The gooey center of the film works for those with a high tolerance for things that might make a majority of the population queasy.

What's missing is a sense of how Monroe, seemingly a law-abiding young man before his family's financial dark days, suddenly went from being a go-along-to-get-along type to a budding criminal mastermind.

This Quake delivers with skill. The build-up to the disaster nicely intensifies with a feeling of dread, and some of the subtlest early effects are the most powerful.

The pacing works referentially to its namesake and real-time ambition, but the characters aren’t quite interesting or engaging enough to sustain attention for the whole runtime, and the film’s crawl eventually wears on weary knees.

The film's tight construction and prolific action scenes carry it, and Blunt and Johnson do the irresistible force/immovable object dynamic well enough, swapping energies as the story demands.

Bridgend does have a life on its own beyond fact, but the narrative it offers in place of the headlines only further proves how phenomena like adolescence and death is better observed, not investigated.

Jagged rides the wave of that excitement, but avoids opportunities to explore deeper below the surface.

It’s an earnest, defiantly women-centric film that maintains a generally positive attitude about the future, albeit also one that feels a little less observational, a little more heavy-handed and prescriptive than the fiercely authentic Wadjda.

It took a second screening to better appreciate what the Zellners brought to the screen, but for some, that might not be enough to get past some of the movie’s weirder notes.

In the end, it feels like Morano didn’t trust her actors quite enough to be the conduits of emotion, falling back on too many filmmaking and screenwriting tropes that hamper the realism of their work.

The Lonely Island brand of humor might at first seem like an awkward fit for horror, but there’s an art to the timing of a well-done splatter flick that shares filmmaking DNA with comedy.

There are some wonderful sequences in Battle of the Five Armies, and the attention to detail is breathtaking (each different space rendered with thrilling complexity), but the film feels more like a long drawn-out closing paragraph rather than (like "The Desolation of Smaug") a vibrant stand-alone piece of the story.

The overall experience of “The Empire” is one that is consistently surprising and rarely dull. That being said, it’s not necessarily successful as a comedy.

Archive is a somewhat unwieldy sci-fi thriller to get into. The plot twists are many, and so are the cliches.

True to form, Hacksaw Ridge draws equally on Gibson's bottomless thirst for mayhem and his sincerely held religious beliefs — or some of them, anyway. It's a movie at war with itself.

Lined by an amicable sense of dark humor and a sporadically amusing bloodlust, this hit-or-miss compilation could bring Halloween cheer to genre fans, especially if a prop candy bar named Carpenter, or narration from Adrienne Barbeau, sounds like a horror convention dream come true.

The plot thickens ... and thickens ... and thickens. Gudegast is clearly an avid student of heist pictures, and he layers this one with a lot of spectacular complications even while he muddles the average viewer’s potential rooting interest.

This is pretty much the opposite of a contemporary American comedy: rather than broad, The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq is an exemplary example of narrow.

There’s a “let’s put on a show” energy in the performances of Reynolds, Ferrell, and Spencer that’s easy to like.

It is somewhat refreshing to witness a May-December romance from an older female perspective and both leads pour their hearts into their roles.

Visually splendid, but generically flat-footed, Song of the Sea is an animated fantasy that comes close to greatness, but is rarely as clever as it is comforting.

Trolls is a sugar-shocked “Shrek,” an aggressively auto-tuned animated fun ride for easily distracted times.

The filmmakers are themselves too celebrity besotted to comment in a meaningful way on how Benson’s career balanced depictions of the rich and famous with in-the-trenches risk-taking.

Elton John: Never Too Late is an affecting movie that the musician's fans will likely appreciate, but it's the equivalent of those official oil portraits that the more intelligent and self-aware royals used to commission.

Table 19 also feels the need to be a romantic comedy in which all's well that ends well, and it's here that the movie fails most conspicuously.

Awake has just enough scares and strangeness, plus a sense of dread and paranoia, to make its horror creepy and enjoyable. It’s not a flawless thriller, but enough different elements click into place, like Rodriguez and Greenblatt’s performances.

It fails to rise above certain clichés, dulled further by stiff performances and a clumsy handle on the movie’s interwoven time periods.

Some of it is tonally inconsistent and the end feels rushed, but strong performances, especially from the great Fionnula Flanagan, along with Bates’ unique voice keep it engaging.

It’s a flawed film, but there are elements that really work, especially the lead performance and some of Flanagan’s gifts with composition. Before I Wake is also particularly interesting to watch now as one can see it as a career stepping stone to the movies he's made since.

Martyrs Lane is ruled by grief, often dulled and overdrawn by it, but its young surrogates give us the unique opportunity to see its themes presented without compromise.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain has the same problem as its real-life subject, in that it goes off in too many directions at once.

For me, One Cut of the Dead is good enough. It sometimes surprised me while I waited for a payoff that Ueda basically delivered, even if he and his collaborators never made me involuntarily leave my seat.

The film finds von Trier wrestling with the claims of misogyny and misanthropy that have followed him his entire career, but not in the way you’d expect. If anything, he leans into both, daring you to look into the abyss with him as he interrogates his own dark side and banishes himself to the underworld.

Both actors are gorgeous, of course, which heightens the romantic fantasy of it all, but there's also a naturalism to them that's appealing.

The film takes a while to find its sea legs and peters out a bit in its big finish sequence, but sticks the landing in the final scene. The whole thing is a little uneven, but it avoids sentimentality, perhaps the biggest trap in material involving a child.

Aan odd fusion of an earnest socially conscious drama and a B-movie mystery programmer that never quite comes together despite a strong performance from Adele Haenel at its center.

The Paper Tigers is still very much a martial arts movie that ends with a late-night rooftop fight, and then a celebratory dim sum meal. But if you already like this sort of lightweight crowdpleaser, you’re bound to find something worthwhile here.

So, yes, the movie’s predictable, and writer Ryan Engle makes a lot of unforced dialogue errors.

Despite its unabashed fondness for clichés and tired tropes, Shot Caller mostly succeeds in its aims because of Waugh’s sober, matter-of-fact approach to the material.

The problem, though, is that we never get enough sense of Paz's interior life to judge this movie as anything other than a comeback story about a nice guy who got knocked out by the cosmos and hauled himself up.

Director Freundlich clearly likes to dig in deep with this kind of character material, and here it pays off in ways it really hasn’t in some of his previous feature work (which includes “Trust the Man” and “The Rebound”).

Silver’s latest film Uncertain Terms finds some substance within its ideology of evaporated ambitions, though there’s plenty of empty space in which the film is still able to limit itself.

Loosely based on the graphic novel Une Nuit de Pleine lune, The Owners doesn’t feel new or groundbreaking by any measure. Still, this increasingly bizarre film is grisly and absurd in all the right, self-aware ways; qualities that the comparable (and far superior) “Don’t Breathe” also possessed as another recent horror film that turned the tables against its lowlife aggressors.

Part of the thrill in watching Niccol’s movies is in seeing him thoroughly curate dreams of our future that play off like logical possibilities.

Like its predecessor, "Code 8: Part II" uses its high concept sci-fi to critique the increasing violence of the militarized police state, especially in the age of surveillance.

At its best, it’s self-aware in a way that’s reminiscent of the ‘90s slasher renaissance in films like “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

Trap too often lacks the craftsmanship it needs to crackle with energy and tension. Despite these missteps, Josh Hartnett almost makes “Trap” worth seeing, imbuing his character with a playfulness that can be captivating. It’s just a shame his great work sometimes feels trapped in a movie that doesn’t know what to do with it.

While this documentary from Alison Klayman can be insightful in taking us inside a phenomenon, its approach can be too broad, with filmmaking that relies on its own weaning sense of trendy.

It’s no surprise that the cinematographer’s directorial feature debut is an alluring ghost story full of visual intrigue and surrealist imagery, giving him the space to showcase his strengths while working out some of the storytelling mechanics.

An old-fashioned Biblical spectacular with fresh blood in its veins.

If the subject interests you, don’t let my mildly negative review dissuade you from going to see it. I would like to see it again myself, but this time in the version I can share with several of my relatives whose vision is no longer present.

Because Users is so captivating from a technical perspective, it’s frustrating to discover how scattered it is narratively.

For a while, the found-footage horror thriller “Bodycam” appears to have something to say and, therefore, a better-than-average sense of how to handle its subgenre’s tropes and tics. Then, in the last 10-15 minutes, the illusion is spoiled.

Little girls will absolutely love it, though. That much is undeniable.

I’m still shocked that Followed is as funny as it is given that Mike is as obnoxious as you might expect given his very online, anything-for-the-lulz persona. He’s a cartoonishly loud, entitled millennial who never stops reminding us that he only cares about the sound of his own voice. He’s also sometimes unintentionally hysterical?

Ultimately, the film registers less as an indictment of widespread financial corruption than as a shallow exploration of one man’s greed. But briefly, when it’s at its peak value somewhere in the middle, Money Monster is a solid bet.

The vast majority of this picture is extremely well done, which is what makes its sudden misstep into wish fulfillment sentimentality during the final twenty minutes all the more of a letdown.

The best parts of Morgan Neville & Jeff Malmberg’s The Saint of Second Chances are like hearing stories from a good friend over beers after a game.

Race takes a complicated, messy story and shapes it with the bland cookie-cutter mold too often seen in the biopic genre.

Through its images of peaceful protests and demonstrations from the era, McDonough's narrow but inspiring film finds deeper relevance in the face of the current protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder.

Director Eva Orner makes her story both about the predator and the victims, and delivers an appropriately cut-and-dry case that Bikram more than deserves that third title. But she connects these sensibilities with an approach that too often feels like an info dump, instead of a gripping mediation on the larger themes and harrowing stories that inspired it.

The film is worth seeing because, regardless of things that I wish had been done better or differently, it feels like the beginning of a major filmmaking career, and because Pettyfer and Freedson-Jackson are so strong.

As a whole, the film is paced with a bit too much restraint, but, ultimately, "You Are Not Me" is one of the better feel-bad movies of this year's holidays, one that understands that family's embrace may be more suffocating than loving.

Some of the writing gets a bit clunky, the ending is pretty horrible, and there’s a performance at the center that kind of sucks in everything around it like a black hole, but most of that won’t matter to viewers of The Witches: They’ll be too scared to care.

Nothing about it makes a lot of sense, but then, nothing about classic old comedies starring people like W.C. Fields or Laurel and Hardy made much sense, because they about oddballs getting into trouble and then trying to get out of it.

Blood-soaked Indonesian martial arts flick Headshot is for anyone who liked "The Bourne Identity," but wished it were way more violent.

It’s the blockbuster version of plopping down in front of a Saturday morning cartoon, watching an archetypal caped crusader save the day. All the while you slurp your sugary cereal, an act of killing time before the next major superhero story comes to theaters.

Where Bad Hair is not so successful, however, is in reckoning with the hornet’s nest it kicks regarding its subject matter. At almost two hours, Simien has time to interrogate the natural vs. processed hair argument instead of only hinting at it occasionally.

That the perspective this time is from a girl’s point of view rather than a boy’s is significant. At least it is in theory. The scripter is Joe Kelly, who, along with J.M. Ken Nimura, created the comic. It’s not a knock to note that the main creative talents behind the camera are male — the women of the cast are clearly imbuing their characterizations with what they know. But there’s still something about I Kill Giants that feels projected, a work more informed by empathy than experience.

With her debut feature, Bang Gang, Eva Husson captures the restless rhythms of adolescence—the push-pull of angst and boredom, of self-consciousness and the yearning to lose oneself completely.

A movie with good intentions but is uneven in tone, leaving me with mixed feelings. It felt like the speech was preempting any criticism with sentimentality. The uneasiness continued in the film’s wild swings between tragedy and goofy comedy.

Despite Lang and Fisher’s exemplary teamwork, “The Optimist” never overcomes its clunky plot or its inclination to teach rather than dramatize.

Greed is never the sum of its best parts since other actors — especially Jamie Blackley, who, playing young McCreadie in a series of flashbacks, is fine but relatively disappointing — can’t pull off the movie’s delicate balance of broad humor and po-faced drama.

If you’re a maven or even vaguely curious there’s a lot of production value to be derived here. The human story that the filmmakers want to drape over their atmosphere, though, never quite connects.

As far as Scream sequels go, we’ve seen worse, but the wear and tear of the years are showing on Ghostface’s mask. The script is serviceable but surface-level, bringing up interesting ideas but never following though on them.

Lively does her best to add emotional layers to Lily so we see her internal growth, but this process is often hampered by the film around her.

It’s an alternating series of frustrating choices, promising beats, and general goodwill for a legendary actor donning one of the most famous hats in movie history yet again. It should be better. It could have been worse. Both can be true.

At a time when the long-overdue rallying cry for representation has inadvertently limited the type of stories artists have the permission to tell, depending largely on their outward identity, the success of LeRoy’s work—and the countless lives it mirrored—stands as undeniable proof that art should never be constrained by the boundaries of one’s experience.

It’s only in the final third when the fight choreography gets a little too incoherent that you realize you don’t give a damn about anything that’s happening, and you start to wish Hobbs and Shaw were given a story with a little more meat on its bones. But by then you probably won’t care.

It’s a testament to Macdonald and Skinner that they inject chemistry into their characters’ underwritten pairing. Their performances are what make “Falling for Figaro” an entertaining distraction, even as the film plays out exactly as you would expect.

Ruskin succeeds in paying tribute to Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole's hard work, but it's less successful in filling in the larger story.

It's less effective in the run-with-a-gun scenes, as is the acting and the writing, which all fall off sharply in the final third. The issues of individual, cultural, and national loyalty—and when and how to respond to aggressive actions by other nations—are relegated to the background of some weak chase scenes and plot twists.

The Columnist hits more like a one-note horror movie, less intellectually deep than its original introduction.

My Old School straddles that middle-ground as well, speculating as to the inner workings of a troubled mind but more often settling for the familiar, picaresque pleasures of a great yarn colorfully retold.

Clever-but-frustrating.

Within about a half hour, what seemed at first banal is in fact oppressive. With deliberate pacing, minimal dialogue, and solid acting from the leads, the movie makes its point felt about marriage.

It’s one of those inspirational Hollywood dramas about which there isn’t anything "overtly wrong" with it. It’s well-cast, it looks great, it has that intense centerpiece in the raft, and it certainly conveys a true story worth telling. And yet I keep coming back to that beautiful sunrise that opens the film. It’s just too damn pretty.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is inherently bound by its white perspective, but at the same time, it would simply be a different story if not through Bobo’s eyes.

Boundaries ends the way most road trips do — by running out of gas. But being in the presence of Plummer these days is always time well spent.

The experiment of "The End" may not entirely work, but it is good that it exists.

While most sequels invite comfort through the familiar, this film’s best moment arrives through Judge grappling with his signature humor in a modern world.

What’s frustrating is that I totally agree with everything Bong is saying, I just wish he were saying it with a touch more finesse. Maybe they can do some fine-tuning in the lab for next time.

Birthmarked ultimately falls short of bringing the emotion home.

When it comes to conjuring a sense of place, Driver’s film succeeds spectacularly, though it comes up short in other areas.

Intermittently compelling but rather unfortunately titled documentary.

Ultimately, Greenland never comes together into a truly satisfying package, but it deserves a little credit for trying to do something unique within such a familiar framework.

The hero worship of a fictional character in the midst of all of this real-life drama is a mistake.

If Torn Hearts had pushed itself a little harder, it could have ascended into camp heaven, and maybe become a cult classic. As it stands, it’s an unapologetically high-femme distraction that’s better than your average Lifetime thriller.