The problem with War Machine is its difficulty keeping its tone consistent in the service of a compelling story or dramatic rendering of ideas.

It’s an impressive recreation of a familiar format–but at the same time, Strange Harvest ultimately struggles a bit to maintain the chilling atmosphere that at first seems effortless.

The craftsmanship, framing, pacing, and droll humor are admirable, and yet the film is never quite subtle enough to hit home the way it needs to.

Disappointing but not outright disastrous, Skincare never penetrates past superficial observations of how beauty, success and artificiality constantly commingle among the Los Angeles elite.

If Stallone has gone through long stretches of unrelatability in his worst movies, The Expendables 4 does bring him back him down to the common man with its flashes of dorky buddy-movie glee: Hey, I like Jason Statham too!

The movie isn’t quite evocative enough to work as effective minimalism. It averages out a stripped-down Smith and the more florid filmmaking touches to land squarely in the middle of the road.

Blitz might be a story of a war-torn metropolis and its inhabitants, but even so it feels bogged down by its ever-mounting tragedies.

Macdonald’s film gets plenty creative in its threadwork, but feels like it could still use a few more passes in order to hold together in the long run.

Unfortunately, even False Positive’s shortcomings are uncharacteristically boring, generic and empty.

For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor.

Everyone seems like they’re genuinely having fun, but they’re trapped in a less interesting movie than the one they could have made, the one just out of frame.

There’s a worthwhile story in here about the long-term effects of trauma, how society disregards and casts aside adolescent girls, how quick we are to blame the victim, how bullying can lead to terror—but all these messages gets lost in translation.

The Boys, Samaritan is not. But even a failed attempt at making a superhero movie out of whole cloth rather than pre-existing IP is welcome, particularly one that challenges the genre’s mores.

It is not fair to assume that every film is going to stray from the beaten path; many are much better off if they don’t. What should be a standard, though, is that a film’s stakes be quantitative, and if it’s about giant mutant monsters engaging in a succession of epic, high-stakes brawls, it should be at least fun to watch.

Behind You stumbles on inconsistency at best and hesitation at worst.

The movie’s action is no-nonsense, no-frills explosions and machine gun stuff, and it lacks the soaring vision of Villeneuve; Sollima is much more of a plunge-forward linear filmmaker. That approach has its advantages, though, and while I wouldn’t have wanted Sollima to try to tackle some of the thornier ethical issues of the first film, he’s more than capable of rampaging through and past them here.

Scrapper isn’t funny or sweet enough to overcome some of its more cutesy leanings, and it’s not inventive enough to stand out from its peers covering the same kind of burgeoning parent-child relationship. But it hangs together, as brief and unsatisfying as its narrative may be, which proves Regan capable of pulling off a feature, even if we’ll need to wait for a second film to fully see her more off-the-wall ideas flourish.

The movie never turns into a full-tilt caper, even as the obligatory end-credits appendix hints at enough material to inspire one. It’s stuck, charmingly and a little wanly, in another era.

If you like fight scenes, fast cars and great actresses appearing for brief periods to give exposition, do I have a movie for you. Fast X asks you to shift your brain into low gear, power over a bumpy road of uneven dialogue, and hang on for some tight turns and incredible leaps—in the air and in logic.

Good as Marriage Story’s pieces are, they’re too finely curated: Baumbach rarely lets the film be as messy as it needs to be, hemming himself in with the threads of his limited perspective.

The film’s vistas are beautiful and Matthews’s aim, high, but those aspirations are not fully realized in what feels like a first draft attempt at brushing Western customs with textures drawn from a South African palette.

To the end, Okja is as endearing, chaotic and awkward as its title creature. Sometimes, the movie requires the same loving embrace Mija provides for Okja—even though, unlike that portly pig, Okja often lets you down.

Though the filmmaking is perfectly competent and sometimes engaging, these moments where things click in a way that doesn’t feel like a teacher tap-tap-tapping on a chalkboard’s spelled-out “themes” are rare. It’s a muddled and messy movie, colorfully congested with ideas that often seem contradictory.

When Donowho brings The Old Way back to the well-trod ground of old Westerns, it’s just plain old.

While the film contains some impressive scares, a phenomenal lead performance and steadfast central message, Run Sweetheart Run is far too preoccupied with speaking to a cultural reckoning that is truly only occurring in terms of optics and vernacular.

Even though the plot of the movie is wispy, it still features the humor that made the original so beloved.

Equal parts captivating and cringey, writer/director Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf flounders in the face of articulating its own thesis.

Like Green’s first 2018 Halloween reboot, this is a badly overstuffed film that largely ignores the inherent strength of what should be its central story—three generations of Strode women, facing down The Boogeyman—in favor of random, gratuitous action scenes and endless subplots.