I’m all for a juicy, action-packed Gerard Butler movie. A Gerard Butler movie that wants to have its geopolitics taken seriously is a different matter. And honestly, it’s an even more different matter when the movie is not particularly juicy or, you know, action-packed.

Mary Tyler Moore knew how to play confident, happy, honest women early in her career, and it is good to see how she finally learned how to be one.

Reality is a brutal film, with a short run-time and a story arc so strong it obliterates the memory of self-important complex films, weighted down with a "message," straining for relevance. Satter's film doesn't need to push. Reality wears its relevance on its fluorescent-lit short sleeves.

It’s smartly crafted, well-written, and strongly performed. I’m not sure it works as social media commentary, but it undeniably clicks as an entertaining thriller about someone who thinks the Insta-world is shallow enough to hide her sociopathic behavior.

For those who are open to its challenges, it is a meditation on time, loss, and connection, and almost a century later, those themes are just as vital as they were when Eliot wrote them.

This unabashedly trashy project from director Peter Thorwarth has its moments of invention and excitement in the early going, but the constant spray of bullets and body parts proves numbing.

Close to Vermeer is a gentle, thoughtful documentary, populated by knowledgeable individuals like Vandivere, experts at the top of their fields who have maintained their passion and love for the subject.

Killing bigots is a fine enough pretext for this sort of watered-down post-grindhouse entertainment, but if you’re honestly going to go there, you can’t stop til you’re past the point of apology.

Primed to be this June’s Horror Movie of the Month, The Boogeyman is packed with familiar beats and little personality, the horror equivalent of a rising music star making a fan-friendly Christmas album as their biggest project yet.

However chronologically jumbled, Victim/Suspect prevails with its many episodes of de Leon’s incisive reporting and dedication, and the insight we get from legal and policing experts about how this cycle continues.

In terms of underwater worlds, once you’ve been to Pandora, you can never go anywhere else. But the fictional Caribbean island where The Little Mermaid takes place is certainly a pleasant escape.

The only thing holding me back from officially naming it the worst film ever is that it's so slapdash in its construction and inept in its execution that I am not entirely sure it should count as a film.

Despite its general tenor of quietude (which breaks in a confrontation scene that reminds you why yes, Schrader is also the writer of the film “Rolling Thunder”), Master Gardener is, among other things, a terrifically emotional film.

It is a horror/fantasy that puts every bit of its imagination on the screen and constantly impresses with its DIY spectacle.

For the most part, Stay Awake stays low-key and believable, particularly when the actors are moving through real-world locations while living their lives.

There's more going on here than meets the eye. The Night of the 12th runs deep. The film's effectiveness lies in its matter-of-fact surface and its roiling wordless interior, the stealthy way it makes its points (without announcing "This is The Point").

The strength of the film is its heart, and Summer’s relationships are used not only narratively, but structurally. With frequent narration from Summer’s daughters, and a heavy focus on their childhoods with a loving but distant mother, their desire to understand her beyond her parenthood and into her personhood is the the movie’s foundation.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

Yes, a mournful song is woven throughout, hence the title. But The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future also requires great patience—it might be too slow of a slow burn—and there’s not much to her characters beyond a few barely sketched traits.

Outpost only succeeds if we are invested in Kate’s trajectory and ultimate fate, and I never was.

This is a film fueled by writing and performance. Writer Micah Bloomberg’s script ingeniously incorporates the movie’s themes into its structure, and Qualley and Abbott—but especially Qualley—playfully keep the audience guessing throughout.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

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.

This is a movie about people whose successes and failures originate in the same places: a tragedy shot and edited like an action comedy.

Overblown caricatures and stale jokes about “don’t you know who I am?!” and going to see his wife’s shaman feel about as empty as a finished cup of coffee, and unfortunately, this movie has nothing else to offer for a refill.

There are life lessons here to be learned and shared, for sure. But the film moves with such thrilling pacing it feels more like a celebration.

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.

The Starling Girl is so effective because it feels so specific to the character Parmet creates but remains accessible to people who haven’t shared her experience. The film is rich in detail, both in the sense of what it’s like growing up in a very religious community and what teenage rebellion looks like when just acting like an individual is enough to earn a stern talking to from an elder.