It’s an inspired idea, even though a lot of the industry inside jokes may go over most moviegoers’ heads. The playfulness of this self-referential structure gives the movie a zany energy off the top that it ultimately can’t sustain.

Unfortunately, Lucy Walker's Buena Vista Social Club: Adios plays more like a well-intentioned but unsatisfying addendum to Wenders' movie and Cooder's recording.

Music can bypass your defenses. Music can imagine a better world, but it can also mourn the world or a love you've lost. Sometimes music does both at the same time. The Indigo Girls are like that. "Glitter & Doom" understands this dynamic, but the architecture of the film is so rickety there's nothing to hold onto. Just sit back and ride the waves of the music.

But Live From New York! is required viewing only if the network’s own 3½-hour marathon salute to four decades of skit hilarity earlier this year was not enough of a retrospective for you.

Like the limited legislative change that has occurred due to the underappreciated efforts of these valiant activists, I wish Snyder’s Us Kids resulted in more.

The movie never builds enough momentum, emotional or narrative, to get the viewer on its side.

I can’t decide whether it’s the relative disposability of the narrative, the unremarkable animation, or the fact that this just feels like another spoonful of content thrown into Netflix’s trough, but “Sirens of the Deep” reads like so many empty calories.

The truth is that pacing often trumps realism, and The Accountant 2 just doesn’t build enough momentum.

Barron’s Cove is a pulpy thriller awkwardly tied to a soapy story of bad dads and the wreckage they leave behind.

By trying to make a grand statement to a post-lockdown theatergoing audience about what they are willing to believe—but also about how far they are willing to go for others—Shyamalan trips over himself and neglects to give them much of a movie.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

Judgmental and ungenerous, Alex’s story gives you enough answers to either tsk-tsk or nod sadly in response. The rest’s up to you, the viewer, which feels like a bit of a cop-out.

I walked away from My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn having enjoyed the time spent with Refn, his family, and Ryan Gosling, but without any further insight into the production of “Only God Forgives,” filmmaking in general or this particular talent.

As Don’t Worry Darling reaches its climactic and unintentionally hilarious conclusion, Wilde loses her grasp on the material. The pacing is a little erratic throughout, but she rushes to uncover the ultimate mystery with a massive exposition dump that’s both dizzying and perplexing.

As it is, “The Gardener” suggests that Van Damme still doesn’t know how to both give his audience what they want and show off his range.

Whatever it is that Mizrahy finds interesting about this subject remains frustratingly oblique, ultimately leaving "Space: The Longest Goodbye" a muddled bag of contradictions and underdeveloped threads and themes.

That opening scene is also, in retrospect, somewhat depressing for the way that it conflates a glib fatalism with an unbelievable sort of turn-the-other-cheek optimism ("If they hurt others, it's because they hurt, too,” as Benedicta says in one scene).

Magic Farm is eye-catching with its high saturation and punchy editing choices, but the seduction of bright and bold visuals is incompatible with Ulman’s unwieldy script. Her hands are full, and oftentimes clarity slips through her fingers.

The Confessions might remind viewers of films ranging from “The Name of the Rose” to Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth.” But Roberto Andó’s film disappointingly ends up being too flat-footed script-wise to deliver on either its dramatic or thematic promises.

A decent first half and solid voice work throughout succumbs to total chaos for the second half and the realization that there’s almost no actual artistic intent here. No story, no character, no world-building, no design. It’s all bright colors and loud noises. You’d think we’d evolved beyond that by now.

You always get the sense that you are watching a screenplay’s first draft that never got the fleshing-out that it clearly needed to make it stand out, either from a dramatic or emotional standpoint.

It’s all inspiring stuff, to be sure—and often so dramatic that it’s hard to imagine it really could have happened, even though it did.

Austin Found features a great ensemble cast, but never manages to explore unique territory.

When it’s over, even viewers more eager to forgive this failed creative reunion will wonder what it is that they just watched, and what purpose it serves other than financial. And why no one figured out a new, engaging way to tell a story that’s already been told.

More disappointing, the performances just aren't quite as funny and focused as they should be. Willard and Kind are both very funny guys when they are used right, but they both seem a bit at sea here, and their characters never come into sharp focus.

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

The filmmakers over-extend themselves to solicit empathy for their doomed protagonists. Youth is so unbearably nice that I eventually wished it were remade by misanthropes.

Most of the rest of the film surrounding it is a conceptually weak and dramatically muddled mess that has acquired a game and good cast and then given them precious little to do.

Ritual cuts a lot of corners on screen and in the story.

Though undoubtedly a flawed enterprise, After Love is a formal wonder, due to the efforts of Lafosse, photographer Jean-François Hensgens, and production designer Olivier Radot.

The visual effects are decent, the cast is better than decent, and that’s all, folks.

In a strange way, War Machine kicks off when it proverbially jumps the shark, introducing something so ridiculous as a big killer robot to jolt the movie awake from its ho-hum military recruiting motions. It’s not a movie built to withstand big questions, but for a high-octane action thriller, it’s a lot more fun when it goes off the rails.

These are important stories that should be seen, but audiences need more than scripts that are primarily acting exercises, with very little insight beyond everyone blaming everyone else and reminders that bad choices by addicts and those around them lead to bad outcomes.

For much of its overlong running time, “Waiting for Bojangles” depicts mental illness as an adorable personality quirk, a source of good-time party vibes, even a glamorous quality. Then, once this frothy French romance evolves into a more serious drama, it turns turgid, causing a jarring tonal shift.

While Keeper is not short on visual style or atmospheric tension, ultimately, it’s a tedious genre exercise undone by an undercooked narrative and its allergy to mystery.

I want to recommend Don't Sleep because it is, intellectually, more compelling than many of the indie horror films I tend to watch. But I can't recommend this movie, mostly because it's not smart enough to deserve that praise.

The result, I’m afraid, is a big disappointment, a disjointed mess that tries to create a point-counterpoint narrative with these two savvy showmen, which inevitably tips the scales in favoring one of them. The problem is, it’s not the one you think.

The film runs out of ideas so quickly that Atkinson literally resorts to dropping his pants to get a laugh from his saggy bare bottom.

The documentary's best material, other than the archival stuff, comes in how it flirts with an analysis of Wallace’s musical inspirations like his Jamaican background and what he took from a jazz musician who lived down the street. Sadly, there’s too little of that, and too many rhymes that we’ve heard before.

Horns would seem like another gamble, and another opportunity to stretch. It’s a supernatural thriller, territory he’s familiar with, but taken to a raunchy, grotesque extreme.

Burial has a hard enough core, both in terms of its central premise and its pulpy tropes, that for about 30 minutes, it almost works as a decent B-movie, right before it unceremoniously falls apart.

While Salles’ portrait gives a very incomplete account of the man and his art, it pays tribute to a filmmaker who remains among the medium’s foremost and most fascinating creators.

The problem here is a recurring one with recent family entertainment and it's how little there is below the repetitive surface. Jokes are recycled with alarming regularity, and most of the supporting characters outside of Maddie fall flat.

American Made may be superficially a condemnation of the hypocritical American impulse to take drug suppliers' money with one hand and chastise users with the other. But it's mostly a sensational, sub-"Wolf of Wall Street"-style true crime story that attempts to seduce you, then abandon you.

It’s clear that the irrepressibly charming Sedgwick and Bacon love to share the screen, and it is an absolute joy to watch their effortless chemistry. I just wish it were in a better picture.

It’s also an odd time to release a movie that embraces collaborating with the Russians and painting bad and good guys with such broad strokes. This puts Hunter Killer in murky geopolitical waters I don’t think it knows how to navigate. Neither the movie or Butler is nearly entertaining enough to distract us.

Despite the obvious sincerity of the filmmakers, the best efforts of Jean Reno and Anjelica Huston, and some lovely scenery, it remains overly didactic, talking down to even the middle school audience it is aimed at.

As tedious as Set Fire to the Stars gets, it remains watchable courtesy of the stunning black and white cinematography by Chris Seager.

Shelby Oaks is a film that plays like a checklist of clichés, a movie that so aggressively employs techniques we’ve seen work better elsewhere that it becomes almost numbing. Horror fans don’t mind familiarity, but not if it feels like the echo is all there is to listen to.

Never feels as momentous or as angsty as a good story about moody teenagers should, and that's mostly because the film lacks a menacing parental adversary.

What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between the United States and Mexico in which it is set.

It’s time for your annual Liam Neesoning: that cinematic tradition in which the seasoned star plays a grizzled character with a particular set of skills, which come in handy to dispatch bad guys and rescue good ones. But this year’s entry in the subgenre, The Marksman, is particularly mediocre.

The main problem of Monster Trucks is how content it is to take its sweet time before shifting into high-action gear.

Often, Song One feels like the timid B-side of last summer’s more satisfying music-biz saga, the much less woe-is-me and a lot more let’s-have-some-fun “Begin Again.”

Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to the depth of the music that seems to have inspired its existence.

No movie with Nicolas Cage, directed by the wonderfully weird Japanese director Sion Sono, should be this taxing, drawn out, and plainly boring.

As much as I wanted to be transported to the world of Miss Hokusai, it felt more like an analytical examination of a period and one of its most artistic voices, and I could never quite engage with that aspect of it.

With its script (co-written by German and Yulia Tupikina) that lacks the traditional structure of a three-part act, Dovlatov managed to evoke in me an overall feeling of internment. Along with it crept in a gloomy mood, gradually formed through the collective frustrations of the time’s hampered dwellers.

There’s a significant difference in quality between the mediocre scenario (and dialogue) and thrilling production design (and direction) in White Snake.

It contains nothing to offend, but nothing to surprise or inspire, either.

Fatherhood is at its best and most watchable when it’s just Hart and Hurd onscreen. Matt and Maddy’s undeniable and reciprocated love for one another radiates from the actors, even in their broadest scenes of comedy.

Although charming, the slight “I Don’t Understand You” struggles to sustain its spark. It’s a series of silly events that get progressively ridiculous and bloodier.

The scenes of wretched debauchery pile up, and in a film only 88 minutes long it's a tough slog. It's difficult to perceive what story is actually being told. There's a lot to look at, colors, light, drugs and nudity, and much of it looks really good. But there's nothing else to latch onto.

This cannot end well—we know this—but the major turn Afternoon Delight takes is jarring and irreparable.

Even the most open-minded viewers may have difficulty relating to the two lead protagonists in Border, a cynical Swedish romantic-fantasy that follows estranged border patrolwoman Tina (Eva Melander) and her unconvincing attraction to Byronic stranger Vore (Eero Milonoff).

It’s a movie with effective scenes and character choices, they’re just not linked together in any way that makes them entertaining or emotionally resonant as a whole.

Despite having a life story seemingly tailor-made for the big screen, it transforms his potentially fascinating tale into a narrow and borderline fawning hagiography that will no doubt find great favor among his fan base, while inspiring shrugs of indifference from those less invested in his tale.

These are tantalizing glimpses, hinting at the deeper psychological abysses at play here, but they are left unexplored.

The period spy thriller The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is only intermittently engaging and amusing, and those portions of the movie that succeed are also frustrating. Because they’re cushioned by enervated, conceptually befuddled, and sometimes outright indifferent stuff.

Tone is a revealing element for this project, which it borrows from the B-movie, apocalyptic seriousness of a later “Transformers” sequel. One of the movie’s biggest surprises is then that it has outtakes, which even include poking fun at how easily the intimidating alien’s costume head can fall off.

These “Fantastic Beasts” movies are just not good. They’re extremely OK, but never truly inspiring or transporting.

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.

Sticky racial politics aside, there are a few inspired moments in Madeline’s Madeline, and most of them belong to the fiercely talented Helena Howard.

This genre hybrid has its moments — way more than several of the films this week being made widely available to critics. It won’t change your life, but it won’t make you angry either.

Gemini Man never pretends to be anything but a time-wasting contraption hoping to entertain its viewer. I can’t reasonably be mad at its honesty, and despite the horrendous dialogue its actors are often forced to speak, I found myself enjoying a fair amount of it.

This movie is progressive intentionally, but not formally, and the difference between its creators’ themes and consideration is unfortunately glaring.

There’s a better version of Hunted that either leans more into its surreal flights of fancy or settles into gritty, tense realism. Hunted gets caught in the middle.

Is this all well-acted? It certainly is, especially by Langella. But all things being equal, I’d prefer to see him in a revival of “The Man Who Came To Dinner.”

The film's fuzzy mystical undertones are irksome as well. They seem less aligned with 19th century representations of Christian or Muslim spirituality than with fond childhood memories of "Star Wars."

Despite a strong ensemble of actors and some impressive photography, Mayday drowns inside its own overambitions.

In theory, that sort of self-victimization could be funny; in this reality, not so much.

Even by the standards of this franchise—and this genre in general—Step Up All In is pretty laughable.

It ends up being little more than a rambling, undisciplined clip show that misfires as both history and entertainment.

Leone continues to grow as a filmmaker—and there’s something interesting about watching that unfold throughout the franchise. But his screenwriting continues to let him down, jumbling his concepts with shallow mythology, atrocious dialogue, and ridiculous padding, leading to another film in this series that pushes over two hours. I’m still rooting for Leone to figure it out, but it’s not in this one.

So vague is the picture about the meaning of the artworks it presents that they proved to be of little interest to me, until I researched them afterward. Far more compelling is Beuys himself, with his signature hat, haunted gaze and outspoken belief that art can be a vehicle for communication.

It's been some years since Jolie did an action movie, and she carries the center of Those Who Wish Me Dead. Unfortunately, it's a film with no real center.

Even with the poetic, vicious grin we can see from Brake’s gummy smile, feasting on the dreams of lovable people misguided by materialism, there’s far too little to fear, or think about.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez is the latest to tackle the rich implications of Bluebeard in his film Elizabeth Harvest, bringing a modern horror-sci-fi sensibility to the story. The horror is already implicit. Gutierrez makes it explicit.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

The end result is a movie so resolutely bland and forgettable that the cast and crew probably expended more sheer effort dragging themselves to the set every day than they did in staging all of the various chases and shootouts and whatnot.

In the end, this is a sufficiently rebellious film about women’s refusal to be forced into sandboxes fashioned by oppressing norms—about fighting for air and resisting the urge to sink into that quicksand, however beautifully decorated.

This film is told in sympathy with the Linda Lovelace who reclaimed her real name, Linda Boreman, and became a feminist anti-porn activist years after her sole porn credit. Unfortunately, despite its passion and purpose, it's executed with so many wrong, false, stale and routine creative decisions that it runs aground by the time Muppet Babies Hef saunters in.

Ultimately, Quasi is a decent effort from talented dudes but a missed opportunity at something memorably hilarious. It's a few decent jokes in search of a better movie that needed a bit more improvisational effort in the comedy department and a lot more shaping in the editing room.

Compared to the original or to more recent films like “Boss Baby” and “The Bad Guys,” it is slapdash and lightweight.

This is funny to a point, but the problem with “Stress Positions” is that said point arrives about halfway through. The runtime that remains gets overloaded with too many plot threads, characters, and repeated punchlines, Hammel essentially turning the proceedings into a failed exercise in Blake Edwards-style farce.

Director Tim Sutton, working from a script by Greg Johnson, offers some striking visuals and a couple of compelling performances. But for the most part, this high-concept Western is too much of an empty drag to ever grab you.

You could build a suspension bridge over the gap between what Robin Hood could have been and what it is. Its hero is credible as a man who wants to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but the storytelling is so impoverished that the message can't stick.

That’s one dismayingly archaic trend throughout The Young Messiah: the fiendish characters are also wildly effeminate.