Erik Bloomquist’s direction is composed, and his co-written screenplay with Carson plays on politician-slamming themes, yet Founders Day is still a second-tier slasher that crosses too many plotlines in an overly complicated small-town massacre.

While Hale and Wolff have separately done strong work in prior romance films, including Hale and Hutchings’ prior winner, The Hating Game, they can’t spark any sizzle here.

At the beginning of Apolonia, Apolonia, Glob proclaims her goal: To create an eternal portrait of her subject, one that evokes the paintings of kings. She accomplishes this feat, leaving a dazzling record of Sokol’s life that champions and carries on her legacy as an artist.

This inane new Statham vehicle, The Beekeeper—directed by Suicide Squad auteur David Ayer and written by Expend4bles’ Kurt Wimmer—manages to be moderately stimulating, all things considered, though it suffers from the filmmakers’ inability to allow it to be as inane as it clearly should be.

Although its barebones backstories and straightforward storytelling may not leave a massive impact, I.S.S conveys the dangers of space and human desperation in a way that will leave you gasping for oxygen.

Sometimes her script devotes too much ink to reinforcing ideas already well-established by her images, and sometimes her dialogue can veer towards flowery YA conversations. But Talati’s made a gripping and beautiful debut, filled with reasons to watch her next movie.

Role Play hardly spices up the subgenre with its saucy date-night games, never as action-packed as Mr. & Mrs. Smith or as sweetly sincere as the rom-com classics that inspire this undercover tale about finding that special someone worth killing over.

Gray plays to the simplest pleasures of heist cinema and wins us over because sometimes it’s alright to simply be dependable and straightforward.

It is hard to capture the utter joy of watching a live musical on the screen, but it’s here that Mean Girls falters.

The premise is also genuinely neat, a fun, breezy little 90-minute high-concept that unfortunately sounds more propulsive and invigorating than it really is.

Inshallah a Boy doesn’t give any clear answers. Instead, the film offers a look at the life of an ordinary woman in Jordan, going through an ordeal likely faced by many like her.

Samuel’s The Book Clarence is a grab bag of ideas and genres that sometimes hit their mark, but in general don’t land a believable arc for the title character.

An all-out assault on the senses that’s fun, funny, and still capable of making you a little queasy. That’s Destroy All Neighbors in a nutshell, but that’s also just the beginning.

In its unflinching portrayal of historical massacres perpetrated against the Ona tribes of South America, it presents obfuscated truths about colonial atrocities, using its austere direction and sun-bleached color palette to firmly place us in the middle of man-made horrors.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project does an admirable job capturing the aesthetic of Nikki Giovanni’s life and poetry. It offers windows into certain parts of history, and glimpses into her ongoing evolution as an artist. Unfortunately, those glimpses don’t offer enough to be memorable.

Good Grief is not a dramedy (even though it is marketed as one), but rather a somber film about the messiness of grief and its often unforgiving, even destructive, grip.

Disaster is horror, and Bayona’s direction allows for a deeper comprehension of a tragedy that exists beyond our grasp.

Surely a short film interview would have been more interesting, and engaging, than He Went That Way. It’s the kind of story that’s undeniably fascinating, but so bare-bones as a screenplay that it needs a little something more if it’s going to work, padded out either in the director’s style or in the writer’s script.

The issue with Night Swim isn’t that it’s ridiculous, it’s that it doesn’t understand quite how ridiculous it is.

If you want to make a slasher-level action-mayhem movie, make the damn movie; don’t pretend your excuses for ultraviolence come from a humanist core. Mayhem! yearns to be taken seriously in all the wrong places.

Despite Sweeney’s uneasy performance, there is something present between Sweeney and Powell, and in the text of the film, that feels fresh—or, at the very least, like a homecoming.

The film’s observations, as filtered through the duo, feel utterly simplistic, and gain gravity only by the enthusiasm in Goode and Hopkins’ performances.

By the time the credits rolled, I realized I don’t think I’d ever watched a movie this long that still felt so brief and bewilderingly abridged; where so much happened and yet nothing happened at all.

Revived and pumped up for the sequel, Wan’s synthy semi-psychedelia still makes for a delightful trip, but maybe Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom could have used a little fresh air; for all of the eye-popping colors, creatures and action flourishes he engineers in and around the sea, there isn’t a single sequence as front-to-back satisfying as the surface-world rooftop chase in Italy that popped off the screen in the first movie.

Though it lacks a more exigent purpose, The Crime Is Mine has layers of textbook farce decorated with a confectioner’s critique. We rarely see such quaint delights in cinemas these days.

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.

There is nothing in The Family Plan that you haven’t seen before, to the point that there’s somehow even less.

Where Chicken Run once played off of the specific aesthetics of WWII POW films with dark humor, Dawn of the Nugget loses its identity in favor of a harmless playfulness interchangeable with a Madagascar or Ice Age sequel.