When the inevitable finale with a thoroughly sign-posted twist arrives, you might realize you’ve already spent all your goodwill towards Milburn’s stylistically over-bloated film that chases one cliché after the next over the course of an overstretched running time.

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.

With such powerhouses as McCarthy and Spencer at the helm, it's a surprise that so much of the film is inert, rote, conventional.

Delivering an unforgettable breakthrough performance, Abita is phenomenal in pitching Lyz on the slippery slope between an adult wannabe and a little kid, boldly wearing even the smallest nuances of her character’s rapidly shifting emotional world on her resolute face.

A film with this incendiary of a title needed to have more to say about being LGBT in a hostile environment.

And while I understand the anger that animates Awbrey’s script, anger doesn’t excuse its overall weak argumentation, not to mention its rampant plot holes.

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.

Familiar, even universal issues of growing up, identity, and intimacy are presented with a lyrical, dreamlike tone.

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]

As a team, Seligman and Sennott share a spot-on sense of comedic timing, knowing just when to throw in the next cutting remark, eye roll, or fake smile. They hit bullseye each and every time, all the way to the credits.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a searing epitaph for Mary Twala, a veteran performer at the peak of her absorbing presence. And it is a radical international breakthrough for Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, a filmmaker who uses potential philosophical expressions to ask tough questions about the ravaged history of Africa.

The Unholy is not designed to be deep, but since glimmers of depth are present, the lack of follow-up makes this a disappointing watch.

While it hardly breaks new ground, The Man Who Sold His Skin still manages to be a breezy watch, with an assured filmmaker gently steering it through a rough-around-the-edges tale.

The director's gifted collaborators sometimes perk up this listless parable, but never enough to sell its second-hand fatalism.

Back and forth The Oak Room goes, without ever building the tension it ostensibly seeks. Instead, it meanders from tale to tale, and the writing isn’t sharp or specific enough to sustain this kind of complex framework.

There’s a largely automatic nature to this informative documentary; much of what unfolds here is depressingly prototypical.

The film initially pretends to have some sensitivity about mental illness, but blatantly trivializes it and uses it as a crutch upon which to hang the villain’s increasingly maniacal actions.

While I admit I would have preferred a documentary about the people who have passed this tradition down from generation to generation, director Ricky Staub’s fictional feature serves as a worthwhile introduction.

With visual precision and remarkable intimacy, Hannah Olson's documentary The Last Cruise recalls the harrowing 40-day quarantine aboard the Princess Diamond cruise ship at the outset of the pandemic.

It’s unfortunate that the finished tribute doesn’t quite come together, and the tension between needing a compelling narrative and paying respects to bands whose music changes our lives never gets resolved.

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."

Bad Trip knows how to stir things up, and its funniest scenes often involve real people getting in the mix, tested by the brilliant skills of André, Howery, and Haddish.

This isn't an unwatchable movie, just an underachieving and forgettable one, and somehow that's more irritating than a disastrous swing for the fences would've been.

So many documentaries cut away from performances, thinking we only want a glimpse of it to get the gist before shuttling on to the next thing. What a joy to be given the space to settle in and let Tina take you where she wants you to go.

Horror movies don’t have to make a lick of sense as long as they get under your skin, engage in some intriguing myth making, gross you out, or simply terrify you. The Toll tries to do several of these, failing so badly that you may be angry at yourself for watching 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.

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