More hollow than hollowing, director Jonathan Glazer’s Edenic nightmare is better when taken metaphorically. There are no people to grasp onto here, only concepts.

The dreaminess, a clear evocation of Fellini, feels well-worn and contrived instead of exciting, coasting on aesthetics.

There’s a reason that Satter knew Winner’s transcript would succeed as a play, but she brings very little that’s new and exciting as a film director of that same narrative.

Rasoulof knows a much more challenging and incomprehensible reality than many of us ever will, but it’s missing from the straightforward obviousness of The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

There’s texture here, unnerving ambience as proof of Glass’ budding talents. But less isn’t always more, and while Saint Maud doesn’t need much, it simply doesn’t have enough to make an impression lasting beyond one second of terror.

The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens.

Vortex, while visually captivating, only functions as a window through which to look at death detached from the beauty of life.

Hold Your Fire certainly illustrates an oft-forgotten slice of history, assembling aestheticized archival footage of tense crowds and police in peacoats scattering like ants on the streets of New York. But through clumsy structuring and skin-deep attempts to appease both sides of the coin, Forbes does not heed his own advice, misfiring entirely.

As the film moves further and further from its inciting secret, watching Inez and her son age, it fades beneath their countless tone-shifting hardships—revealing a film stronger when its close-shot realism is echoed in the script.

For a mystery, Wake Up Dead Man is surprisingly bad at making its ensemble feel essential to the stakes.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

Look into My Eyes is a unique window into the minds of those who, like Wilson, experience a lot of feelings about the state of the world, but aren’t quite sure what to say or do about them.

Those looking for bleak, slow horror and who are willing to suspend plenty of disbelief might want to check it out, but it won’t rock the worlds of the rest of us.

As soon as you unearth a place’s past, it lives on in you—changes you. This is the heart of folk horror that Enys Men speaks to, but its dull, repetitive, padded delivery of images makes its genre findings (in words British enough to befit the film) weak tea.

It’s clear both The Card Counter and First Reformed are cut from that same cloth, though the latter sticks the landing better than the former.

Effectively, the film feels dishonest and, in spite of surprisingly dynamic camera work, intellectually lazy. Ironically, there is enjoyment in watching Binoche and Hamzawi, whose character is rightfully unsympathetic to her schmuck of a cheating husband. Non-Fiction is at least no more clever than Unfriended: Dark Web.

A movie like this shouldn’t be so ambivalent, much less so harsh on the eye.

Oldroyd...maintains such a rigorous distance from Katherine that she gradually seems less like a human being than like a mere carnival attraction.

Regardless of whether or not Soderbergh once again made iPhone filmmaking look more visually elegant than most modern Hollywood blockbusters, No Sudden Move suffers from low stakes and a disconnect from the world of our characters.

Though director Reinaldo Marcus Green finds winning performances away from his lead, the milquetoast script serves the tennis patriarch a soft lob—one without potential to inspire or excite, and one that’s constantly reminding us that we already know how it ends.

Despite its important subject and impressive access, the surprisingly surface-level film doesn’t have much to say.

Aronofsky can be a moving, almost disorienting stylist, but he’s all blunt force trauma here.

One could argue that the fairly straightforward biographical approach is meant to act as a primer for those have never once tuned into Turner Classic Movies; on the other hand, rapid-fire references to Godard’s contemporaries, including petty feuds and clashing reputations, are calibrated so that cinephilic savants can pat themselves on the back for getting the reference.

While Plaza continues to make her case as a versatile A-lister capable of leading the more complex version of this kind of heist film, Emily the Criminal is a little like an initiation that never needed to happen. Her bonafides are proven. But it still stands as another showcase for her, as she shines even through its uninspired racket.

Labaki’s filmmaking suggests uncertainty at best and lack of confidence at worst. She layers on the suffering too thick.

A fresh take on how our hyper-connected world observes catastrophe would rightly pick at this scab. But Alex Garland approaches this modern hopelessness with impersonal detachment, dreaming up an empty war filmed for no one.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

Phillips simply tries to do too much.

For every overgeneralization Macdonald leans into or too-obvious historic parallels he lets fly, there is a corresponding performance, ebullient and transcendent—a purity Macdonald, and his viewers for that matter, can’t help but sour.

There is a better film somewhere in Bring Her Back, but it has instead been formatted into an unrewarding and unrelenting exercise in unpleasantness.

Rebuilding is a reminder that It’s a noble thing to want to make movies about everyday people. Their stories are worth telling. However, a key part to making that endeavor work is being curious about the people you’re depicting, and letting that curiosity — rather than an assumption that you already know everything there is to know — drive the storytelling.

By denying us the terror thrills of this no-win situation, leaning into shock and eschewing awe, Bigelow leaves us trundling out of the theater with only the dull ache of impending doom to keep us company. I could have listened to NPR for that.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.

By only brushing up against the factors that make its case fascinatingly, timelessly American, The Burial stays soft, a trial by pillow-fight—but that’s how you please a crowd.

Bones and All is a heart-tugging portrait of wayward spirits searching for belonging that deadens the genre of cannibal horror into digestible, prestige-glossy arthouse.

The Dating Game plot is strong, and while it is a rather freaky piece of trivia, it is more of a footnote in Alcala’s murder spree than the entire story.

This approach fundamentally misunderstands Eno’s entire creative ethos, which relies on technology to elevate—not replace—the unique human ability to create art, a quality that is sorely remiss here.

Anchored by the filmmaker’s coming out as a trans man about a third of the way through the film, Chasing Chasing Amy has an undeniably sweet and well-intentioned story to tell about its maker, but Rodgers comes across as a little self-fascinated in a familiarly youthful way, like he’s taking an extended selfie at a fan convention.

Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.

When Miss Juneteenth isn’t trafficking in tropes, it’s a history lesson, and not the entertaining kind where you forget you’re actually learning; the textbook kind.

Poehler’s film hits the same notes that we’ve heard before without presenting new information, exploring new territory or asking any new questions.

Bros says many of the right things, often loudly and directly, as it reblazes an already well-marked trail towards normative convention.

For Zodiac Killer Project to work, it would have to be coming from a filmmaker who is fully ready to admit their own culpability in continuing to fuel the worst aspects of the genre they intended to exploit. That kind of brutal self-admission would have taken a great deal of courage, but Shackleton can’t quite get there, even if he comes close at times.

For all the technical achievement on display, as impressive as it is that you could recast a main role in so short amount of time, All the Money in the World is disjointed and frazzled.

It’s the thought put into the writing that leads Promising Young Woman astray: The movie knows what it’s about, but waffles over how to be about it. The ferocity Mulligan funnels into her performance hints at the story that could’ve been—merciless, cool and vividly stylized. But her ruthlessness, her “no fucks to give” demeanor, isn’t matched by the picture surrounding her. She realizes her promise as Fennell struggles with her own.

The Color Purple is involving on a scene-to-scene basis, but it has a processional quality. Though it’s less constrained than Spielberg’s sometimes sentimentalized version of the material, the new movie isn’t less sentimental – or less thirsty for audience approval.

Where Burroughs achieved the profound in the brevity of the novella, Guadagnino punishes you with longwindedness, ending after (non-final) ending souring the film into a clock-watching endurance test.

Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.

Coming from a first-timer, Golden Exits might suggest promise. Coming from Perry, it nearly reads as self-satire, the epitome of overly dry and thoroughly hubristic indie filmmaking. Don’t let the indulgent chatter fool you. Here, Perry has nothing to say that’s worth listening to.

The concept behind the film is an amusing, if obvious, one-note gag stretched out to nearly two hours, and not a gag that’s particularly novel or one that offers Larraín much to expand upon. As a would-be political satire and a vampire film, El Conde simply doesn’t have much (sorry, sorry, I know) bite.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project.

Despite a few moments of heightened bliss that remind us what kind of talent it has in front of the camera (and the operatic possibilities of Hong Kong action), Raging Fire’s dull discussion of policing never lights a fire.

For a directorial debut, Aloners showcases Hong Sung-eun as an exciting new voice—hopefully next go around she’ll give us a little more to chew on.

The main attractions for Marvel’s Ten Ring circus are better when freed from the MCU’s captivity.

With an incredibly deep and frankly excessive wealth of archival footage at its disposal, Perry examines filmic versions of the video store experience, drawing conclusions about what they meant to us, how filmmakers used them, and how we processed the end of the video store era.

As an arrival, Undergods impresses, but what’s under the surface needs finessing.

In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as human. There’s more fulfillment to be gained from listening to “The Very Best of Bob Dylan.”

The movie is ultimately harmless, trivial puffery that vanishes from your brain as quickly as you experience it.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is stuffed to the gills with western tropes, with not a whole lot to add to the genre, especially in terms of furthering feminism onscreen. It may not be the worst western in the world in terms of women’s rights, but that is hardly a reason to commend a film that’s only missing the whore with the heart of gold.

There is power in the inescapable, in the dreaded endpoint of becoming news after a lifetime spent fearing it—mourning it. But despite its length and artistic competence, Brother’s lack of affecting specificity displays rather than embodys grief.

The context, however much of it there is, affects little, and the whole film begins to resemble a fetish object more than an adaptation. In a bad way.

So many romantic comedies revel in formula, turning a genre into an embarrassing mating ritual soundtracked by the rustle of screenplay pages and bad scene-transition pop. If nothing else, The Threesome understands a greater range of emotional, physical, and logistical possibilities – so acutely, in fact, that it sometimes wanders away from the “com” part of the rom-com altogether.

Its dedication to Long’s point-of-view is admirable, but Lee’s filmmaking hits the brakes like a student driver, sacrificing what made the framing narrative enticing in the first place.

It occasionally reminds you of how awful it can be a kid, and It also occasionally makes you jump out of your chair. But it never figures out how to do both at the same time.

The film’s confounding tonal discordance, salvaged only in spurts by a commendable performance from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, makes its observations far more embarrassing than existential.

Thomas Cailley blends traditional French social realism with one major element of science fiction (humans turning into animals) to create a dystopian drama that focuses on a small, character-driven story in order to evoke a vaguely environmentally conscious message.

Huda’s Salon uses strong thread to sew its dual narratives together, but “together” is all they are. They don’t cohere or complement each other save for providing two distinct paths into Abu-Assad’s exploration of Palestinian identity and life, contextualized in women’s experiences as members of a patriarchal society.

It’s a hagiography more than anything, one that does benefit from access to an intriguing library of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and outtakes, but rarely does I Like Me know how to connect this material to any kind of deeper insight into John Candy’s psyche, with a few notable exceptions that ultimately aren’t enough.

Credited to being “based on an original idea” from star Daisy Ridley, Magpie works in fits and starts as a portrait of an unbelievably, almost comically toxic marriage, but never aspires to really plumb the psyches of its characters or present them with anything but the most obvious and unchallenged choices.

Carry-On is good for a chuckle in fits and starts, primarily when dealing with the easily imagined workday horrors of dealing with irrational holiday travelers in a packed American airport, or the behind-the-scenes camaraderie of the TSA with their bingo cards for items such as confiscated drugs, weapons or embarrassing sex toys. There’s also a few well-executed action sequences.

Bleak and crisp and cold as an Icelandic waterfall, Lamb is a movie with a sheepheaded toddler in great knitwear, the vague looming of something sinister and a filmmaker that can’t seem to wrangle it all.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is your average talking-head documentary and a useful resource of information if one is writing a grade-school research paper on the basic logistics of the tragic crashes.

Layton’s failure is frustrating. American Animals is a rare thing, truth that’s legitimately stranger than fiction. Bereft of a cohesive structure, the movie loses purpose, and that rare, strange truth is lost in workaday heist tropes blended with workaday documentary portraiture.

The premise of Michael Sarnoski’s Day One hints at a more filled-in world, but plays more like a maudlin, shallow commercial for the franchise, aided by an overused, cloying score and simplistic, navel-gazing character arcs.

White and Arteta have a solid foundation but seemingly no idea of where it could go.

Though Cohen has made a formidable name for himself in the visual aesthetics of rock ‘n’ roll, his feature debut is unfocused and emotionally flimsy, no doubt a product of Cohen’s first-film inhibitions.

It’s a kid’s movie with some adult moments and lots of nerdy references, along with new interpretations of familiar characters, just as you would expect.

Director Cate Shortland tries to leaven this particular loaf o’ unacknowledged concussions, fractures and tissue damage with family drama and trauma.

Exploring the mechanics of this epochal event is a great idea, led by a memorable performance from Domingo, that somehow still manages to render the protest march as flat and lifeless as any obligatory TV-movie checklist.

Since we don’t really have characters and we pretty much know how this story is going to go, all we’re left with is images—and Staub proves himself a greenhorn every step of the way. The script, for all its by-the-numbers structure, still has plenty of potential for some engaging and unique moments.

Brigsby Bear is so committed to its brand of self-congratulatory uplift that the filmmakers refuse to contemplate any of their material’s darker aspects.

Victim/Suspect manages to be at once fascinating, improperly focused and somewhat redundant.

It’s still a bit of a romp, but sacrificing both its logical plotting and dark humor with shortcuts (and not quite having an ending, just kind of stopping once it’s out of gas), cuts the legs out from under Fresh.

Like the rest of Annette, the dry humor isn’t funny enough to fully sustain its cool-kid commentary and the filmmaking is never grand enough to fully sell the caricature.

Christian Swegal’s film is most effective in its early, character-study moments, as it leaves the audience to discover that Jerry, for all of his confidence, has a worldview informed by absolute nonsense.

Theron wrings this so-so material for all its comedic potential. But she gets little help from her running mate.

Patti Cake$ clearly loves music, but fails to translate that into a compelling narrative. It’s an album filled mostly with half-baked skits.

Cage has never been less than immensely watchable in any movie, good or bad. In those like The Surfer, which falls somewhere in the middle, he continues to prove an unparalleled ability to transcend mediocrity, and turn any performance into a one-man firework show.

The deeper Some Freaks wades into what becomes a series of sadistic and masochistic humiliations, the more McDonald’s film begins to feel schematic, with these characters little more than pawns in a screenwriter’s game of toying with our expectations.

On the whole, for a filmmaker at the start of her career, The Balconettes is a rather impressive display of Merlant’s talents. It balances its more serious subject matter with dark humor to navigate a modern world where it feels as though women are more at risk than ever before, and it does so with stylistic flair.

A story that could truly individualize a massive, era-defining tragedy. In this telling, however, you’ll follow the plot and shed some appropriate tears, but if you come away feeling cheap, you won’t be alone.

Despite a furiously alpha-male James McAvoy raging through the movie—nearly making this new take into an enjoyable, scareless, hoot-and-holler romp—Blumhouse’s hollowed-out remake undermines its nasty source material with its Americanized sheen.

Honor Society never gets a handle on its comedic bona fides, but its faux-irreverent tone does allow for a satisfying con-style turn as Honor struggles to keep her new maybe-fake friends under her control.

Kaluuya and co-writer Joe Murtagh preach a message from the heart, but the inner workings of The Kitchen ring more hollow than the remarkable visuals suggest.

At once Coppola’s most coherent and least interesting film to date, The Last Showgirl feels designed for pre-release award body screenings, where its most unique elements – a worthy, game ensemble cast! An arresting lead performance! A careful, loving attention to showgirl decor and costuming! – can be itemized and lauded on a voting ballot, rather than them adding to a complex and effective film.

While not quite a complete experience that sticks the landing, The Sound of Silence is nevertheless an impressive debut from a fresh new filmmaker.

As much as I delighted in the whimsy, chuckled at the art-house ambiguity and applauded two men’s depiction of how taxing it is to be a woman, I couldn’t get past her pain and suffering.

Bateman and McAdams have some fun with the gonzo goofiness of the project, and milk a couple of comedy set-pieces—like one about a gunshot wound and a squeaky toy—but the flatness of their characters leaves no room for relatability.