which is run through with icky implications Burns seems terribly unaware of — end the film on a wearisome final point.

While the film’s star and subject is never less than dazzling, even her most inspiring moments can’t obscure a paper-thin exploration of a remarkable life in transition.

At its core, A Jazzman’s Blues is a soap opera full of shocking secrets, emotional confrontations, and one exceedingly satisfying slap.The mystery aspects are thin; anyone with passing knowledge of Black American history can infer early on who was killed, why, and by whom.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

It takes some ambitious swings and works on its own terms in fits and starts, all while not really working at all. Like the T.S. Eliot poems that inspired it, Cats is an elaborate lark.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the 2019 version of Hellboy is busy to an exhausting degree, overloaded with apocalyptic fears, and seemingly endless in its pileup of twists. But it’s hard to read much into a movie less invested in shrewd observations than in stuffing as much lore as possible into 120 minutes.

If You See Something remains urgent in spite of its flaws.

It’s beguiling that a film with an almost religious aversion to subtext could be so unsure of its own subject, but Pellington knows from experience that it’s hard to put a finger on impermanence.

Feig goes for the spaghetti method of storytelling: Throw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and something has got to stick. Only some does, but the good stuff — the really campy, trashy, nutty stuff — is the kind of thing popcorn cinema hasn’t so happily embraced in years.

At a time when calls for diverse media dominate the industry, Hidden Figures hedges its bets with a family-friendly commercial solution: warm and fuzzy storytelling that’s both progressive and safe.

With “Bardo,” Iñárritu delivers a cartoonishly indulgent film about the fact that he makes cartoonishly indulgent films — a rootless epic about a rootless man who’s been unmoored by his own self-doubt.

It's one thing to make a minor, accomplished work after focusing on grander statements, but Julieta mainly disappoints because it feels like the kind of straightforward, unadventurous drama that the filmmaker generally excels at reinventing through his own peculiar vision. This time, he plays it too safe.

Jupiter’s Moon is no simple story of escape, in part because Mundruczó’s script (co-written with Kata Wéber) has no real idea where it’s going.

The film runs on an engine at the altar of memory, itself a facile idea since prolific writers who produce feted work don’t wholly rely on retroactive synthesis. The film is then only memorable in some sequences. Magical, it is not.

Whereas "The Avengers" felt like a reimagining of the paradigm for superhero movies, Age of Ultron has air of a rerun. Though impressively made and visually remarkable, it suffers from the hollowness that plagues so many blockbusters carrying the sense that we've been through this before.

It’s good enough to be dangerous, and bad enough to demand better. It’s going to turn the world upside down and make us all hysterical in the process. For better or worse, it’s exactly the movie the Joker would want.

The film reunites most of the principal cast and crew of director Harry Bradbeer’s 2020 Netflix feature, “Enola Holmes,” and while that franchise-starter was frisky and fun, its followup rehashes the original’s charms (with wishy-washy results), while expanding elements that required no additional attention.

Regrettably, “never again” proves to be a misguided ethos for a film about pain that’s so nakedly unresolved, both in its characters, and in a world that has learned nothing from the lessons they were born to teach it.

It’s a fun watch, to be sure; as a home invasion movie of sorts, it has a number of thrilling moments, and lead actors Freida Pinto and Logan Marshall-Green each do a stellar job with what they’re given. However, the final product also exudes trepidation about its most intriguing aesthetic and narrative elements — ideas which may have only enhanced its genre sensibilities, had the filmmakers further pursued them.

Roofman is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.

A sweet and gracious and often painfully labored dramedy about a stand-up comic who struggles to connect with his autistic 11-year-old son, Tony Goldwyn’s “Ezra” rides an emotional honesty that’s almost completely undone by the sweaty contrivances of its plotting.

Alas, it’s not veracity that rules in stories like The Housemaid, but the often mealy delights of Feig’s latest film are routinely thrown into sharp relief by Seyfried’s crisp performance. Motivations, emotions, and machinations might be the building blocks of this sort of housebound thriller, but a genuinely good performance? That’s what can really wipe the floor.

Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of The Piano Lesson is referential, often overly so, and while this version contains its fair share of standout sequences along with Oscar-ready performances, the film never fully coalesces into an effective, singular, emotional narrative.

Can Anna Kendrick save the movie musical with The Last Five Years? The answer is no — and yes.

It’s not that Andrew Dominik has made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by fears of madness who was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the issue is that he has made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously characterized as a victim.

Director Maggio’s reverence for Parks is certainly palpable in his documentary. It’s just not the deep-dive necessary to complement the scope of the work he created, and the impact he made, that would make the film truly enriching and compelling. But it might be enough to serve as a cursory introduction for the uninitiated.

While Souza and his life and work are more than interesting enough topics for a documentary, what The Way I See It is really about — what it really wants to be about — is not the man who took the photographs, but the man who was the subject of those photographs.

Hammy jokes fall flat and that bloated run time sags in the middle, weighing down would-be snappy humor. It should all pop, but Overboard settles for a low crackle.

Stuck between a hangout movie and an out-and-out caper romp, Tag settles for something in the middle — there are worse ways to spend your time, but the result is taking an outrageous premise and making it seem ordinary.

The creativity may be lacking in other areas, but “Goosebumps 2” steps up the creature feature quotient with style and smarts.

The director’s instincts are a bit too broad to sell the full psychic horror of this scenario, and Taylor-Johnson will never be accused of being able to shoulder a movie by himself, but a super coherent sense of space and a vivid feel for the environment help The Wall to remain upright to the end.

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is hardly a disappointment, but it does, in places, feel like a missed opportunity.

By the time “Old” is over, the strongest feeling it leaves us with is that it just got 108 minutes shorter.

It’s an ambitious piece, but in the dance between experimental ideas and grounded storytelling, Aviva should have listened to her body.

It’s not a sequel; it’s a replica. And while that might bring some comfort and joy during the holiday season, wouldn’t you rather savor the real thing?

It’s not a thriller, it’s not really a comedy, and it’s unlikely to start a revolution despite a cruel jolt of a final shot.

It’s an impressive feat of filmmaking, but one that reveals nothing new, a major misstep for a film seemingly dedicated to doing just that.

For all the texture of the film, which was shot in and around a New York City vibrantly retrofitted to the story’s 1998-set specifications (costumes, music, locations, the whole kit), the hammy way important beats and plot points are served up feels out of step. It doesn’t pop, at least until the film’s final act, which finally brings together Aronofsky’s disparate parts and shows an inkling of what the filmmaker was attempting to capture.

With Shaye’s performance as its anchor, the movie is often a perceptive character study, at least until it’s hijacked by the same bland trickery that so often fogs up horror movies with more to offer.

Small touches point to a slightly better movie hiding beneath most of the routine, particularly the respectable finale that stops just short of the clichéd resolution expected of it. On the whole, however, The Way, Way Back dances to a tune we've heard too many times before.

Fans of the original film will still find something beautiful underneath, and “Riding Free” acolytes will likely delight in seeing a splashier take on a story they already love. Everyone else, however, might wonder when they can hope to be set free from this story, just like Spirit.