Benson, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, knows his way around heartbreak, and despite the elevated nature of the story — she time travels, for chrissakes — always finds room to add genuinely relatable elements to Harriet’s incredible plight.

The movie's potential blossoms whenever it toys with the allegorical ingredients head-on. DeMonaco's script plays like a devious Brothers Grimm tale told through the filter of Occupy Wall Street.

If this one still bites off more than it can chew, its ambition nevertheless reaffirms Sanga as a skilled and emotionally sensitive filmmaker who’s attuned to the low-frequency wavelengths that tend to get flattened out by stories with this kind of sweep.

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.

Forget “The Terror,” here comes “The Tedium.”

Berman and Pulcini’s movie feels as if it’s more haunted by unrealized potential than anything else.

Using the hyper-gendered spaces of college Greek life as a fertile palette, Takal and her co-writer April Wolfe skewer toxic masculinity, the white male literary canon, rape culture, patriarchy, and white male rage — all wrapped up with a bow in the stylishly entertaining package of a studio-backed holiday horror.

Even as the screenplay (which Clowes adapted) contains much of the source material’s pitch-black humor, it also falls short of realizing its subtle vision of an angry recluse learning to make peace with his surroundings.

Paradise Hills posits that its entire world is a shell game built on outdated ideas and a resistance to originality, but it’s the film itself that’s most woefully unable to ever go anywhere new.

The 1971 epic offers a stylish and scathing parable about the dangerous ways that the powerful can exploit religious zeal to stay that way.

With a little sleight of hand and a well-executed metaphor, horror can encompass both the fun and the artifice of filmmaking. Night’s End may not be perfect, but it’s perfectly flawed.

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.

There are some real missed opportunities here.

The way that the film resolves — or doesn’t — leaves the distinct impression that Waltz simply ran out of interest in this story, which would be an explanation as understandable as it is frustrating.

Demolition spends its goodwill early on, eventually giving itself over to cheap-feeling twists and a problematic final act.

The pacing is so frenetic that audiences will likely never have more than a millisecond to appreciate the textures or the visual spectacle of a shot before it’s already zipped ahead to the next sequence, always another song and dance to see, even if it’s woefully hard to actually enjoy.

M. Cahill’s new film about a woman who puts herself up for adoption in her early thirties is too unintentionally strange to be an effective drama, but too determined to be one to succeed as a comedy. The result is a drab retreading of well-worn beats without much interesting substance to show for the effort.

The Sacrament is a missed opportunity to further expand West's pallet. Instead of twisting conventions and playing with expectations, West plays into expectations.

And so we’re left with a very sweaty film that strains to be funny, but one that’s also itching to argue that it’s lack of funniness is precisely the point. Some problems can’t be solved by celebrities alone, and the most subversive thing about “Don’t Look Up” is ultimately how — in its own impotent way — it weaponizes its wild star power to make that point.

The ideas don’t cut that deep, but like its psychic protagonist, this movie knows exactly what its audience wants.

An uneven, intermittently thoughtful but largely preachy overview of WikiLeaks' rising influence that has less of an issue determining Assange's character than it does with telling a compelling story.

Save for a few clever twists and winning performances from O’Shea Jackson Jr. and 50 Cent (née Curtis Jackson), Den of Thieves is the kind of bloated crime thriller that could have been made in any decade — which is not to call it timeless so much as way past its time.

Brosh McKenna knows her tropes, and when she finally, finally brings rom-com vets Witherspoon and Kutcher together IRL (for an airport-set love declaration, of course), we’re reminded why these things work so well, how cozy and comfortable the inevitable it is, how wonderful to wrap everything up with a big bow, even if we saw that gift coming from a mile (or 20 years) away.

The algorithmic results don’t reflect well on the Russo brothers’ directing chops — their monumental spandex operas seldom required and never displayed the kind of muscular imagination needed to stage Michael Bay-like fight sequences — but The Gray Man is even more damning for Netflix itself, particularly so far as it epitomizes the streamer’s penchant for producing mega-budget movies that feel like glorified deepfakes of classic multiplex fare.

There’s nothing especially mold-breaking here, though an ending moment elicits a gasp even as Apartment 7A ends with a cruel shrug — and perhaps the best thing I can say about that is that now I immediately want to rewatch Rosemary’s Baby. Plus, Garner gives a captivatingly distressed performance as a woman being attacked from all sides, where the only way out is through a window.

This gory teen comedy blends laughably outrageous carnage with a legitimately scary plot to delightful ends. Throw in a winking fetish for cinephile culture and audiences are sure to go wild for the gutsy film.

The younger Mann goes through the motions of a gritty murder mystery with plenty of technical proficiency but only a modicum of soul. The Mann touch is not only in the DNA of the director but in her movie, which inadvertently makes the case that atmosphere is more hereditary than innovation.

This trite Irish trifle about a girls trip to Lourdes is so chalky and underbaked that its all-star cast (Laura Linney! Kathy Bates! Stephen Rea!) is left no choice but to chew on the scenery.