The best thing about Stargirl is that Big Star's yearning ode to adolescence "Thirteen" is played in its entirety not once, but twice. If Stargirl introduces a new generation to the wonder that is Big Star, it will have done more than enough.

It has a goofy grin on its face from frame one. But it never quite figures out how to pass its good vibrations to the audience.

Mainstream may be up-to-date on stylistic grounds, but its narrative could use refreshing.

That kind of gallow’s humor defines the surface tone of Arkansas, which often feels like a riff on “Breaking Bad,” only now it’s more about how sad it is to be poor white trash.

Daddy Issues is not the laugh-out-loud rom-com it had likely aspired to be, yet it’s just charming enough to make you wish it were better.

This is a Sad Rich People movie, no more so than a lot of American films dating back to the dawn of cinema, but it's no "The Leopard" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Great Gatsby" or you-name-it.

The Kings of Summer flirts with profundity, seeming to yearn for it and fear the honest expression of it at the same time. There is much here to admire, but the overall impression is of a film that does not have the courage of its convictions.

The most frustrating thing about the British prenatal horror movie Kindred is not that it’s impersonal, but rather that it’s not personal enough.

The ending — with its revelation of what these girls were really after all along — is so frustrating, you’re likely to wonder: Is that all there is?

Branagh, the actor, comes through unscathed. Branagh, the director, not so much.

The movie also falls back on a lot of boogity-boogity docu-clichés. Skittery editing, ironic music cues, that sort of thing.

The shooting is picturesque, the acting overbaked.

Though it has a few big laughs, Uncle Drew mistakes its goofy pitch for a free pass to be very simple with its comedy, and sappy with its emotions

Fanning delivers a performance of such astonishing depth and emotional range that her presence here is both a relief and strangely frustrating, since the film that surrounds the young actor is sadly no match for the qualities she brings to Potter’s profoundly personal narrative.

Unfortunately, the film never finds a way into Berg's personality that explores his many facets without reducing him to a blank-slate character at the center of a traditionally-made period thriller.

Clumsily conflates our country’s racist genocide of Native Americans with the era’s marginalizing of women and their lack of rights.

While the action and suspense set pieces are executed with typical Ritchie bravura, the movie falls flat a lot of the time in between.

The entire story takes place in and around a spectacular house with curiously sterile interiors that are more like the setting of a magazine ad for expensive liquor than a home real people live in. The bigger problem is that the world of the characters is not fully inhabited either.

Good scripts make you forget they are scripts. The script for Prisoner's Daughter is quite talky and never takes wing. You can almost see the words on the page, despite the strong efforts of Beckinsale and Cox.

Making his directorial debut, Hsu clearly has an eye for striking imagery, and Detention is filled with moments of shuddering, abstract beauty. But his ghost story never quite materializes from its uncanny ether.

The Vault is not, in other words, just derivative—it’s also flabby and bland.

Luke and the other actors do their best, especially Zosia Mamet as June’s friend and Melissa Leo as Charlie’s mother, but the dialogue never creates vivid, specific, consistent characters.

I’d have an easier time accepting the trite, asked-and-answered conclusions that director Muye Wen and co-writers Jianu Han and Wei Zhong lead viewers to if they were more adept at tugging at viewers’ heart-strings.

The execution is riddled with problems, not the least of which is the absence of Salinger’s actual work.

The Runner squanders at least one great performance (Fonda’s) and delivers a dispiritingly inert cinematic experience.

Coogan and Rudd's generally charming performances both give weight to their otherwise wisp-thin characters, but their swishy mannerisms also speak to the superficial nature of Fleming's presentation of Erasmus and Paul.

If you already are a fan of the Indigo Girls (and this writer is), then you know what their music means and the impact it's had on you. But if you don't know, if you want to learn more, “It’s Only Life After All" doesn't get the job done, even at 2 hours long.

Half-nifty, half-cheesy.

There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the senior action flicks that have become ubiquitous.

Daldry’s latest, Trash, co-directed with Christian Duurvoort, not only pitches the same Academy woo, it shamelessly mimics Best Picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire.”

The big problem throughout Uncle Kent 2 is that while it can offer some amusement, it all feels like an inside joke.

The worst thing about “Scare Out” isn’t that it’s boring and ultimately trite, but that there’s so little of Zhang’s usual sensuousness in it.

The whole experience feels like a generic inventory of recognizable tropes—the possessed child, the creepy old woman, the deeply-concerned priests, and the Ouija board are all here. Except, the cumulative fear bizarrely fizzles before it reaches something significant or emotionally meaningful.

A crashing disappointment, even if you haven't seen director Masaaki Yuasa's relatively inspired and completely unpredictable 2004 anti-coming-of-age fantasy "Mind Game."

The limitations of Palansky and co-writer Mike Vukadinovich's shared vision are, realistically, the biggest problem with Rememory.

This is a film that so blatantly cribs from other popular works that it never develops a personality of its own.

For a while Pearce does a very clever balancing act, taking everyday unpleasantries and grotesqueries of life and exaggerating them just so.

A terrific cast can only do so much with superficial, maudlin material in the coming-of-age dramedy Wildflower.

A plainly affable romantic comedy that’s not too powerful with its romance, and certainly not its comedy.

Writer/director Camille Griffin’s feature filmmaking debut is an ambitious but muddled mix of Christmas comedy and apocalyptic drama.

Every movie, even a remake, deserves to be viewed on its own merits. But that’s easier stated than done when you have a film like Downhill, a largely inferior American knockoff that's far less dynamic than the 2014 dark comedy it's based on.

While there’s a bit of hero worship going on that deflates the piece, and Wain’s direction is surprisingly uninspired, the biggest problem is the script that tries to cover too much ground but doesn’t really have that much to say as it does so.

There’s no question that Islamophobia is also on the rise around the globe, and this film — however inadvertently and well-intentioned — plays directly into it.

The result is a promising film that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, like a meal well-presented on the plate that just doesn’t fill you up.

An impressive team comes together in front of the camera and behind the scenes for the heist thriller Triple Frontier, but the results are frustratingly uneven.

It’s structurally awkward, jumping around in time needlessly and sometimes confusingly, rendering Nureyev’s story weirdly inert until the final 20-30 minutes.

While Clown is far from the disastrous misfire that typically stains VOD horror movies (most range from awful to “I never want to see a movie again”), it comes apart about halfway through, losing a very difficult tonal balance. Having said that, there’s more to like here than the studio burial would have you believe.

Take an ordinary family in the Hollywood Hills and throw both a wildfire and a menacing pack of killing machines at them and you have “Coyotes,” a movie that frustrates more than it thrills, never quite finding the right tone for the most harrowing night in the lives of its characters.

Quivoron, who co-wrote Rodeo with Buresi, often switches gears between character study and a heist movie, creating an uneasy whiplash.

It's more of an affectionate spoof on 1980's "summer camp" slasher films.

It’s a movie that's constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. A few big things too.

The Great Buddha+ is one of those movies that's much more rewarding to think about than it is to watch.

The Odyssey is one of my favorite stories of all time, and I was looking forward to "The Return," but it never rises above the level of an honorable but misguided good try.

Finley deserves credit for adding extra wrinkles to Anderson’s story, but Landscape with Invisible Hand doesn’t cut deep enough to leave a mark.

At a time when it seems like women’s representation seems to be regressing, the intention of the film feels more timely now than when the film ends in 2019, before the pandemic, and the fondness for dating apps starts to wear off. But it was the user experience of the film—where its simplistic narrative design leaves no surprises and plenty of shallow characters—that felt unsatisfying.

The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

There’s a big meaning to all of this, and yet the movie can’t eloquently express it, even though the metaphor is in the title.

Even as it’s spinning through enjoyably goofy action set pieces, most of them enlivened greatly by a fun performance from Jason Momoa, there’s a desperate familiarity to the entirety of “Fast X” that makes it feel more like reheated leftovers than this series has before.

They’ve shared home movies previously, but this documentary—meaningful in concept, but fleeting in its expression—puts them in close-up, with Gainsbourg behind the camera in her debut.

The Dancer clearly needed a better task master behind the camera. There are too many scenes of Fuller physically and mentally suffering for her art as she questions if what she does actually qualifies as dance.

Being a mom is hard, a universal truism that "Nightbitch" explores in ways that are occasionally inspired but mostly blunt and banal.

Sorvino is great in the small role of Clark's tear-stained, checked-out mother.

The Glass Castle is at odds with itself. Maybe that contradiction is by design. Maybe it’s inevitable, given the emotionally complicated terrain it treads. But the result is a film that never quite clicks tonally and doesn’t do justice to its harrowing central story.

West of the Jordan River works best when Gitai involves himself in the interviews. Gitai is a compelling screen presence—empathetic and patient, but also skeptical and necessarily forceful.

Only fitfully entertaining or illuminating.

As the director, co-writer, editor and composer of ominous piano tinkling heard on the soundtrack, Jason Saltiel is nothing but ambitious when it comes to this semi-successful creepy thriller that, intentionally or not, pushes the #MeToo buttons perhaps a little too hard.

We meander from one story to the next until every idea, big and small, gets cast aside with childish zeal.

Joan Jett deserves a great rock doc. This isn't it.

The only thing worse than hot garbage is elaborately lukewarm mediocrity, and for too much of its running time, the new comedy Stuber is just that.

Branciforte's writing lacks the nuance to take its absurd concept seriously, so it awkwardly injects comedy.

The mythology here is both dense and frequently silly, with the movie grinding to a halt around the one-hour mark for an extensive information dump. By the end, you may still be unclear as to what’s going on, but you also may not care.

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.

This all sounds like it could make for a fascinating movie. But The Devil and Father Amorth feels at once bloated and slight, like a DVD supplement puffed up to feature length (an hour and eight minutes, just long enough to be exhibited in theaters as a stand-alone title).

The Mauritanian fails to humanize the story it’s telling, never coming off as something more challenging or interesting than a superficial, manipulative accounting of true events.

For a movie about a larger-than-life personality who shook up the world with his brazenness—and since has had to seek political asylum because of it — The Fifth Estate feels unfortunately small and safe.

The Quarry may be a slow burn from a dramatic standpoint but it is only when Shannon is around that it flickers, however briefly, to life.

All of these interesting performers can't save a dull script. To work, Draft Day needs the kind of witty dialogue and snappy energy that Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin brought to “Moneyball” but the screenwriters mistake constant activity for actual screenwriting.

All of these nuances, as well as whatever satirical social commentary the movie wanted to make, are lost in the climax, a press conference staged with a threadbare quality that’s sadly typical of too much original Syfy fare.

The adaptation (by Josh Boone and Jill Killington) lacks any inference, mystery, or discovery: it is all text. Any complexity that there may be is all on the surface. Problems are easily solved, since there's nothing left unsaid, or if something is left unsaid that Ruthie says it for us in the voiceover. This makes for predictable viewing.

An impressive display of film craft and a profoundly ugly movie—so gleeful in its violence and so nihilistic in its world view that it feels as though the director is daring his detractors to see it as a confirmation of their worst fears about his art.

The adult viewer, reflecting on the idea that this is “just” a kid’s movie, might conclude that kids deserve a little better.

Never as giddily awful as Gotti, this movie suffers more from a case of what film critic Andrew Sarris called “Strained Seriousness.” Except the ostensible seriousness here never runs particularly deep. Lansky is for Keitel completists only.

Every bit of this movie yearns to be on the same proverbial shelf as something like Bay “Transformers” or Anderson’s “Resident Evil” films, but it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own space. An alien planet shouldn’t look this rote; same goes with the life-or-death action that happens on it.

The multiple twists, double-crosses and leaps in logic are more likely to prompt giggles than gasps, despite the impressive production values and the earnest efforts of an A-list cast.

It’s not badly made, just uninspired and played out. If you like B-movies made with a budget and are specifically looking for an undemanding time, “Abigail” might be for you. “Abigail” might also disappoint you, especially if you’re hoping for more than what’s advertised.

It's so repetitive that it will make you want to pick up your phone while it’s playing on Apple TV. You should play Tetris.

As an achievement, Computer Chess is laudable. As a film, it's missable.

Hamilton deserves better. So do the other strong women who make up the film’s trio of warriors, fighting to protect each other and all of humanity from technological destruction. Again.

Instead of exploring the more complex dynamics of adolescent social structure, it limits itself to an artificial set-up and a superficial level of storytelling, more afterschool special than feature film.

Van Dormael’s film was pure torture from first to last, about as mirthless a comedy as I ever hope to see.

The film offers some simple-minded insights into the myth of the happily-ever-after, and a dash of nonchalant French charisma. But the whole thing is only as original as a dull midlife crisis, retrofitted into a whimsical screwball mold that feels miscalculated.

The story of this fight is fascinating, and the repercussions of this case are still being felt today. But the cinematic treatment of the story is confused. The movie often seems to have a hard time making up its mind whether it wants to be “The Insider” or “Mean Girls.”

Borrego, an awkward thriller pasted onto a moody strangers-forging-a-connection drama, doesn't allow itself to be what it so clearly wants to be.

Director Jonathan Sobol has an apt if not avid eye for gritty and colorful locations, and when the movie is at its most loose-limbed it’s a pleasure to watch. But around the time the director resorts to a trunk-point-of-view shot that’s turned into a not-terribly-flattering imitation of “Pulp Fiction,” The Padre begins to take itself more seriously than the wafer-thin back stories of the opposing characters should allow.

Damici gives his memorable protagonist enough life to hold it together more often that it would have otherwise. He’s great here. The movie around him, not so much.

I cannot lie, though. As cranky as much of the movie made me, Pastoll, Blaney, and especially Bolger all contrive to deliver as satisfying a climax and dénouement to this saga as one could hope for. So there is that.

Thankfully, the film does get better in its second half. Not a lot better, but enough to justify one’s continuing attention.

Mothers’ Instinct gets by on its pulpy potential more than anything else. There’s something intrinsically appealing about watching two phenomenal actresses go head-to-head in an old-fashioned melodrama.