The plot does, finally, allow the emotions Robbie won't express to erupt in a way that threatens everything, and Kenneally's script deals knowingly with the aftermath. But it doesn't always seem to understand the characters around its hero any better than he does himself.

Effectively moody but offering frustratingly skin-deep chills, The Woman in the Window underestimates its hero in more than ways than one.

Although written as a supporting role, Suarez Paz’s portrayal of Rey adds depth to the story and ultimately carries the film. So much so that you wish the movie had been about her.

More often than not, I Still Believe feels like the cinematic equivalent of the sort of Christian pop songs its main character performs, filled with soaring choruses and heavy-handed lyrics. Every emotion is telegraphed to the hilt, with results that feel more manipulative than affecting. The fact that it's a true story only partially mitigates its more cloying aspects.

This solidly crafted Ridley Scott production is sprinkled with classy ingredients, including Alicia Vikander as headline star. But it is also a fairly flat treatment of over-familiar plot elements, and fatally low on the key psycho-thriller elements of suspense, surprise and dread.

This is a documentary that will best be appreciated not by fans of The Little Prince but rather by linguists and ethnographers.

The two elements never mesh convincingly, proving neither substantial enough to work as compelling drama nor sufficiently suspenseful as action-thriller.

Merely a watchable rehashing of his preferential themes and plot points, set in a present-day Manhattan so nostalgic and unreal it might as well be a period piece.

Marcello never quite manages to shoehorn in both more than a century’s worth of European struggles and sociopolitical thinking and the full story of Eden’s downfall after he’s finally become successful. Indeed, these weighty concerns capsize the entire enterprise in the final stretch, where the story runs aground on an iceberg of undigested ideas, barely developed themes and bad hair choices.

In the Tall Grass is at least impressive on a technical level. Cinematographer Craig Wrobelski manages to find every conceivable way to make tall grass visually ominous, with Mark Korven's spooky score and the ambient sound design making valuable atmospheric contributions as well.

The images, and the actions within them, lack the acerbic edge that would really drive the knife in.

Even when it grows too enamored of its own lyrical driftiness, there’s undeniable skill in Patterson’s use of space, color and sound. The movie might have worked as a mood piece; at times it almost does.

A pedestrian thriller whose personal-tech gimmick is even more thinly imagined than one might guess, it's a jumble of cheap jump scares made watchable by likable leads Elizabeth Lail and Jordan Calloway.

The documentary, largely alternating between scenes of the poets engaging in freewheeling conversations and performing their works, comes to feel talky and claustrophobic at times (cinematographer Peter Eliot Buntaine keeps his camera uncomfortably close). But it gains urgency as it goes along.

To paraphrase an old joke, this raucous alta kocker comedy, about a long-married Jewish couple experiencing a day from hell, isn't really very good. And the running time is so short! But the film is impossible to entirely dislike nonetheless.

The humor is sometimes strained, and Lellouche doesn't always demonstrate the lightest of touches.

The film does develop the chemistry between the titular alien and the human he’s forced to inhabit while inside Earth’s atmosphere. But the distinctiveness of this buddy-movie bond is often drowned out by giant set pieces of CG mayhem that feel exactly like those found in the good guys’ movies.

Too many endings and romantic subplots that do nothing but bloat the running time and detract from the snowy action could easily have been jettisoned by editors Tang Man To and Li Lin for a leaner, loftier final product.

Closely based on the director's own troubled youth, Farming is rooted in rich, complex, potentially gripping material. But Akinnuoye-Agbaje slaps this story together with so little subtlety, he ends up seriously diluting its dramatic power.

Set in the tense hours between a calamity and the societal breakdown it'll almost certainly cause, Ben McPherson's Radioflash begins as a visually rich, calmly serious take on apocalypse drama.

There are teasing glimpses of artistic genius in A Dog Called Money, but eccentric choices and muddled intentions, too. A talent as strong and singular as Harvey deserves a more probing, less indulgent film than this.

Lee’s film plays it disappointingly safe, never deviating from romantic comedy conventions; there are no real surprises that you can’t already see coming.

Mildly informative but superficial, Shooting the Mafia is much less dynamic than its title.

Though this clearly isn't meant to be a lighthearted story, a glimmer of wit here and there would've helped keep viewers engaged in the action and endeared us to a cast that is competent but hardly charismatic.

The results are visually disorienting, to say the least. Although Notary and the special effects team do as good a job as technology allows, the expressive Buck never quite looks real. And you keep expecting him and the rest of the animals to burst into song.

Gourmel's film never stops identifying with the teen; that unshowy compassion will win some viewers over to a debut feature whose pulse rate never rises to the level its plot would seem to demand.

Rescuing Jimmy (and possibly Lorna) from a possessive, abusive husband would have been plenty of drama for this hitherto quiet, sensitive picture. Instead we get a family full of leering thugs, whose depiction sometimes suggests they might have a cousin out in the barn who dresses in other people's flesh. The action doesn't get quite that extreme, but it's bad enough.

Less audience-embracing than most surf documentaries that make it to the big screen, Michael Oblowitz's Heavy Water will play best to those familiar with its cast of characters.

Leads Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning are commanding actors who give it all they’ve got to make their characters realistic, but while the film can be intriguing, it is never truly moving.

This one offers plenty of lurid fun and some genuine scares. But the grounding in dark spirituality that made the previous entries focused on the Warrens so compelling gets diluted, despite the reliably dignifying double-act of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson.

I spent the first hour of Happy Happy Joy Joy guiltily feeling like I needed a rewatch of Ren & Stimpy — it's an important series and there's no pretending otherwise — and the next 35 minutes feeling dirty about the whole thing and the last 10 minutes getting actively angry about how the entire story had been framed and reduced to "difficult genius" cliches.

Despite its laudable intentions, Waiting for Anya proves less impactful than it should be. The film certainly doesn't have the thematic weight of "War Horse," another film (and acclaimed stage play) based on a war-themed book by Morpurgo that was geared to young readers.

No good performance can hide the fact that what happens during roughly the first hour is perhaps beautifully laid out and told but also extremely familiar. There is an expectation that Akin, also credited with the screenplay, will somehow step it up in the second half with a new twist or unexpected insight. But quite the opposite happens, as the narrative becomes both more melodramatic and erratic.

Sacrifices its potentially compelling central storyline to an elaborate, meta-style intermingling of supposed fiction and reality that turns out to be far more confusing than intriguing.

Wilson acquits himself adequately enough, emphasizing pacing over character development, but delivering a series of kinetically propelled scenes that clearly benefit from his extensive visual effects experience.

The results aren't fully satisfying on any level, despite a terrific cast that includes rising star Ana de Armas (Knives Out), soon to be seen in the upcoming James Bond film "No Time to Die."

The Photograph is a romance-heavy star vehicle for Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield that’s deeply flawed but both sexy and thoughtful. Writer-director Stella Meghie’s fourth feature (after The Weekend, Everything Everything, Jean of the Joneses), thick and multi-layered with a lush and precise visual language, invites the audience to look beneath the surface of a standard meet-cute.

Though it follows a familiar format, devoting its middle third to the games leading to Homecoming and the final act to the game itself, All-Americans doesn't really play like a sports drama; football is mostly an excuse to pay attention to these kids. But that focus is diluted by the number of people we're spending time with.

Earlier films like Sightseers and Free Fire suggested Ben Wheatley might have the mordant wit to tackle a work forever associated with sardonic genre maestro Alfred Hitchcock. But in place of atmosphere and suspense, he delivers blandly glossy melodrama.

While this hodgepodge contains the occasional lovely or eloquent moment, as one would expect after Estrada's captivating 2018 Sundance debut Blindspotting, those are overshadowed by material that grates on all but the most forgiving ear, in a semi-narrative setting that clearly just cares about getting from one aria to the next.

Sadly, despite its title referencing a dirt bike gang, Charm City Kings doesn’t really show us anything we haven’t seen before. Unable to harness the story’s potential, the filmmakers instead deliver a mostly canned movie that flatlines 20 minutes before it comes to an end.

Boys State inevitably feels more and more like reality TV programming, which is both appropriate for our times and depressing.

Even though Whishaw is mesmeric, by the end of the 105-minute running time the whole experience starts to feel like being trapped in a broken-down subway car with a violent mental patient.

The idyll is all so jolly that when the film swerves into misfortune in the final act, it feels not like a necessary dramatic corrective but just a dreary downer, like medicine there to stop the spoonfuls of sugar from going down so easily.

Sadly, the script for this debut feature, written by Louis Godbout, is less persuasive: No single event is fatally implausible, perhaps, but taken together it doesn't ring true.

It's a testament to the complexity of the subject and her positivity even in the face of the most culturally entrenched caveman attitudes that we come away from this flawed, chaotic film with a warm appreciation for her achievements and her indestructible generosity of spirit.

Unfurling over a sluggish two hours plus, Stillwater is least convincing when McCarthy attempts to build suspense, with most of that work being done by Mychael Danna’s score. The late plot twists become almost risible, once Akim (Idir Azougli) enters the picture.

Only proves more intent on establishing an ominous mood than providing thrills. Muted and restrained to the point of tedium, the picture offers little that's distinctive to set it apart.

The main issue with the film's screenplay, written by the director, is that it is trying to cover too much ground and yet be tonally light on its feet.

Hossain's refusal to overexplain the details of his world — is the thing Jack's supposed to steal a drug? a weapon? — plays well in some instances; elsewhere, coupled with the film's low budget, it risks failing to convince us we're in the future at all.

Despite the fine performances by leads Lena Headey (Game of Thrones), who has herself long been active in refugee causes, and Ivanno Jeremiah (AMC's Humans), The Flood lacks the narrative urgency needed to make watching it feel like more than a slog.

Making her debut as director with a true story from her native Australia, actor Rachel Griffiths gives the pic a workmanlike, generic feel that would play well on family-centric cable channels. Horse lovers will be the moviegoers most vulnerable to its modest charms.

Big on atmosphere but low on drama, DAU. Natasha is fascinating conceptually but weak cinematically.

Director Andrew Levitas and his co-screenwriters dramatize a riveting story using a mass of groan-worthy genre clichés that ill-serve the truth they are trying to recreate.

As Jaws and all the best predecessors have shown (John Carpenter’s The Thing also seems like a major reference), you really need to care about the crew before they’re eaten, and Hardiman doesn’t draw strong enough characters for us to latch onto.

The untrained actor is the weakest link in an already hit-and-miss cast, and few viewers will respond to Ben's unearned bravado.

Well cast with actors who help the film overcome an obviously meager budget, Phoenix is as rough at the edges as its protagonist, and will inspire a similar kind of sympathetic response — especially among viewers who've been through a few reversals and know not every rebound has to take the form of a glorious firebird to be worthwhile.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

Even though the movie poses questions worth pondering, it's self-inoculated against doing the pondering. With all the long, loving glances at the orderly pastel interiors of Jean's home, and the constant nudging reassurance of the score, the narrative has been too padded against sharp angles to register a seismic jolt.

Screened Out delivers a convincingly cautionary argument that we're all becoming zombies forgoing human relationships and experiences in favor of our ubiquitous devices.

Unfortunately, despite all its good intentions, Shooting Heroin lacks the cinematic urgency to get its important message across.

Amusing but off-key in some unhelpful ways, it's a dorky time-killer that doesn't suffer too much for its familiar vibe.

More curio than classic, Four Kids and It may hold children’s attention (and sometimes test adults’ patience) over the movie’s brief running time, but seems unlikely to inspire many a rewatch.

But if you can check your brain and go along with the preposterous plotting of a mystery thriller as generic as its title, there's a certain baseline pleasure in watching the more or less wholesome young couple at its center swim in a murky cesspool of deception and death. Oh, and diamonds!

Capone is definitely an unconventional take on the twilight of a notorious gangster. Alas, it's not an interesting one, although the borderline self-parodying Method madness of Tom Hardy's performance does kind of demand to be seen.

Offers a few spooky thrills to get you through another night stuck at home.

Stardust is a mostly listless odyssey, its lack of excitement compounded by the absence of Bowie's music.

Director Sheldon Lettich, who also worked on the story and screenplay, gives Van Damme plenty of space for his performance, but his direction, like his star, only really comes alive during the action scenes, particularly the climax, set around the freight containers and towering cranes of the Hong Kong waterfront.

As a harmless time-waster, Good Trip has its charms, but also its oversold shtick.

Rapu's film is still somewhat scattered; its Earth Day release date only serves as a reminder of the many superior eco-docs one has seen about remote paradises threatened or destroyed by encroaching forces.

Saddled with an excess of voiceover and a shuffled flashback structure that keep the characters at an emotional distance, All Day and a Night feels familiar in both its bleakness and its ultimate offering of hope.

Closeness, the original title of which, Tesnota, also apparently implies being walled-in or suffocated, is dramatically erratic, with tense and compelling sequences alternating with diffuse and/or flat interludes that don't advance the narrative or pay off in other ways.

Intended as a 90-minute nail-biter, the movie starts off strong but loses steam about halfway through and never quite recovers.

Wildly episodic in structure and violent in the extreme, Dreamland doesn't fully succeed in sustaining its outlandish conceits. The pacing also drags significantly despite its brief running time, lapsing into a talkiness that provides too much opportunity to pick apart its absurdities.

Good-looking and technically well crafted, the film struggles to get past pastiche and conjure an involving world of its own.

If ever a comedy cried out for tight 85-minute treatment that keeps the gags pinging fast enough to disguise the thin sketch material at its core, it's this hit-or-miss two-hour feature.

As I might have said during my own high school days, The Kissing Booth 2 is "mad stupid," but it's still not as overtly slappable as Netflix's other low-budget teen comedies.

If Ainsworth is ever turned off, you won't know it: She and DP Ben Ainsworth make everything look interesting, if not necessarily appetizing.

Clocking in at just over an hour, Hill of Freedom is Hong Sang-soo's shortest feature film to date. And it's his most lightweight, as well, with the Korean auteur merely reshuffling his tried-and-trusted play on non-linear structure, camera movements and characterizations without offering anything decidedly new

This tale of a despondent man's attempt to find someone to help him commit suicide never really hits the emotional heights it should; it may be that the film's proponents are confusing simplicity with profundity. [30 Sept 1997]

The sour-tinged comedy of excruciatingly English embarrassment deploys some talented performers on both sides of the camera but its promising parts never quite cohere into a properly satisfying whole.

Despite promising opening sequences and some above-average performances from a trio of young actors, the film's points become more elusive as its technique becomes more blunt. [16 March 1992]

The film boasts pungent atmosphere, as well as hard-hitting performances by leading man Michael Pitt and such reliably good character actors as Ron Perlman and Isiah Whitlock Jr. Unfortunately, the promising elements never coalesce into a satisfying or engrossing whole.

Incomplete-feeling film, which inadvertently illustrates how empathy without balance can obscure truth.

Anna, who’s caught in a midlife crisis that deepens throughout the movie, clearly doesn’t know what she wants. But the problem is that Weisse, the director, doesn’t always seem to know what she wants either in this prickly, wavering character study that both confounds and compels, and that doesn’t manage to land its ending.

The result is a passably entertaining diversion, glossy and decently acted but devoid of any kind of edge.

As capable as the actors are, I can't say I cared much about any of the characters, which made the emotionally uplifting climax feel underpowered. The scope for which this handsome but bland film strives so hard is present mainly in the wide-open spaces of its picturesque locations.

Director Nick Rowland couldn't ask for a more magnetically tormented character to anchor his low-key-to-a-fault feature debut.

Though its running time is brief and a lot of the writing is sharp, the tug-of-war between a onetime literary lion and his wide-eyed No. 1 fan lacks the necessary tension to make the drama's outcome matter.

Turning his famous furrowed brow away from the realm of life-and-death nail-biters, Neeson elevates the proceedings with his dry delivery and nimble comic timing. Made in Italy makes you wish the actor did more comedy.

Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev's script neither brings it to life nor quite has us rooting for its destruction.

This would be a very different movie in most other hands, and in many cases, a worse one. Still, there's something missing in this look at a happy life's destruction.

The picture wallows for a bit, having deprived itself of the teen cheer that was its main driver. Of course the sun will come out again, after those Amber has given so much to eventually find a way to force her into the role of gracious recipient. The fact that the way they do this is entirely appropriate to the character doesn't keep the film's feel-good climax from feeling very, very familiar.

Like many a stage mother, Thom Fitzgerald's comic drama is pushy. It tries too hard, in all too obvious ways, to win over the audience.

To the extent that it works, much credit goes to Keery, for finding the real human need inside this twentysomething cipher.

Where the movie hits flat notes is in the way it spells out its points rather than letting friction percolate through the action.

The Owners proves a nasty, if not exactly credible, thriller.

Regrettably, Storm Over Brooklyn is only a rudimentary primer on the case, rather than a particularly comprehensive or insightful one. Many of its shortfalls have to do with director Muta'Ali's (Life's Essentials With Ruby Dee) narrow focus on the Hawkins family, especially since the film is most compelling when it evokes the pressure cooker of racial hostilities that New York City had become by the late '80s.