A Nice Indian Boy is filled with enough novel truth to transcend its predictable elements, leaving viewers with a film that feels like a genuine love story, instead of an idealistic imitation.

Never coherently articulates (or draws connections between) its various concerns, proving a handsomely horrific vampire bloodbath that, ahem, bites off more than it can chew.

A work of tremendous look-at-me energy: all prolonged close-ups and studied master shots of actors weeping, screaming, laughing, longing, and freaking out with sweaty, grimy intensity.

Operates in a single, precious sub-Kelly Reichardt register, its every second marked by studied images, sounds and performances.

Devolves into such a morass of shrill chaos and affected symbolism that it’s difficult to feel anything other than exasperation with its central maternal crisis.

When it comes to its central legal struggle, though, it leaves out so many crucial details that it cuts itself off at the knees.

A hot-blooded crime story whose affectations outweigh its subversions.

Kurosawa creates such an eerie atmosphere in the first hour of Cloud that watching it crumble into more generic action territory is challenging, and feels like a miscalculation. It doesn’t help that much of the action in the second half isn’t particularly interesting.

Overwhelms via length and monotony, employing a challenging form that’s both its greatest strength and, ultimately, its most frustrating weakness.

A work that proves hopelessly at odds with itself all the way to a conclusion that fizzles at the moment it should explode.

Considering Rogen’s participation as both a writer and actor, it’s surprising that Mutant Mayhem plays it so safe, not merely in terms of plot but with regards to its comedy.

Lipovsky and Stein elicit not a single solid performance from their cast, and their tale’s twists are illogical even by the material’s established guidelines.

Blame for this sports drama’s shallow leadenness can’t be similarly pinned on the supernatural; instead, its shortcomings are attributable to a one-dimensional script and resultant performances that are far less nuanced than its headliners’ ripped bodies.

A cautionary tale about…making “a pact with the devil.” However, Milli Vanilli doesn’t have much to reveal that isn’t by now well-known pop lore.

No matter a committed performance (two, actually) from Robert Pattinson, it’s an original that plays like a rehash—and an underwhelmingly unfunny one at that.

Boasts the idiosyncratic anxiety, depression, and angst of its author’s work and the bouncy tone and matching visual style of every other recent cinematic kid’s fable—two flavors that, it turns out, don’t really go well together.

A Compassionate Spy takes a far more rose-tinted, one-note view of Hall—a tack that requires skirting past major conflicting particulars and eschewing the very uncertainty that Hall himself exhibits in numerous archival interviews.

A narratively and emotionally disjointed journey, its fine lead performances, moving details, and racial commentary never cohering into an affecting spectacular.

Its formal lyricism offset by a script that’s intolerably clunky, it’s an affected portrait of euthanasia and friendship that gets lost in translation.

Although handsomely mounted and occasionally chilling, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a one-note tweet.

Goes heavy on convincing musical performances to make up for the fact that it has nothing astute to say about its subject—in large part because it doesn’t seem to really know him.

Despite winning the Best Actress (for its female ensemble) and Jury Prize awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a bold gamble that doesn’t quite pay off.

Though Monkey Man is exasperating, Patel’s work shows heart, love, and promise—something that can’t be said about many other action films.

A rather obvious and pedestrian lesson, if one that’s embellished with a few memorably macabre sights.

[Song’s] sophomore effort embraces a lighthearted rom-com template and then plays its material inaptly seriously—making it the cinematic equivalent of a sugary soda gone terribly flat.

Evil Dead Rises is confirmation that—like so many that have come before it—Raimi’s legendary horror saga has run out of steam, continuing onward only because its easy-to-market IP value remains relatively high.

The Animal Kingdom is what an X-Men movie would look like if it doubled-down on its tolerance-for-outsiders metaphor and did away with any exciting superpowered spectacle.

A pleasant and well-acted curio, and little more.

Despite attractive aesthetics, its fights grow wearisome, especially as the material crosses the two-hour mark and, in the process, zooms past multiple potential endings.

A would-be franchise re-starter that resembles a Saturday morning cartoon come to overstuffed, helter-skelter life.

There’s not much to latch onto here except the faint flickers of the better film this one, with more care and attention to detail, might have been.

Would have no reason to exist if it didn’t constantly foreground the issue of race, and yet affords no pointed or amusing commentary on the subject.

Mistakenly assumes that the woe-is-me routines of the rich and famous are the stuff of great drama.

There’s nothing very unsettling about its eventual horrors, in large part because the film is too infatuated with its sleek style to get its hands dirty.

There’s no mystery to Speak No Evil, and even less disquieting creepiness; instead, it’s a bludgeoning beast, epitomized by McAvoy’s Paddy.

A shallow and slender tale of lousy dreams, worse decisions, and painful regrets, all of it predicated on a lead turn that’s too one-note to wow.

Unoriginal and ungainly at every turn, it’s a debacle devoid of any genuine magic.

Ripped from yesterday’s headlines, it’s as fast, flashy and superficial as the director’s prior efforts, and also as exaggerated.

No matter Jodie Comer’s committed effort to wring something emotional from this cataclysmic saga, the film proves soggy in every respect.

By minimizing its predecessor’s goofiness in favor of vacuous character drama, winds up only sporadically kicking into gale-force gear.

Telegraphs its bombshells from the outset and dutifully shuffles toward a conclusion that tethers this saga to Donner’s The Omen.

With nothing lurking beneath his character’s brawny exterior, and even less to his up-and-down tale, Johnson proves merely an adequate contender in his bid for dramatic credibility.

An aggressively fine intergalactic adventure whose earnest optimism and sweetness flirts—faithfully and dully—with hokiness.

Rental Family, directed by Hikari, displays an almost admirable amount of restraint in its tear jerking, opting for quieter moments of grace rather than overdone emotion. In fact, it’s so restrained that Fraser’s Phillip Vandarpleog is not much of a character at all, and you leave itching for more of his inner life.

A visually striking but shoddily written and crushingly derivative amalgam of assorted genre forefathers.

Just as there’s no reference to the many falsehoods Diana has apparently told about her past, there’s zero overt mention of the controversy surrounding her signature triumph—thereby proving that the film cares more about rah-rah uplift than thorny inquiry or messy reality.

Maria is a swirling, fragmented recollection of Callas’ life, one that leaves things frustratingly on the surface.

Those with a hankering for willfully pretentious absurdity may find this festival entry right up their alley.

Despite looking great, it comes off as a humdrum knockoff of yesterday’s fashion.

Refusing to provide an accurate and trustworthy snapshot of what both these opposing factions are really about, the film comes across as a superficial exposé afraid of getting dirty.

The cautionary tale is a familiar one. But it’s told with enough flashy verve and humor, along with a gossipy bombshell audio recording, to play as a breezy non-fiction look back at a phenom that had its 15 minutes—or, at least, enough time to get through an evening’s worth of quiz questions—in the smartphone spotlight.

Though stirringly headlined by Kate Winslet, it’s a by-the-books affair in almost every respect.

For all its avenues of inquiry, however, it never quite gels into more than a collection of tantalizing but unfounded theories.

While Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t quite capture the irresistible magic of the original, it’s full of stylistic wonder and fun characters.

Terrifier 3 is a juvenile splatterfest with an ignorable plot, and its performances veer from the competent (LaVera and Thornton) to the inept (most everyone else).

Burdened by a hazy and mannered style that drains it of urgency and feeling, it’s a self-conscious curio that’s less dreamy than dreary.

Provides only some of his story, its up-close-and-personal view masking as much as it reveals.

The real issue here is simply a dearth of novelty—an insurmountable shortcoming for a B-movie that should be able to drum up some thrills from its offspring-of-Nosferatu premise.

A sluggish and monotonous country-ified neo-noir that fails to innovate and, worse, to utilize its magnetic leading lady and her capable co-stars.

Yanking unashamedly at the heartstrings, however, it’s a manipulative and uneven tune that strains to elicit the sniffles it so hungrily seeks.

To a greater extent than its franchise mates, Avatar: Fire and Ash is drunk on its own extravagance, unaware that it’s offering up nothing new that might justify its absurd Sturm und Drang.

[A] bland stab at genre hybridization, whose sole accomplishment is falling flat at everything it tries.

Undone by storytelling that, however well-intentioned, coats its real-life tale in a corny Hollywood sheen.

Arguably the most derivative offering the tired genre has yet to offer, borrowing elements from so many forebearers that it plays like a conventional pastiche.

This sixth chapter boasts not a single genuinely unnerving jolt—a consequence of tepid writing as well as the familiarity of Ghostface’s tactics, which have long since become their own genre clichés.

It won’t revolutionize the genre, and in fact would have benefited from considerable additional polish, but it’s just cute enough to warrant two hours of Netflix subscribers’ time.

Neither as scary nor as funny as its premise might be, The Pod Generation instead coasts along on a placid, self-satisfied wavelength.

A mediocre remix that, for all its familiar elements, fails to improve upon a single aspect of its trailblazing predecessor.

With no twists or clues to keep things lively and volatile, one’s mind instinctively begins to ponder how things are being precisely timed, where the other actors are moving to in the background, and the many other behind-the-scenes logistical challenges inherent to such an endeavor.

A typical provincial British tale about everyday Englishmen and women banding together to accomplish a controversial task against long odds, it’s akin to a warm glass of milk.

Despite a premise that begets one of the strangest lovemaking scenes in recent memory—a quasi-incestuous gender-bending head-spinner—the film is too frequently the epitome of pretentiousness.

Pulling on the heartstrings with tug-of-war-grade might, it’s a carpe diem fable that elicits more exasperated eye rolls than tears or laughs.

Exhibits a superficial interest in ribald revelry and yet, in most respects, neuters its wilder impulses.

The amusing thrills intermittently appear, but the novelty is gone.

In trying to have it both ways, it succeeds in neither, in the process stranding its charming leading man in a saga that needed to be either goofier or more gruesome.

It has one thing to say, and it says it over and over again with a dismal lack of nuance.

You can cut-and-paste all your adolescent obsessions into a giant collage (and recruit Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn to participate in the madness), but that doesn’t mean it’ll amount to more than a messy, insubstantial grab bag of your favorite things.

By weighing everything so heavily, and obviously, in one direction, it eventually comes off as a thinly disguised sermon about ugly oppression and noble suffering and defiance.

A deep dive into a pool of pretentiousness whose absurdity mounts with each new quasi-supernatural—and heavily symbolic—development.

So rote that even an A.I. wouldn’t dare try to pass it off as original.

Were it not for the participation of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it would be an insufferable groaner rather than merely an inoffensive one.

The Mean Girls movie-musical barely differentiates itself from its predecessor.

Nothing—including a game performance by Dev Patel—can prevent it from tumbling down a bottomless hole from which it can’t escape.

An uninspired cover song in desperate need of its forerunner’s fire and flair.

Though Immaculate won’t raise any hairs, it should boost Sweeney’s career. She transcends all of the triteness, proving herself to be the megawatt actress with virtuoso potential that she’s already demonstrated herself to be.

Come for the healthy servings of capuzzelle, zeppole, and scungilli, but prepare to choke on the stale and squishy platitudes about family and tradition.

A prototypical example of talking, ceaselessly and crudely, at the audience.

Aiming for ribald and risqué and coming up with only ruinous humorlessness, it may be the longest 84 minutes anyone will spend in a theater this year.

We Strangers constantly tries to hold onto something that was never there in the first place. It’s a movie that’s sort of about community, sort of about racial assimilation, and sort of about the lies we tell ourselves and others to wrestle with life’s mundanity.

There’s plenty of preposterousness to be found in this sequel, which barely revs to life when indulging in automotive mayhem and outright stalls every time its human characters open their mouths.

Largely faithful but unwilling to pick a funny or nasty lane, it’s the most impersonal film of its writer/director’s career, and a revolutionary thriller that too often falls back on establishment conventions.

Strives for stratospheric emotional heights and yet proves so self-seriously somber and saccharine that it plays like a leaden parody.

A fleetingly recognizable tale of love, desire, obsession, regret, bitterness, and ire that, at every turn, plays as florid, horny, juvenile fanfiction.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare would seem to be an almost ideal project for Ritchie—which is why its lethargy comes as such a dispiriting surprise.

What’s missing, however, is a payoff worthy of his set-up, resulting in a diverting thriller that drags its way to an underwhelming finale.

Aside from a couple of vicious set pieces, however, this genre effort’s gimmickry results in derivative cornball melodrama. It would have benefited greatly from speaking louder while carrying a big stick.

Rob Savage’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 short story is as stereotypical as they come, so devoid of originality that the most pressing emotion it elicits is pity for its leads, Sophie Thatcher and Chris Messina, who deserve better than to be put through this paint-by-numbers ringer.

A daring saga that boasts far more moments that stumble than soar. It’s a mess that can be admired—but a mess, nonetheless.