V/H/S is icky stuff that doesn’t deserve a pass just because the awful men in it get what’s coming to them.

Day has a startling combination of confidence and corruptibility as the legendary jazz singer, but the film itself is a jumble of barely established characters, over-stylized techniques, and didactic dialogue.

One of Nolan’s greatest attributes as a filmmaker is his trust in the intellect of mainstream audiences—audiences who have rewarded that trust by making challenging, original works like Inception huge hits. This time, though, it might have been smart to dumb things down a bit.

This is too neat, tidy, and digestible of a take on such a wrenching topic—especially when we know the forces of injustice at work here were only temporarily stymied by this trial, and hardly defeated.

It’s a great conceit, with abundant potential. But the movie gets off to a shaky start by failing to flesh out, so to speak, the central couple.

Considering the limited material, what we get from Washington and Zendaya is doubly impressive. There’s not enough in the text for them to form full characters, but wow do they nail individual moments, shifting from tenderness to cruelty to scorn to reluctant introspection (in this way the film comes across as a series of successful auditions).

This is a middling Ferrell project that has its moments but mostly brings to mind better, music-themed comedies (A Mighty Wind in particular).

There are two curious elements to The Land of Steady Habits: writer-director Nicole Holofcener centering a film around a male protagonist; and Ben Mendelsohn giving a regular-guy, mildly comic performance. I wish both experiments had paid off a bit more.

A torturously convoluted extension of an already complicated narrative that can’t decide if it wants to be an origin story for snow queen Elsa, a romance for her sister Anna, a metaphor for living with grief and depression, or a parable about reparations due to indigineous peoples.

A bit more investigative work on the part of the filmmakers might have gone a long way, especially because there is something of a black hole at the center of Fyre: McFarland is depicted as ground zero in terms of responsibility, but we never get a real sense of who the guy is, what drives him, or how he was able to pull the wool over so many eyes.

A charitable reading of Master Gardener would be to say that it feels unfinished and unformed—that there might be something here with another pass at the script or a different cast.

Coffy is at once a notable moment in female-empowerment cinema and a pervasive exercise in the objectification of women. It’s as if Gloria Steinem wrote a screenplay that was then handed off to Hugh Hefner to direct.

MaXXXine gestures toward themes that have been explored throughout the trilogy—namely the lengths one will go to for fame, as well as religious hysteria—but without much conviction. Take away the endless Hollywood references and 1980s signposts (yes, there’s a New Coke gag) and there’s not much else going on here.

Despite the strong lead performance and these immersive aesthetics, Madeline remains frustratingly at a distance. Even as the movie puts us inside her head, it somehow fails to illuminate her.

The Exorcist is provocation at its ugliest.

Boys State is a thoroughly depressing portrait of American teen masculinity, Texas politics, and the overall state of democracy.

From Gene Kelly’s forced grins to its boldly monochrome sets to the horn-heavy George Gershwin music that is the genesis for the picture, An American in Paris is an all-out assault on the senses. If Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, which would come a year later, revels in movie-musical joy, this effort’s defining trait is insistence.

Oddly inert, except when it’s blithely nasty, 52 Pick-Up may very well suffer from mismatched sensibilities: those of grim thriller director John Frankenheimer and witty crime novelist Elmore Leonard.

The two main characters in The Royal Hotel—young women abroad who take bartending jobs at a run-down resort in the Australian outback after they’ve run out of traveling funds—make so many ill-advised choices that you begin to wonder if director Kitty Green, who wrote the film with Oscar Redding, is conducting some sort of feminist litmus test.

The horror comedy Slice has so many amusing, eyebrow-raising elements that at the very least it entertains as a curiosity.

The first Suspiria is a psychedelic sensory experience, but it didn’t really mean much. The remake, written by David Kajganich and directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name), tries to bring too much meaning to its horror conceit.

An even more callow cousin to Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, Ready Player One combines motion-capture performance with state-of-the-art animation to free the filmmaker from the constraints of the traditional, live-action format. Yet form seems to be about all the movie is really interested in.

There’s a beating heart to the film, but it’s faint.

McCraney has a background as a playwright, which may explain why High Flying Bird mostly consists of a series of zippy conversations. Each one is overstuffed with so many ideas—not just about sports, but also sexuality, faith, economics, and history—that the characters don’t quite register as flesh-and-blood figures.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be a connoisseur of kill-shot comedy, but director James Gunn at least makes it somewhat palatable.

Nasty stuff—of the sort, lord knows, that I’ve praised plenty in my time. But in this case the return on icky investment just isn’t there.

As for the werewolf effects, I appreciate that they appear to mostly rely on practical elements, but the end result still leaves you wanting: this wolf man is less rabid animal than angry burn victim.

As someone with only a basic knowledge of Bob Dylan, I can’t say I came away from A Complete Unknown with much more of an understanding of the man, his music, or his cultural significance.