It’s anchored by a typically strong Sarah Paulson performance, to be sure. But “Hold Your Breath” is nonetheless a frustrating work, a sequence of powerful scenes that aren’t tied together with enough tension to make us care. It’s a film filled with moments but no momentum.

Blake Lively gives it her all in The Rhythm Section, but the movie only meets her halfway.

There’s clearly a biopic in Morrissey’s true story. You can hear it in the timbre of his voice and the wit of his lyrics. However, it is not in England is Mine, a flat, disappointing drama that casts Morrissey as a mopey teenager. The man who wrote “How Soon is Now?” deserves better.

This "Goodnight Mommy" replicates the basic story beats of the original but leaves out all of the tension, ambiguity, and nasty invention that made that earlier effort so effective in the first place.

Boarding School has some edge by being told from a child’s perspective, even though it's not for kids. A lot of great directors have told this kind of story, and while Guillermo Del Toro might be the most popular living one to do it, it’s Louis Malle that comes to mind.

This film tells us that the gulf between what we want to know and what we can know may never be illuminated.

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

It’s a mismatched-buddy comedy. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy. It’s a raucous girl-power comedy.

J.K. Simmons does not speak a word in I’m Not Here, but his performance is eloquent, anguished, and moving.

While Lila & Eve is not supposed to be funny — indeed, the central topic is about as unfunny as one could possibly imagine — but nevertheless inspires huge laughs, albeit of the unintentional kind, thanks an idiotic screenplay and a supposedly "shocking" plot twist that even the most inattentive viewers should be able to figure out within the first fifteen minutes or so, tops.

Disappointing because its creators don't do anything interesting with a fairly novel theme: a mother's possessive love for her estranged daughter.

Ross always preached that there were no mistakes, just happy accidents. A mess like Paint—all broad strokes and no point—proves that he wasn’t always right.

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.

Behold the craven exercise in hollow nostalgia that is Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

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

It's the kind of film where you start trying to guess which of the characters will turn out to be a figment of the narrator's imagination. The answer, of course, is all of them.

Although a surprising number of plot machinations from the original film remain fully intact, usually accounting for anything that seems remotely clever, what is missing is the type of hold-your-breath tension provided by good thrillers.

Only really comes alive when cars are being used as battering rams and computer-generated explosions proliferate like fireworks.

Fernando Coimbra’s Sand Castle offers too little to the War is Hell genre to be noteworthy.

While what Cline did and the fight his victims took to find justice is a truth worth knowing and learning, Jourdan’s crass documentary isn’t the best vehicle for such weighty material.

Everyone in almost every scene either looks lost or annoyed, never genuine. Except for Crowe, who grumbles his way through another film with deceptive ease, finding occasions to ground even a miserable film like this one.

Uneven it may be, Red Joan still emanates a memorable essence, one that’s refreshingly and believably feminine.

The sleepy, dopey action bonanza Angel Has Fallen is disappointing, and not just for the reasons you might expect.

Like most Netflix movies, no matter what The Mother would be a perfectly serviceable thing to have on in the background while you tidied the living room or answered emails on your phone. The spy-movie setup is generic enough to follow while doing something else, and the villains’ motivations are only as specific as the plot needs them to be, which is to say not very specific at all.

With leaden performances and puzzling camerawork, it’s hard to feel in tune with the movie’s frights outside of the occasional jump scare.

As it is, The Good Mother starts with a gunshot and ends with a whimper.

When Johnson is doing that movie action star thing he does so well and giant animals are going enormous-mano-a-enormous-mano, there’s undeniably goofy fun to be had. You just have to be patient during the downtime.

This is a movie for instant fans; it's explicitly for anyone who doesn’t needs any convincing about why we'd instantly love them, much in the same way its underdog tale is eagerly meant to be seen as pure, and even more cloyingly, as crowd-pleasing.

Too many times the characters in this movie sprint across the line separating quirky charm from know-somethingish affectation, and then stay on the wrong side of it.

An ambitious black comedy that never goes far enough.

About Alex has the kind of energy that reminds one, even this cynical critic, why writers and directors keep returning to this oft-told tale.

Director Craig Johnson and screenwriter Kent Sublette (“Saturday Night Live”) find a nice balance for the boo-surprises, creepiness, and humor, with a resolution that brings everything and everyone together.

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.

Watching Queenpins is like eating grocery store birthday cake. It is very pleasurable in the moment but likely to leave you feeling empty and a little queasy.

Callbacks to other “Insidious” films are half-hearted, and “The Red Door” seems to give up on trying to make all of the pieces fit after a while. What does work are a handful of scares in the film’s first half.

Willy’s Wonderland feels like a movie conceived during a drinking game. A few people had a few too many after a few rough days and dared each other to come up with the most ridiculous concept they could get produced.

I admire the intentions behind Cherry. I even admire the Russos' desire to "do one for themselves" after directing so many films in a corporate-driven context. But Cherry warrants a simpler down-and-dirty approach.

This is a confounding movie. Its pace is leaden, its structure lopsided, and while Dunham and Fry are both first-rate performers, their respective personae — both public and on-screen — are difficult for them to fully transcend.

Movies made over fifty years ago by the likes of Max Ophuls were more animated, more angry, more radical in their critiques of such injustice. So watch "Letter From An Unknown Woman" before you even think of checking this out, is my advice to you.

Salt and Fire is fundamentally bad, in its filmmaking and expressiveness, whether there is any meaning to a parrot quoting Nostradamus or not.

Wolf Warrior 2 lectures you, pummels you, and then expects you to cheer.

I suppose director Paula van der Oest was trying to go for some kind of European Gothic feel, but something this unsavory needs to move a lot faster than this. This contraption is slower than molasses in winter.

It could be funnier. It could be a lot smarter. It could look better. But it also could have been significantly worse, working as much as it does because it knows that you don’t need to be great if you’re this Goofy.

While the mix doesn’t always cohere, the film boasts moments and scenes that rank with Duvall’s best work.

The film’s inherent emotional power is undermined by the visual and narrative murkiness of its storytelling, including a gotcha twist at the end that has nowhere near the weight of the themes it's trying to explore.

Bring tissues. Because whether you’re the faithful target audience for Miracles From Heaven, a non-believer or someone in the mass agnostic middle ground, you may find it hard to hold back the tears during various points in this real-life tale. And they’ll be earned.

The fault is in Towne’s direction. People sometimes complain that flashy, ostentatious visual stylization takes them out of the movie; what took me out of this movie was its flat, lifeless, unimaginative and conventional visual style.

Loud, trashy, sweet and weird, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers reboot Power Rangers is not merely an ideal film for rambunctious and undemanding 12-year olds, it actually sees the world through their eyes.

The thing that makes the film stand out is the way it shows artists relating to each other and to their work. It's rare to see a movie about creative people that accurately captures the way they'll size each other up on first meeting and then, once they've determined that the other person is serious, proceed immediately to the sharing of influences and the granular discussion of theory and technique. [2021 Director's Cut]

Almost approaches so-bad-you-need-to-see-it categorization.

The film is clearly sweet and well-intentioned, but Mexican director and co-writer Analeine Cal y Mayor has trouble transcending the confines of her meager budget, which leaves “Book of Love” looking and sounding distractingly chintzy.

While some of the kills are sufficiently clever and gnarly, "Mandy Lane" is never particularly frightening.

The movie’s main feature is a group of long-take, moving-camera action scenes that I guess might have been more engaging had the characters on the run and in battle been figures you wanted to spend any time with. They’re not.

Quirky to an extreme with not much to say about the millennial resistance to maturity and grown-up responsibilities, Larson’s film feels like a perplexing stylistic disagreement between its creative parts.

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.

It’s violence for cowardly voyeurs who want to make the people who annoy them just shut up in a way that’s silent, sterile, and thoroughly humiliating to the victim.

There are some good ideas in the film, albeit a bit obvious ("why can't we all look past our differences and get along?"), and albeit done much better in other films (primarily "The Visitor").

Problem is, every time the movie gets near an authentic emotion, it barely pauses before making a run to the next Katy Perry song cue. (Seriously, both “Roar” and “Firework” are featured herein.) Given the care that the adult and teen actors invested in trying to honor their real-life counterparts, this feels lazy. If you like Katy Perry songs that much, you may feel differently.

DriverX is worse than just one of the year’s most vapid movies, it’s an out-and-out nightmare of late-stage capitalism.

The Legend of Cocaine Island feels like the kind of story that only could have gone down quite this way in the state that gave us “Florida Man.”

The first two-thirds of "A Sacrifice" are a largely leaden affair that offers viewers little that they haven’t seen before. It isn’t even awful so much as it is intensely forgettable—the kind of film whose title eludes you even as you watch it.

Superficial, dull.

The Union delivers tonal whiplash on account of its failure to exceed at either end of its genre attempt at action-comedy.

It’s a dull, overly familiar affair that really only reminds one that Depp should have segued nicely into old man roles if his personal life and on-set behavior hadn’t derailed his trajectory.

For what it's worth, The Legend of Tarzan is several unpretentious cuts above the pompous, leaden "Greystoke" of over thirty years ago.

Like these other actresses-of-a-certain-age movies, the entire story is grounded on some notion of a deep and sustaining friendship. But it's hard to believe these women have any genuine connection other than cashing a check for a film that is not fabulous but forgettable.

Kidnap isn’t schlock, it’s garbage.

The just-shy-of-great teen comedy Dear Dictator is the rare high-concept coming-of-age story with enough warmth and smart-ass charm to (hopefully!) make it accessible for a fairly wide cross-section of moviegoers.

Holidate is a reminder of how easy it is to get every aspect of a romantic comedy wrong.

The cast is filled with actors doing everything they can to make their characters as memorable as possible even when the script (credited to four people) isn't lending them the support they deserve.

It’s an overly calibrated hodge-podge of better movies with absolutely no original thought of its own, populated by stock characters, and brought to life with uninspired filmmaking.

Murder Mystery 2 has no loftier goals than disposable entertainment for 90 minutes, and it gets the job done.

As a full movie experience this did not drop my jaw in a consistently enjoyable way. And the movie’s Trump joke is pretty ineffectual. Sad!

If this all sounds rather dull, that is because it is.

First, and foremost: Zombeavers is exactly what it sounds like, a stoner-friendly horror-comedy about undead beavers. This needs over-stating since high-concept humor doesn't get higher than this.

Wholesome in the most “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” brand of mythical Americanism, 12 Mighty Orphans is engineered to rouse emotions with uncritical pride, never reaching the less immaculate corners of the historical period it employs as canvas.

A machine to deliver gore and violence, Brightburn also features some of the most improbably and even hatefully dumb salt-of-the-Earth type characters in a recent American horror movie. But even if you watch Brightburn knowing that it doesn't have much going for it beyond a few disturbing kill scenes, you will still be disappointed.

In the annals of historical biopics, Jonathan Teplitzsky’s Churchill stands out as a uniquely awful and tedious caricature of a fascinating subject.

The characters could have embodied traits of typical office drones and managers, turning the film into a savage black comedy. But those elements aren't developed beyond a point, making the movie's only selling point its excessive gore and violence.

By playing with formalism, using faux documentary, and cranking out hedonistic scenes of excessive drug taking and partying, Yates aims to blend “Erin Brockovich” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” But the director’s filmic language never offers quite enough sex, quite enough excess, quite enough of capitalism’s depravity. Pain Hustlers just doesn’t know how to commit.

A gentle low-key comedy.

It’s a film that is too often trying to be a serious study of politics, warfare, and pacifism until it slaps you in the face with a reminder that this is all set-up to one of the broader, goofier action franchises of the modern era.

The sad subtext of Made in Italy is more intriguing and poignant than what we see on screen.

Foe stumbles rather spectacularly by leaning more on melodrama than logic and choosing cliche over originality. Aside from rehashing tropes and offering some laughably bad moments, the film accomplishes little.

Ricky Stanicky feels like a throwback, and not in a nostalgic fun way either. It’s more like a rehash of tired bits and jokes with nothing particularly innovative or clever to say.

You may think it unfair that I make comparisons between "Starbuck" and Delivery Man. Truth be told, my rating is higher because I'd seen "Starbuck." Had I not, Delivery Man would have been intolerable.

Next Goal Wins exists as proof of the invulnerability of a certain movie template and as a Frankenstein patchwork of previous films.

It’s pretty frustrating to watch a close-but-no-cigar movie like this.

From the beginning, Cut Bank isn’t just tonally inconsistent, it doesn’t really have one. It’s flat. There’s no sense of rhythm, tension, or atmosphere.

But despite the familiar nature of the themes writer/director Neil Burger is exploring, his film still offers plenty of tension and his trademark visual panache.

The result is a bit of a mess and an oftentimes dull one at that, the kind of bland cinematic Euro-pudding that Miramax used to release in bulk back in the day.

Again, merely watching Brody engaging in such painstaking work is interesting; the generic bloodbath that ensues, less so.

By preferring to keep viewers in suspense until the film's finale, Pastoll makes it harder to recommend a movie that has many good ideas, but no clue what to do with them.

While I appreciate writer/director/Canadian horror slinger Lowell Dean for helming a thriller where the most sensible, resilient characters are either dark-skinned or an ally to dark-skinned folk, the rest of the movie ain’t that deep. In fact, it’s insanely clumsy.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

Besson doesn’t build up the romantic emotion he apparently aspires to with his efforts, but “Dracula” gets by on the power of his (and Landry’s) conviction.

While Where Hands Touch demonstrates confident filmmaking from a technical standpoint, Asante’s plot choices around the ambiguous development of Lutz feel irresponsible, especially during these risky political times that uncompromisingly demand us to be the opposite.

For every delicate element there are many others that are heavy-handed or cringe-inducing, including some painfully on-the-nose musical selections. (Salt-N-Pepa’s perky “Push It” plays while Collins’ character, Rosie, is giving birth. Get it? Because she’s pushing!)