Kill the Jockey is an elusive and sometimes frustrating watch. It elides interpretation in ways both intentional and undercooked, flirts with a greatness that isn’t fully earned, yet it has some glorious moments and never unseats the viewer.

Ultimately, the movie belongs to Diggs, a Tony winner for “Hamilton” who comes into his own as a genuine movie star with a fully realized performance that easily outshines the bumpier moments.

While always an amusingly twisted ride, The Neon Demon is marred by pensive stares and monotone monologues about superficial desires that drag on, and on. Fortunately, Refn treasures shock value over all else, and his movie delivers on that promise with a depraved third act.

The action that clutters the last hour of this movie is never compelling enough to feel like anything more than a bloody distraction, but the characters vibe together so well on their own terms that the walking dead only need to provide an existential threat.

A stylish and well-acted espionage thriller, The Infiltrator is also naggingly familiar.

From “Star Maps” to “Cedar Rapids,” Arteta has consistently poked at the plights of marginalized characters, and Beatriz is a rich, grounded figure, but the inanity around her is hard to believe.

It’s a nifty fit for the Danish filmmaker behind similarly cold-blooded dramas like “A War” and “A Highjacking,” who establishes a sense of unease from the film’s opening moments and never quite relents.

The material, however, takes a Raymond Carver short story and plays it almost too straight. Ferrell looks uncomfortable, but not amusingly so.

Most of the movie’s machinations seem merely in service of deepening the central gambit, which is to follow Mona’s journey and to look cool while doing it. On that front, it succeeds, but the movie’s charms are limited when the originality it purports to offer only feels like a bit of a costume.

A film that often avoids any middle ground, making for a cut-and-dried courtroom tale that desperately wants to be anything but.

If the Day-Glo antics of Fear Street Part 1: 1994 are as tonally insecure as its teenage characters and a bit too broad to get under your skin, rest assured that this overstuffed slasher cuts much deeper when it’s contextualized as the latest chapter of an American horror story that’s been in the telling for more than 300 years.

While “Succession” was all about delusion, with the Roy children cluelessly thinking the family business needed them while everyone maneuvered around their childish stunts, Mountainhead is all about the cruel intentionality of men who actively choose to burn down our world and just might have the competence to do it.

Riddle of Fire is all too happy to wander around in circles as it simmers in its own absurdity, as if any kind of legitimate incident might threaten to break its spell.

Ron’s Gone Wrong has enough ideas about our current relationship with technology and social media to bring about important conversations between parents and teens that are more than just “phones are bad,” while delivering a charming and at times laugh-out-loud funny story about a boy and his robot computer friend.

Go For Sisters, like the filmmaker's previous features "Amigo" and "Honeydripper," sustains a feeble premise with richly defined characters and strong performances, yielding an underwhelming but nonetheless sustainable viewing experience.

Call it a Shakespearean catharsis or just call it a lark -- either way, the movie represents Whedon's least essential work, regardless of the material's inherent comedic inspiration.

Anderson does add some style to the film, doing wonders with an indie-sized budget for a film that requires a specific period setting.

In these trying times, you generally can’t go too wrong with Almost Love, a film where, for the most part, everyone is nice to each other and just trying to be a good person. But the third act becomes a pile-up of soap-operatic incidents that try too hard to advance plot arcs . . . that are less interesting than the spiky, perky characters at their center.

If this sounds like American Sweatshop is trying to have it both ways, that’s because it is. It wants to titillate, and to judge. To show, and to tell. To enrage, and to pacify. Combined with the by-the-numbers direction and unremarkable cinematography, the overall effect is of an after-school special about how social media is bad for you — which it probably is, to be fair.

American Animals is fiercely entertaining from start to finish, even when its characters are acting so dumb that you start to suspect they still have some more evolving to do.

While much of the information shared in “The American Dream” is stunning, tenuous threads and too-zippy pacing keep it from landing with much impact.

If anything, The Adderall Diaries is worth seeing for the ways it challenges the audience to examine and take responsibility for their own personal narratives.

Cicėnas and Grineviciute are both strong actors, each conveying their character insecurities and vulnerabilities with nuance, but their chemistry together isn’t quite enough to paper over the cracks in the movie’s love story

It’s no crime to have another wholesome heroine for a new generation to look up to, only a shame that this is a sanitized reproduction and slight distortion of one who already existed.

The sensory appeal of the technical limitations only lasts for so long. And as a feature, “Dry Leaf” does feel oh so long once there soon proves to be little variety to the bag of visual tricks over three hours.

It both hurts and helps that Bibb and Duhamel have real chemistry, and their initially combative relationship — a staple of the romance genre — is believable and with some actual heat behind it.

As the film’s themes announce themselves again and again, it weakens the mystery. The film seems to be yelling at us who the culprit is while hoping we remain engaged by mugging and hijinks alone.

King can’t really play a teen anymore, and the message of non-conformity feels stale, in the YA adaptation space and beyond. This trend, much like shifting beauty standards, is already on the way out.