Unfortunately, Belly is highly uneven. Williams comes from music videos and knows all about flashy techniques. His sure sense of the visual reveals potential, but he needs to learn to tell a story far more coherently. [04 Nov 1998, p.F2]

The story doesn’t really develop organically. There are logical gaps and narrative lurches that are hard to ignore.

Because its gimmick lays bare the evils of racism so easily, the movie works for a while, but it becomes so predictable that it runs out of gas long before the end. [13 Oct 1985, p.5]

While The Unmaking of a College stands as an important document of Hampshire history, it lacks the practical skills and vision needed to allure outside audiences.

Specific as Ozon’s approach here may be (nothing feels accidental or arbitrary), his lovingly made curio, which often borrows verbatim from its predecessor, comes off a bit tired and trifling.

Though the performers rally throughout, the film, sweet as it is, fails to strike a manageable or engaging enough tone as it treads some overly familiar territory, jarringly plays around with the Russian characters’ accents (there’s a reason, but still) and becomes too earnest and gimmicky for its own good.

Director Damien Power occasionally tilts the movie into horror territory, with some particularly grisly violence that might shock viewers who think they know where it’s going.

The script wields its symbolic hammer so heavily that it tends to smother the story’s more authentic emotions.

Haddock proves the beating heart of the piece, infusing her role with a quiet strength, determination and equitability; neither plucky enabler nor long-suffering victim but something believably fresher and more heroic. Maybe she should have been the film’s true focus.

As a micro case study about some acutely flawed 21st century strivers, When You Finish Saving the World has its well-turned moments, but when you want it to be gloriously messy about families and human interactions, it stays resolutely in lab mode.

Brown-Easley’s story is interesting and the film’s acting is committed. Unfortunately, as a cinematic experience, Breaking fails to compel.

Though the film is politically and culturally urgent, it’s too much of a challenge to connect with the void of character at the core of this screenplay. We may all have the power to be Jane, but the image of Jane remains frustratingly hazy in Nagy’s depiction.

While her résumé of fantastical roles makes her seemingly right for this kind of part, Gillan is directed into a pair of off-puttingly stiff performances, more skit-appropriate than feature-rich.

Master ends up a genre film in which the outlandish generic elements — the witches and the maggots, the fizzing bulbs and out-of-sync shadows — are far less frightening than its portrayal of this real, everyday world in which racism isn’t a long-dead bogeyman; it’s alive, breathing, banal.

This documentary has its limitations, both as a piece of reporting and as cinema. Tulis and his editors rarely give the viewer a moment to breathe and reflect, as they race through a blitz of images from internet chats and cable shows. Their approach to the documentary form is merely functional at best, and sometimes is visually unappealing.

The enchanting setting becomes a backdrop to action that’s dispiritingly mundane.

The first half is the more intriguing as older and younger tussle with each other and ask the tough questions, figuring out their mission together. But it all falls apart in a hackneyed third act.

This is a B-movie with the pretensions of a prestige drama; and frankly, the less ambitious version would’ve likely been better.

At its best, Taurus captures the tumult of the artistic process, where happy accidents and unpleasant truths are perpetually in conflict.

Any effort that manages to incorporate pointed observations about Islamophobia, casual xenophobia, female objectification and sexual hypocrisy, at the same time working in a loud make-out session in a cathedral confessional certainly can’t be accused of slacking, no matter how kooky or tedious things become.

Dorfman does an excellent job of constructing a dialogue- and performance-driven chamber piece; but he shows less skill at staging fight scenes and raw terror.

It’s kind of funny and kind of scary, if ultimately neither funny nor scary enough to keep the two modes from canceling each other out.

What does connect is Cuthbert’s anxious, guilt-tinged performance as a mom who spends her days as an in-demand marketing consultant, helping brands reach the coveted youth demographic.

While Topside is without a doubt a film that lives within its own immediacy, it also feels somewhat entrenched within the hopeless inevitability of its own story.

Night’s End takes a bit too long to build up momentum.

Unlike “Hustle,” Amsterdam only fitfully locates the moment-to-moment comic verve — or the bittersweet sense of longing — that would give these characters and their farcical shenanigans the deeper human resonance it’s clearly aiming for.

The result is amusing enough, but it’s as cinematically substantive as a sugar cookie.

The movie lays out key data points that persuasively — if a bit dryly — position laboratories as the inevitable future of food. But more engaging are the sequences showing technicians at work and lobbyists trying to win over a skeptical press and wary farmers.

There’s not much new to this plot, but the filmmakers invest a lot of personal feeling and creative energy into their depiction of a rural community populated by the children of immigrants, as seen from the perspective of a kid too bored and angry to appreciate — yet — what makes her home special.

It’s a remarkable story, but “Father Stu” is a broad, somewhat brutish film.

While its issues with pacing can be overlooked in favor of its welcome sincerity and full heart, everything that Marks’ film offers us is well-trod territory.

Is Madame Web a good movie? No. Is it hilariously delightful? Often.

Even as the low-key mockumentary Brian and Charles impressively scales down a sci-fi concept to fable size, it neither does much to maintain its oddness nor finds that right mix of comedy and pathos to have much impact.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is mildly amusing, swift, noisy and unrelentingly paced, which is par for the course considering this is the studio that brought us the Minions.

Julie and Charlie make a winning couple, which goes a long way toward making Love on the Villa watchable. But they’re so boxed-in by the movie’s clichés, their love affair rarely gets the chance to breathe.

The cast is terrific, the dialogue is snappy, and Logan has the kernel of a great idea here, connecting the teenage slaughter that fills most slashers to the real-world cruelty of conversion camps. But They/Them never connects on a gut level, as a horror movie should.

Directed by Stephen Williams with a sense of momentum and fluidity, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this version of Bologne’s life story glides over the most interesting parts.

Chait and company have a hard time coming up with enough plot to justify “Wolf Hound” stretching past two hours; and the long shootout scenes in the movie’s midsection do get taxing. But the extended aerial combat sequences at the start and end of the film are genuinely impressive for a non-blockbuster, and ought to grab the attention of genre aficionados.

Though it doesn’t quite come together, Keeping Company is never pat or predictable.

Swallowed is slow-paced and often aggressively unpleasant — unless your idea of a good time is watching people moan in pain for minutes on end while clutching their stomachs. But it’s a memorably intense experience, with sharp points to make about how the lives of outsiders and outlaws can tip in an instant into sloppy chaos.

Director Mark Meir and screenwriter Yuri Baranovsky take too long to get to the movie’s biggest twist; and in general, The Summoned is too light on action and tension. Still, this mix of Willy Wonka, “Get Out” and “The Most Dangerous Game” has some striking moments.

God’s Time has an endearingly scrappy vibe and a talented cast filled with unfamiliar faces. But it also feels cobbled together, as though Antebi had multiple ideas for how to approach this material.

Overall, the action here isn’t as taut as it was in “The Reef,” and the shark effects aren’t as impressive. Still, for the most part the movie delivers what it promises.

As a sustained piece of action choreography, then, Athena is frequently staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of modern French identity, the movie feels thin and overdetermined.

Glasshouse holds back a few provocative secrets for its final third; and throughout, Egan borrows from the likes of “The Beguiled” and leans into the sensuality of her premise, in which a handful of lonely ladies are suddenly delivered a handsome stranger.

This is more of a movie for anyone who wants to see burly jerks in cowboy hats get knocked around by a giant, hairy humanoid in the gorgeous Black Hills wilderness — and who doesn’t mind waiting through a lot of slow-paced setup to get to some pretty nifty chases and gore.

Aselton has a light touch as a director, and she wisely trots out an all-star parade of comedy heavyweights to distract from the script issues.

City Hall is inside information in search of a movie, a forced marriage between the trappings of reality and the fantasy of a jerry-built plot. Reasonably intelligent, neither offensive nor enticing, it passes its time on the screen without providing compelling reasons for audiences to either go or stay. [16 Feb 1996, p.F1]

Although Something from Tiffany’s was shot in a festive, lit-up New York City, there’s a flatness to the look and tone of the film that keeps it from crossing the line from “something to put on while wrapping presents” to “something to watch with the whole family every Christmas.”

Cats Don’t Dance treads this territory with a whimsy that will be over the heads of young kids and too unimaginative for adults.

Background stylist/co-director Eric Radomski has created a terrific-looking world of film noir-influenced Art Deco skyscrapers, shadows, gargoyles and windows. Unfortunately, some of the worst-animated characters in any recent feature get in front of those stylish backgrounds.

The film’s dialectic qualities can feel a little forced and wooden, though Ritch mitigates this somewhat by directing his cast to deliver their lines at such a snappy clip that viewers don’t have time to dwell on the clunkers

What makes this film more than mere visual vigilantism is John Schlesinger, of whom it can be safely asked, what happened? He shows flashes of the old brilliance here -- the talent that made "Midnight Cowboy" so moving and "Marathon Man" such a nail-biter -- in telling this modern horror tale of the court system gone awry. It's unfortunate that after the messy construction of his last film, "The Innocent," he hasn't directed his gifted self toward something with a bit more intelligence. [12 Jan 1996, p.F6]

It’s easy to take for granted what’s good about Dalíland, namely Gala and Dalí as played by Sukowa and Kingsley. Sukowa’s depiction of a Russian woman with a taste for drama and the finer things in life is over the top, but deadly accurate; Kingsley balances imperiousness and vulnerability beautifully and with an ease only he seems capable of achieving.

Deakins’ work is beautiful, Colman is incredible, and the role of Stephen proves to be a breakout for Ward. But the story is too scattershot and contrived for an audience to be swept away and moved in the same way that Colman finds herself swept away by the experience of the Peter Sellers classic “Being There.”

For all the flayed flesh and impaled skin in the picture, this Hellraiser isn’t sharp enough.

Like its predecessor, it is enjoyably episodic, jumping from one comic vignette to another. Some of these connect, while others land with a thud. But so it goes with Christmas. Not every present is a winner.

Notwithstanding the embellishments, this undoubtedly remains a Tyler Perry film — occasionally for better, but often for worse.

Based on Jessica Knoll’s best-selling mystery novel, the Mike Barker-directed Luckiest Girl Alive — with a script by Knoll — falls into the trap of trying too hard to capture not just the book’s flashback-heavy plot but also its distinctive voice.

When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? I think it sees a good actor giving a well-meaning, unevenly directed and often touching performance in a movie that strives to wrest something raw and truthful from a story that’s all bald contrivances, technological as well as melodramatic.

This kind of movie can easily become ponderous and pretentious, but Putka keeps everything wide open, in the spirit of his befuddled protagonists.

The possibility of redemption hangs over this movie, as it does in much of Schrader’s work. But for the first time in this trilogy, that possibility is resolved in a manner that feels neither fully examined nor earned.

What’s on-screen too often feels like wan, second-rate imitation, and the few differences seem motivated less by a spirit of imagination than one of joyless anxiety.

The new songs are forgettable and the animation is cluttered with every pixel competing to show off. There are too many leaves, too many petals and too many pores on the fully animated dwarfs, who bound into the movie with noses the size of pears.

Despite a clever premise, decent special effects and an amiable tone, the horror-comedy The Curse of Bridge Hollow never makes the jump from “mildly pleasant time-killer” to “entertaining.”

This movie can spot the handsome face that lies beneath an ugly exterior, but it seems to get fooled by the rot that sometimes lurks beneath the sweet and the safe, the formula and the sure-fire.

Aside from the obviously unintentional humor, the quality of Kraven the Hunter is severely lacking. Perhaps that’s all the recommendation you need for some dumb fun at the movies.

Admirably ambitious if conceptually muddled, it short-circuits a lot of those signature “Magic Mike” pleasures — including some of the lust, and a lot of the laughs — and signals its headier ambitions with a dramatic shift in scenery.

The more you realize where Shyamalan is leading us — and by this point, it’s not exactly a surprise destination — the more difficult it becomes to locate a worthwhile point. Perhaps the point is in the impressive discipline of the filmmaking, though if anything, given its premise, the movie wants to be a grislier, more nastily unhinged piece of work than it manages.

Although Prisoner’s Daughter gets a necessary emotional lift from its strong lead performances, the blandly by-the-numbers redemptive family drama falls short of representing a return to early form for the “Thirteen” director.

With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, [Hill] seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend.

While it will likely amuse its target audience of geeks and the terminally online, Deadpool & Wolverine is a whole lot of hot air and not much else.

The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension. And even with a physically impressive production at his disposal, Fuqua’s filmmaking instincts are clumsy and prone to cliché.

Philippe winds up with a curatorial hodgepodge; the lovingly cited connections about shifting realities, artifice, searching and all those plush Lynchian curtains never coalesce into anything unifying, and sometimes get repeated by different narrators.

Too much of the film (an official selection at 2020’s Cannes Film Festival and Colombia’s entry in the 2021 Oscar race) lacks sufficient conflict and an organic sense of storytelling.

What does make the movie a few degrees more entertaining than most is its cast.

The cast is game. Unfortunately, what should be gut punches feel like glancing blows.

Even if viewers can’t make sense of it all, they should be able to connect to the way Van Warmerdam revisits some of his favorite themes — including the idea that we’re all actors really, struggling to remember our lines and motivations.

While the script (co-written by Eisener and John Davies) is weak, there is an endearingly scruffy vibe here, goosed by some cool-looking costumes and effects.

Horror hounds should appreciate all the inside jokes and references — while also wishing the movie itself were as consistently good as its influences.

The lack of explosive action hinders Condor’s Nest, as does the reliance on spare, nondescript locations like bars, offices and open fields. But Blattenberger can write punchy dialogue; he also wisely spends some of his money on ace character actors.

There are jokes here, and dramatic moments too; but everyone is so darn earnest all the time that nothing truly exciting happens. Instead, we just hang out with some pretty decent folks for a while, and then the credits roll.

"Fallen Sun” is best described as a movie-size version of a “Luther” season — which, for longtime fans, is better than no “Luther” at all.

If the movie feels a bit overstuffed, that may be because Poliner clearly cares about these characters, and — quite touchingly — has thought a lot about what would make them happy.

With a visual style that is straightforward and serviceable at best and a frustratingly limited emotional range, Back to Black never captures the beauty of Winehouse’s talent, the heartbreak of her performances or the horror of her tragedy.

It will be interesting to see what this capable filmmaker does his next time around with, hopefully, a larger budget and a few more objective voices helping to guide his choices.

There is nothing better about this Cat Person, which coarsens, flattens and torturously over-elaborates a story whose elegant concision was precisely what made it such rich and elastic interpretive fodder.

Sorry About the Demon is too slackly paced and there’s a broad tone to the jokes and performances that skews corny. But the central comic premise is a hoot; and the movie has an unexpectedly philosophical dimension.

In Barthes’ curiously distanced, muted handling, we only sense points being made, not lives being lived.

Landon gets a lot of help from Harbour, whose facial expressions alone capture this ghost’s wit, hopes, fears and heartbreak. He’s one lovable dead guy.

The race to the end is certainly technically proficient, and all the actors gamely play out the ride (including an acid-tangy Marin Ireland making the most of her two scenes). But it’s not horror anymore — more like a medical drama with a race-against-time diagnosis and cure — and ultimately no memorable deepening of King’s ruthlessly efficient, vividly sketched black hole.

The mix of busy comic exaggeration, affectionate ’80s nostalgia trip and gloomy mid-perestroika history lesson never comes together.

While trying to make the original’s free-flowing, frequently surprising plot fit into a more conventional screenplay arc, Barris and Hall have sapped a lot of its vitality. The new version may be more current, but the old one rings more true.

The plot of Punch follows a fairly predictable path, and it lurches into overheated melodrama in its second half. But Ings does a fine job of capturing the instant connection between these two young men.

Even at its bluntest, Seriously Red draws a lot of heat and light from Boylan, whose Red enjoys embodying the casual confidence, folksy wisdom and bombshell bravura of one of the world’s most beloved entertainers.

Overall, the approach proves too cluttered and diffused, especially if the goal — as it should be here — is to build real dramatic tension.

The slam-bang stuff in this picture is too tediously routine. The movie is much better when it gets philosophical, pondering a world where everybody’s surveiling everybody else but nobody can agree on how to use that information to keep us all safe.

Though the movie’s leads are undeniably charming, director Steven K. Tsuchida and screenwriter Eirene Tran Donohue don’t give them much to do that hasn’t been done many times before. What does distinguish their film is its setting