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.