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.