Call it a case of the Mondays, but this kitty needs to go way back to the drawing board.

The King is so eager to be a mud-and-guts epic about inherited violence and the corruption of power that it loses sight of the rich coming-of-age story at its core.

Finley often seems to be at the mercy of his material’s strangeness. He stages most scenes with a vacuum-sealed flatness, as if unsure how else to focus our attention on what’s sucking the life out of the film’s world, and his cast — who can only stretch their characters’ shared frustration so far — are left with little to do but lean into the anti-drama of intergalactic domination.

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.

Alone Together has the momentum of a reclamation of sorts, but the plot tries to do too much, say too much, when it really should just be about love. Who cares if it’s formulaic or not? In the middle of this pandemic, maybe being something we can rely on is a good thing.

Fans might be appeased by a successful bunt in a long summer of disgraceful strike-outs, but this is still a maddening failure when compared to the remarkable artistry of “Into the Spider-Verse” or the raw pathos of Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2.”

As sturdily crafted as Knock at the Cabin may be, Shyamalan’s funny games never achieve the profundity they’re reaching for, ending up as a preachy end-times message movie wrapped up in a slick horror package.

An interesting but not entirely rewarding inversion on Lumet’s continued study of law enforcement.

Gilroy’s film needed to be 60% better or 20% worse in order to transcend the forgettable silliness of its existence, but it could stand the test of time as a lasting monument to the idea that our own personal taste is the only real thing we ever had.

A handsome little biopic that’s sopping wet with the same clichés that its whiny hero so adamantly disavows, Mark Gill’s England Is Mine distills the early days of one Steven Patrick Morrissey into an anonymous coming-of-age story that — if not for its keen sense of place — could really be about any mopey white boy whose talents are dulled by torpor.

The story suffers from a distracting aura of self-importance. Vikander brings a remarkable tenderness to her character (who, in real life, left her husband's side much earlier) but Redmayne's sharp gaze and toothy smile make it virtually impossible to ignore the actorly feat on display.

As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.

I was bored or exasperated by almost every minute of “Aggro Dr1ft,” but there are only 80 of them, and not a single second of this AI-inflected nightmare experiment feels insincere.

My Old School seems to believe its surprises are more revelatory than they actually are, and for the sake of avoiding spoiling the whole thing, it’s hard to sum up what the filmmakers were so fascinated by in the first place.

The more that America: The Motion Picture relies on straight parody, the sparser those laughs feel.

Adapted from the Melissa Hill novel of the same name, Something from Tiffany’s starts with a premise sweatier than Patrick Ewing at halftime, forcing Tamara Chestna’s script to untangle some ultra-messy story beats when it needs to be more focused on sparking a love connection.

The greatest value to Emmett Malloy’s broadly unenlightening Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, a new documentary laced with intimate and never-before-seen camcorder footage shot by Damien “D-Roc” Butler, is how bluntly it reaffirms that Wallace was real, even if he always seemed larger than life.

Costa is, above all, an excellent chronicler of the moods swirling in her nation, but there is a flipside to the way she paints the picture.

These stories are all tragic and sad and complex, and more than worthy of innumerable explorations. Many of them are even present in this film, even if nothing about them satisfies. Consider this one a crisis of its own: a well-meaning look at a world that never goes deeper than the surface.

Exodus: Gods and Kings illustrates a typical contradiction of commercial entertainment: By playing it safe, the movie fails to enrich the material, and never captures the energy that has made its narrative so captivating for millennia.

Plot is often the cruelest fate that could ever befall a cool premise, and so it goes with Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a high-concept genre exercise whose shallow depths are all too eager to come to the surface.

The film also boasts unexpectedly great voice acting; it’s not an exaggeration to say that Oscar winner Foxx thrives as the voice of Bug.

As urgent and necessary as their story is, it also feels too familiar on cinematic terms.

As the film explores San Sebastian — with its marvelous architecture and sprawling beaches — it starts to feel like Rifkin’s Festival is content to get lost with its anti-hero rather than trying to find a substantial narrative to support his existence.

An energetic yet hopelessly convoluted espionage thriller that doesn’t tell a story so much as it chronically bumps into one. ... Lee’s debut is little more than a chattering Pez dispenser full of plot twists.

Despite a fun premise and a well-structured first act, “The Man from Toronto” tries to do too many things at once and devolves into a strange bouillabaisse of studio comedy tropes.

The documentary is hesitant to dip even half a pinkie toe into genuinely harsh subject matter, because to do so would contradict its clear mission to coronate Perry as an industry great. All that nuance gets elided for a fluffy, forgettable hagiography that purports to tell Perry’s story, but keeps him constantly out of reach.

What this movie has — courtesy of Kurt Wimmer’s upwardly mobile script — is a rickety ladder that it climbs from comically low stakes up to the highest levels of power.