Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is more about planning a job than it is the job itself. It is downright obsessive in its detail about camera cycles, false identities, and elaborate planning.

It's a mess, but a glorious one, and it's so clearly the expression of one artist's vision, seemingly immune to studio notes, that when you find yourself wondering "Who on earth could this possibly be for?" you realize that it's a compliment. As an entertainment, Rules Don't Apply deserves an extra half-star for audacity.

The heroes of this film are, in other words, selfish, but never in a venal, or ugly way. They're human, and they do what they must to face each successive challenge they're confronted with.

A documentary that offers some fascinating if glancing insights into a rich and timely subject but ends up being more frustrating than enlightening.

Daniel H. Birman’s Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is what happens when a crime documentary loses sight of its focus.

Caveat is a masterpiece of understatement for a title, and a witty opener to Damian Mc Carthy’s directorial debut, an impressive and often terrifying film, taking place almost solely in one location, with two people trapped in a moldy dimly-lit house.

This "lack" of a serious critique makes Between Two Worlds the story of a pampered journalist confronted with how "these people live," plus the fallout when her lie is discovered, rather than a real shot fired at an unfair system.

Dickman's film reeks of pot smoke and non-seriousness.

Eventually it becomes a half-baked, sci-fi horror flick, and even a bit of a drama. Like “I Feel Pretty,” it uses its high-concept premise to explore notions of feminine power, at least superficially — and similarly, its execution ends up being problematic.

A light touch doesn’t suit the heavy themes in The Power, a horror psychodrama that’s specifically concerned with sexual misconduct and then more generally about the abuse of (you guessed it) power at a London hospital.

The problem with “Vice is Broke” is it never quite gets around to answering what went wrong with Vice, content to mimic its “quirky” form of filmmaking as interview subjects recall the toxic workplace atmosphere that undeniably produced some formative journalism.

Means to make fun of romantic comedies the way "Airplane!" goofed on disaster movies and the "Naked Gun" films spoofed detective flicks. The result is actually more in line with Gus Van Sant’s ambitious but ill-advised shot-for-shot remake of "Psycho."

In segments brutal and unforgiving, Stephens gives the viewer glimpses of the kind of emotional and physical abuse Maggie is subjected to—beaten by her dad, unsupported by her kindly but helpless mother, told by religious figures in the past that her homosexuality can be “fixed.”

While the tonal shifts from melodrama to mordant comedy don’t always work, Fonda and Tomlin are as good as they have ever been and Moving On proves itself a powerful rumination on the strength it takes to age—mentally, physically, and economically.

Isn’t It Romantic tries to have its red velvet cupcake and eat it too, and though it’s tasty and enjoyable while you’re watching it, you’ll realize how hungry you are for something heartier soon after you’ve come down from your sugar high.

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

No matter how many shapes Owen takes, Krasinski's essential everyman always makes it warm-hearted and engaging. He may be surrounded by the fantastic and silly but his humanity, even in animal form, is what brings the movie to life.

Although it’s stuffed with many cliches, The Aeronauts can feel like a rather enjoyable bit of historical fantasy.

Chomet’s gift for deftly caricatured faces, expressive movement, and clever compositions hasn’t deserted him, and there are many flat-out beautiful bits scattered throughout, but this is altogether a work that’s best appreciated with the sound off, while blasting a playlist of Django Reinhardt’s greatest hits.

It ultimately results in a cold, unsatisfying experience.

There is not a single original idea in All Day and A Night. Not one solitary surprise is to be had here.

It’s beautifully constructed and executed, with a lead character who reveals new biographical and emotional layers to us with each new scene, and a backup cast stocked with small-scale underworld types.

That it doesn’t quite come together in the second half after a riveting first hour is disappointing, but there’s still too much to like here to discard it as much as A24 seems to be doing.

None of this is particularly difficult to watch; the cinematic competence, the sincerity with which the clichés get served up, and so on, make a relatively smooth viewing experience. But they also render what would have been an at times harrowing real-life story into something safe and bland.

Went Up the Hill doesn’t just explore grief, it expresses it.

The overall effect is as if you fed a book of bawdy medieval verse to ChatGPT, which is perfectly in line with the film’s most provocative aspect.

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.

Kroll and Slate, though, give performances that have the opposite effect. They aren't the best people, but the relative goodness of their intentions is never in doubt. My Blind Brother puts these characters through the comic wringer, but the humor is founded on the characters and their flaws, not the circumstances.

Pilgrimage is the kind of movie one fears is going out of style forever. A historical action drama, serious in tone and intent but also invested in delivering movie-movie thrills.

If Gifted works for you as it did me, it’s mostly because of the cast, but also the way the story unpeels.

Lone Survivor burns with the fever of a passion project. Writer-director Peter Berg's gratitude to United States servicemen for all their sacrifice comes through viscerally, from first frame to last.

If only the dialogue and visuals matched the daring of its ideology.

Scott’s soapy epic—his second cinematic outing this year after the superior (and also partly campy) “The Last Duel”—isn’t exactly a bore, thanks to a number of its actors (like Leto) unafraid to lean into the film’s kitschy tone as well as some fearless moments—like one sensationally go-for-broke sex scene—that meet them at that amplified level.

It is with a zippy touch and a number of questionable directorial choices—Sorkin is still a much better writer than director—as well as an immersive, pressure-cooker structure that is never less than enthralling, that Sorkin implants his aforesaid signature style into Being the Ricardos.

For the film to be about more than just wildly outrageous behavior (although those moments are the one that provoke the biggest and well-earned laughs), these have to feel like real people and we have to care about them too. And we do, thanks to a strong cast of comic actresses who have an easy chemistry with each other.

The sequel (which is also a prequel) features a bigger cast, a longer running time, extra subplots and additional romantic entanglements. But it’s emptier than its predecessor and has even lower stakes. It’s less entertaining, and for all its frantic energy, it manages to go absolutely nowhere.

While it doesn’t hit the highs of the very best movies based on the author’s works — those would be Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” two outstanding examples of American narrative cinema of the ‘90s—it’s also far less slick and ingratiating than the watchable but very Hollywood-processed likes of “Get Shorty” and “Be Cool.”

Watching Kristen Wiig's lived-in and alive performance as this blunt, practical, and yet totally innocent woman is to be in the presence of something very very special.

It’s a little too “Garden State” in places, but Johnson smartly puts a grim enough layer on their dynamic to avoid turning the whole thing into a treacly rom-com.

What’s perhaps most interesting about director Jen McGowan’s film is how much she rescues it from that dreadful opening act, although she can’t quite get it back to something worth recommending, largely due to a major flaw that grows more prominent in contrast as the film gets better.

The film may be cinematic comfort food, but its creators do earn our trust and nail all the essential beats they need to along the way.

Simply falls short.

The main distinguishing feature of this film is its almost-novel nesting-doll plot structure, and passing thematic interest in its narrative's formulaic nature.

Anthropoid has one hell of a story to tell, a story that once again reminds us of a savagery that is not so far in humanity’s past that we need to stop being reminded of it.

We Live in Time is a film that looks you in the eyes as it tugs on your heartstrings, a movie that would almost certainly fall apart with lesser performers to make this kind of shallow script feel organic. Luckily, this one has Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

Rich in impulsive sensuality and knowing humor, the film captivates even as it stumbles through too many subplots. It’s a tad convoluted but never dull.

If this flawed final outing is, indeed, the last we see of Tommy Shelby, it’s still a heck of a note for the man who plays him to ride out on.

It isn’t until deep into “Moonlight Sonata” that you start to realize how many patterns Brodsky has woven into the fabric of this tale.

Corbijn, as has been his custom in directing features, goes for mood and feel rather than narrative momentum, although his scope is clearly hemmed-in by the production’s budget; there’s not much here in the way of effective ‘50s-New-York evocation. But the actors and their exchanges ring true, and by the time the film reaches its lonesome conclusion, the resonances are eerie.

Too often, Kane and Koury don’t seem to trust entirely what they have, and they needlessly pad Voyeur with miniatures, re-enactments and an overall light, playful tone. It all seems at odds with the story’s fundamentally disturbing — yet gripping — content.

Pacino dials down the manic, wide-eyed “Hoo-ah!” that has defined his screen presence over the past couple decades, and often rendered the Method master a parody of himself.

Although their work is ultimately not enough to make “See for Me” anything more than a gimmick movie that never quite pays off, Davenport almost makes it worth watching and will leave you wondering about what they could accomplish with stronger material.

Though it's a well-done family drama, White Boy Rick is a half-told story that only lightly incorporates the deeper issues of systemic injustice. The black characters feel shortchanged in comparison to their white co-stars; even Rick’s closest friend, Boo (RJ Cyler), feels unremarkable. Despite these flaws, the performances in the movie are strong.

These episodic sketches immediately feel monotonous since the plot isn't arranged in chronological or sequential order; leaps in time from 1945 back to 1941 and then forward to eventually 1944 are a distracting overcompensation for an otherwise lifeless chain of impersonal betrayals, cold-blooded murders, and unbelievable moping from all involved.

Maria Schneider’s story is a tragic and often infuriating one, and “Being Maria” captures the complexity of the situation.

This recent The Secret Garden both respects and admires children’s imagination as its young characters discover their own way to grapple with loss, isolation, and loneliness.

The absurdist sectarian comedy gives way, as it inevitably does in this conflict, to tragedy, and death both human and animal. While Shomali resists easy cynicism while seeming to have almost every excuse to indulge it, he doesn’t try to craft a hopeful parable out of his material either.

Lousy Carter, at its best, feels like a cruel joke on its own protagonist, the kind of guy so convinced of his own genius he doesn’t want to mess it up by actually putting himself out there.

What Taylor and his game cast, led by Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage, do get right will leave you excited, and eager for more.

Only the most committed genre fans and academic-minded masochists will want to hang around until the bitter, arthouse-meets-choose-your-own-adventure style ending.

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.

The one major problem with Into the Forest, the one that keeps it from making that final leap of good movie to a potentially great one, is that the final third is just not quite as strong as the stuff that precedes it.

In addition to serving up heaping helpings of suspense and action, “Fuze” abounds in twists.

Lively is superb here, giving one of those hyper-focused, action-lead performances that's as much an athletic feat as an aesthetic one.

The fact is that as good as Plummer and McDermott are here, Ford ultimately writes himself into a corner that requires actions in the final act that don’t ring true.

As a piece of filmmaking, Torn is slightly above TV-movie quality.

The movie, starring Zabou Breitman, Jacque Gamblin, Pascal Elbé, Sylvie Testud, and Tony Harrisson, has a more upsetting dimension than most suspense dramas as it’s based on a true story, a story that touches on issues still roiling France today.

Frustrating in its repetitiveness, Leon’s third feature is like a narrative exercise fascinated by both memory and youth. Italian Studies relentlessly experiments with form, but fails to fully congeal.

The Best Man Holiday has the potential to become a staple of Christmastime movie watching in the 'hood.

Inflate its profundity, and you’re part of the joke; Dismiss its pleasures and layers, and you’ll miss a strange and sometimes rewarding experience.

So much time and energy put into something that, try as I might, I could only muster interest in sporadically. All of this well-meaning effort to waste on a film that never finds the right tone to connect with viewers. It takes a lot to make a movie like Outlaw King, even if it provides so little.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

There's a flatness in the end-result. The quirky is utterly predictable.

Individual scenes can be tense but the arc as a whole lacks momentum. I Smile Back should have been devastating. Silverman is willing to take you there. What it ends up being is frustrating.

It’s all overly precious and just not funny enough, even if it is a blood-soaked tribute to those who would look at the story as just another day of underpaid work.

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 scenes under water are exquisitely beautiful, but it is the screenplay that feels soggy.

While there's undeniable creativity in the film's visual and metaphorical aspects, there's a glaring neglect in the power needed for this film to find its own voice.

It’s antagonistic comedy that’s brilliantly designed so that nobody actually gets hurt.

Say what you want about his onscreen vices, but Branagh has always been a charitable director and it really shows here.

Champs is a documentary that wants to say something sociological about the sweet science of boxing. In this regard, it has an undeniable power.

It’s a rambunctious, often hilarious, and carefully-constructed story about a teenage boy starting to question his sexuality in the midst of his Evangelical Christian world.

It is reported that this movie’s scenario was inspired by the life of Schroeder’s own mother, and the film has a personal tone that is not always detectable in his other movies. It enhances a film that’s one of the most thoughtful in his body of work.

The actors never once seem engaged with the material beyond the surface. Thus, Crooked House feels as lifeless as the corpse at its center.

The debut feature from Australian writer/director Mirrah Foulkes eventually provides enough of a revenge fantasy to satisfy, even if the road there is a bit windy and bumpy.

A lot of this is figuratively and literally standup material, with the interview subjects framed head-to-toe in front of bright, primary-colored backdrops, and keeping things as light as possible.

The premise isn’t thoroughly uncomfortable so much as it is simply tedious; Barbara Hershey’s focal character Tabitha is made to appear more and more helpless in the film’s scant psychological thrills, and yet we’re stuck with a flat anxiety for a feature's length.

The scariest thing about “Humane” is how genuinely believable its nightmare vision ends up being. However, the film’s micro approach to a macro crisis never connects because we’re never given a reason to care about these specific people.

We might not come away understanding Jacobs or his world better, but we can still enjoy spending time with him.

"Cloudy 2" is undeniably dense with ideas, images, and characters but slight on anything of thematic interest at all.

Too bad The Djinn is often as plodding as it is impersonal. This movie crawls whenever it needs to sprint.

Godzilla vs. Kong is a crowd-pleasing, smash-'em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a science-fiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals, and, in spots, a voluptuously wacky spectacle that plays as if the creation sequence in "The Tree of Life" had been subcontracted to the makers of "Yellow Submarine."

The film's plot is articulated cleanly, if a bit too plainly at times, but as is so often the case in Sayles' movies, that's not where the director's interest lies. Go for Sisters lacks the epic quilt qualities of such sprawling Sayles pictures as "Lone Star" or "City of Hope," but this seems more a matter of intent than evidence of any sort of failure of vision.

This one has familiar beats but appealing performers, better dialogue, and more depth of character than many more formulaic movie romances.

If it wasn't for Lawrence and Barth Feldman's joint comedic excellence, with their commanding charm and chemistry fueling its laughs, No Hard Feelings would have been a disaster. But thanks to them, it's a serviceable summer comedy that should keep the J. Law lovers happy, even though her talents are better used elsewhere.

In its attempt to cram too many narratives and subjects into too short of a running time, it ends up coming across as both overstuffed and oddly undernourished.

The best thing about Flanagan’s film by some stretch is the work by Rebecca Ferguson. The director of “Gerald’s Game” and “Hush” proves again to be a very capable filmmaker when it comes to directing actresses, getting Ferguson’s career-best work to date.

Any movie that can bring to mind a Joni Mitchell song as the credits roll — “Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone” — has earned its keep.