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.

While scribe Zac Stanford's premise invites a Charlie Kaufman-like, reality-bending take, Schwartzman plays things straight enough that one has a hard time believing the action. But viewers who get through a credulity-testing second act may laugh enough in the third to be glad they did.

Like the ambitious The Wandering Earth, the last Chinese epic to make a play for international glory, and indeed Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, The Eight Hundred is thin on characterization, and too often slips into rote narrative and war movie cliches (really, a runaway white horse?). And that's despite eight writers working on the script. The sheer volume of men fighting and dying in the face of overwhelming odds and stellar technical spectacle step into the gap where emotional connection should be.

While some characters on the ever-escalating guest list provide the pair with welcome comic distraction, this day-to-night hangout pic doesn't really take flight.

Although Landon and co-screenwriter Michael Kennedy have latched onto a winning concept, pairing the body-swap conceit with serial killer thrills, they’ve freighted the film with so many trite life-lesson moments that the fun gradually drains from the narrative, like blood from a murder victim.

A little bit like finding an eyewitness to history and then describing everything he feels but not much about the event itself, it leaves the viewer with a sense that something very important has been left out.

It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.

It's a messy, childish scrawl of a film, but it is high on energy.

Russell leans into his iconic role with admirable commitment, providing just enough winking to let us know he's in on the joke and thoroughly enjoying it, while Hawn remains as adorable — albeit now in a more grandmotherly way — as always. When they're onscreen together, it somehow feels like this year's pandemic-threatened Christmas will miraculously still be one to celebrate.

It’s not quite enough to prevent this B-grade rendition from feeling rather familiar and unsuspenseful, even if stars Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) and Madison Iseman (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) provide a decent level of tension throughout.

Despite its value in providing superb starring turns by Lena Olin and Bruce Dern, the film never manages to overcome its air of familiarity.

There's contemporary currency in Lister-Jones' point that women, already marginalized, should refrain from victimizing one another. But the point becomes strained once the external adversary emerges and the protagonists — of which only one really counts — take down a very literal embodiment of the patriarchy as pure evil. This is less an issue with the blunt theme than its limp execution.

It's a fun conceit trapped in a broad and retrograde flick.

A sloshy swill fermented in the hacked-up viscera of superior fantasy features — including Labyrinth, Hocus Pocus, Monster's Inc., Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Adventures in Babysitting — the film often sinks beneath the weight of its viscous plot. However, it burbles and thrives in moments that rely on aesthetics over story, director Rachel Talalay (Tank Girl) infusing genuine creepy tension with an à la mode witchy/techy visual motif.

Johnson creates a magnetic antihero, volatile and antisocial. He doesn’t fly so much as stalk the sky; he swats opponents like the bundles of weightless CG pixels they are. And this passion project serves the character well, setting him up for adventures one hopes will be less predictable than this one.

That the film proves intriguing despite its overly familiar themes is a testament to the acting more than the writing. Eaton delivers a compelling, highly physical performance, using her endlessly expressive eyes to communicate her character's complex range of emotions and making us care about Liv despite the contrived plot mechanics.

It’s all quite watchable and not without suspense, but the characters reveal too little emotional depth or complexity to make us care much about either their losses or their hard-fought victories.

There are some undeniably amusing moments, thanks largely to a cast unafraid to throw themselves into the raunchiness and violence with full abandon, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that the film represents a missed opportunity.

A critique of post-millennial journalism is one of several ideas raised but mostly abandoned in this genre pastiche, which never really coalesces despite some promising elements.

The film spreads itself too thin to offer a thorough political portrait.

As it moves toward a climax that will require Santa to connect with his inner action hero, the film works better than it should without being as enjoyable as its predecessor, the brothers' much less ambitious Small Town Crime.

Once the outlandish premise is established, there's little to enjoy in the increasing body count, leading you to wish that Mr. Peterson had simply murdered his victims in their sleep. That at least would have made for a blessedly shorter movie.

Elegy . . . embraces the emotional messiness of a heart-wringing country song, but lacks a haunting refrain to get under your skin.

Pixie is a trigger-happy comedy road movie that relies more on boorish energy than wit or charm.

The problem isn't that some jokes fall flat; invariably that happens in this format. It's just that there are no big, hold-your-sides-till-they-hurt sequences. [5 Feb 1993]

Dispiritingly generic in both appearance and tone.

As it is, the family pic's light tone never lets its themes of addiction, abandonment and poverty hit home, instead focusing on its hero's unlikely accomplishment and the brotherhood of sport.

Even Gandhi (maker of 2016's Obama-early-years feature "Barry") admits that what he hoped would be a cautionary tale is probably just one more way for the infamous celeb to get the attention he craves.

Sure, there’s some fun in all that meta-playfulness. But there’s also a facetiousness that wears thin and intrudes on the killing spree, making me often wish I was watching any one of the superior movies being referenced.

Intentionally provocative, artistically uncompromising and self-consciously polemical, La Leyenda Negra attempts to inform by incitement, challenging audiences to concede to an unvarnished view of migrant life in working-class Los Angeles.

Neither conveying the flavor of the swampy South nor juicing the story's murky undercurrents with compositional correlatives, Glimcher's framings and pacings are disappointingly flat, coagulating finally in a batch of cliched action gumbo. [13 Feb 1995]

This legal procedural remains strangely flat, despite its star power and a gripping central performance from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. An unimpeachably well-intentioned treatment of a dark chapter in American justice, it's methodical and serious-minded to a fault.

A B-movie that would benefit immensely from some wit in the script and charisma in the cast, it’s not as aggressively hacky as P.W.S.A.’s oeuvre, but it runs into problems he didn’t face in 1995: Namely, the bar has been raised quite a bit for movies in which teams of superpowered young people have fights to save the universe.

Ultimately, none of the storylines offers a surprise or tells us anything we don't already know, this many years into America's opioid ordeal. And arriving at a moment when Crisis could refer to so many other calamities, its failure to illuminate anything makes it feel like a distraction.

Super Mario Bros. is a jumbled mess that is somewhat likeable in spite of itself. There are so many wrong turns taken by this film that even when we end up where we started, we still don't know where the heck we are. [1 June 1993]

The film exudes empathy, as you'd expect, but struggles to find a compelling point of view.

The admirable efficiency of Skyfire means that you don't have to waste a lot of time sitting through endless exposition.

If it uses romance and hijinks as a way of suggesting to teens that the unthinkable might not really kill them, that's a worthy goal. (Insert your own remarks about surviving 2020 here.) But adding fewer spoonfuls of sugar to this kind of medicine might be good for everyone.

Exciting in its big game scenes but excessively dreary in the undercoached dramatics, the seasonal offering will score some quick points at the boxoffice and then fade quickly. [24 Sept 1993]

At this point, Cage's movies don't have to be reviewed, but rather stamped with official certificates of weirdness. This effort directed by Kevin Lewis certainly qualifies.

The mangy humor provides a steady stream of laughs, but Look Who's Talking Now won't be confused with the better breeds of film comedy. [3 Nov 1993]

It’s the kind of movie that needs a feather-light touch or plenty of humor to avoid feeling overly parental. Moxie has neither.

Though the movie is never unengaging, ultimately, it doesn't quite deliver.

Ultimately, it all feels less like a romance than a curiosity.

It's pleasant enough, but lacks the vitality to be more than mildly funny as comedy as well as the insight to build emotional heft as drama.

Vague and unsastisfying, but not as immediately dismissable as Propaganda's 1993 shocker dud "Kalifornia," "Dream Lover" has going for it the lure of Spader and Amick going for broke and a plot that will bring on post-screening discussions. Either masterfully restrained or badly out of whack, depending on how one interprets the conclusion, "Dream Lover" is problematic enough to earn only passing notice in the marketplace. [11 Apr 1994]

In terms of rollicking wacky gorefests, "Freaked" has nothing on "Dead Alive," the superior New Zealand cult hit from earlier this year. Still, the uniqueness of the project will ensure a number of die-hard fans. [4 Oct 1993]

Just identifying the references is a feast for film buffs, but the comedy here is so specifically film-oriented that the laughs, with rare exception, have no deeper resonance. The gags, both sight and verbal, come fast and furious, and more than a few connect. But the ultimate result is wearying, as if one were forced to sit through an endless succession of "Carol Burnett Show" parodies. Another problem is that the films parodied are often less than stellar; "Sleeping With the Enemy," for instance, was already a tired thriller rehash. [19 Oct 1993]

There is plenty to admire technically in his drama . . . But its substance is a mashup of ill-fitting parts, indebted to both Romeo and Juliet and Douglas Sirk.

While Van Damme's cyborgian performance in the classic Western role should satisfy the thespic demands of action fans, it will blunt a mainstream crossover. [18 Jan 1993]

Of course, ravishing Malick-esque visuals cannot quite excuse muddled plotting, portentous dialogue and wobbly performances. But In Full Bloom is still an impressively polished debut feature, admirably ambitious and elegantly crafted.

This well-intentioned if somewhat heavy-handed historical affair is anchored by Coogan’s solid lead turn, with support from Andrea Riseborough as a hard-hitting state prosecutor and promising newcomer Garion Dowds as an executioner who could wind up facing the gallows.

While visually lush and inviting, this insular, self-absorbed film is more a violation than a celebration of the lives of two of literatures foremost sensualists, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Little of Miller’s boisterous, anarchic spirit makes its way into this film. Nor is its superficial handling of Nin’s theme of a woman’s self-realization likely to satisfy her admirers.

The conflicts feel just a tad too routine and the characters too thinly drawn to get the blood flowing.

Here the burn can be too slow to handle at times, as if the gas had been forever left at medium-low heat. You're ultimately left wanting more from a movie that tries to drift away from the usual policier template, even though shots are fired and bodies drop.

The finale is telegraphed far in advance, yet when it comes the drama is so down-played it doesn’t register in its full horror.

Admirers of old-fashioned British war drama should find this passably entertaining, and the dazzling green Welsh countryside and seafront locations that stand in for England's Southeast coast are certainly pleasing to the eye. But handsome production values can't disguise shaky storytelling that relies almost entirely on composer Marc Streitenfeld's agitated orchestral score to stoke suspense.

After an intriguing setup that takes its time building atmosphere and characters, declining to rush the first death, the film becomes progressively more overwrought and hokey. It also loads up on derivative tropes that worked better everywhere from Ringu through The Conjuring Universe.

The documentary is just as notable for the cultural and social analysis that it lacks as it is for its contents.

Good direction takes on a bad script and the script wins. [16 Oct 1992]

The story itself finally feels lost beneath the levels of artifice rather than heightened by it.

A great deal of human drama underlies all this, but not all of it makes it to the screen.

One unfortunate effect of the jumbling is that it cools off Statham’s slow-boil performance, and prompts us to question the logic behind H’s plan.

A likably low-rent, low-ambition entry into a genre whose standard-bearer, Meatballs, doesn't set the bar very high, Mike Stasko's Boys Vs. Girls goes to summer camp for its promised battle of the sexes.

It's an odd match of a screenplay (adapted by Berman and Pulcini) that's too obvious, telegraphing rather than teasing out its twists, and direction that's overly timid; one gets the sense that the filmmakers are checking off genre tropes and tricks from a list instead of finding ways to invest them with fresh chills or shivers.

Spirit Untamed is beautiful to look at and occasionally genuinely funny. The stunning and detailed animations saturate Lucky’s world with an impressive array of colors, from the crimson apples she feeds Spirit to the pistachio and emerald-green leaves on the swaying trees.

This trying-to-please-everyone Jennifer 8 is likely to disappoint viewers on every level, from the cerebrals who enjoy a brainy, cop-and-killer psychological duel to the clunkheads who savor a bloody, bump-in-the-night, mechanical scarefest. [5 Nov 1992]

Here Today doesn’t fully succeed in any department. But it does provide some alternately amusing and touching moments, thanks largely to the heartfelt performances by Crystal and his co-star Tiffany Haddish.

The brisk pacing and capable cast still can't quite mask a certain routine feel in a movie without much heart.

The doc pads out its assertions of malfeasance with personal scenes that fall flat, never giving much insight into its subject's personality or deepening the sympathy we may have started off with for the children she left behind.

A heavy-handed reimagining.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

Viewers who can take it at face value may find a chill or two here, but ultimately Old can’t escape the goofiness of its premise long enough to put its more poetic possibilities across successfully.

Though not without its moments, the film offers too little of interest for its leading ladies to do, and feels throughout like an adaptation of a comic book that was written for the sole purpose of being sold to an IP-hungry film studio.

The film’s true stars are the stunt and fight coordinators who render these clashes in visceral, mostly realistic fashion, although they eventually lose impact through their sheer repetitiveness.

Despite fine performances by Stephen Fry and Jude Law, Wilde is a disappointingly predictable and uninvolving film portrait of Victorian wit and writer Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned for being homosexual. [01 May 1998]

This bloated finale (running almost 2 hours long) perfunctorily ties up the narrative loose ends with little finesse or energy — a shame because the earlier two entries, chock full of pop culture references and subversive thematic underpinnings, had immense potential.

Where the first film offered genuine scares, this one is suspenseful at best, snicker-worthy at worst, and will beg viewers to recall the time Fonzie got on water skis and tried not to get eaten by a shark.

The film does something unexpectedly audacious with its last few moments, making me wonder if there’s at least a little nutrition in cloying fluff.

Where there should be intimacy, we get distance. Where one might expect steady meditation, the narrative jitters impulsively.

Making an atypical foray into commercial film territory (the Star Wars films being a notable exception), Driver proves a formidable action movie hero, his imposing physicality (and, perhaps, his former experience as a Marine) serving him well here.

A haunting glimpse into the horrors of mental illness as well as the harsh world of mental-health care, "Mr. Jones" is, unfortunately, sugarcoated with a glossy doctor-patient love story that diminishes its emotional strengths. [6 Oct 1993]

It’s just too bad there’s not more of a personal stamp on the material to rescue it from its indie-film clichés. Flag Day is not a complete misfire, and if a no-name director had made it, the movie would probably get a pass. But considering the emotional stakes involved it’s neither terribly memorable nor moving.

One feels the lack of an underlying original idea that makes the director’s work so quirky and identifiable, and that also goes for the missing element of ironic-iconic humor that has been slowly disappearing from his films.

What Jolt lacks in originality and subtlety it at least somewhat makes up for in verve.

Ridley Scott’s film is a trashtacular watch that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. But it fails to settle on a consistent tone — overlong and undisciplined as it careens between high drama and opera buffa.

Shaheen Seth’s libidinous, compelling cinematography beautifully complements Nora Takacs Ekberg’s lush “haunted dollhouse” production design. But while Birds of Paradise is a worthy sensory experience, the visual and aural pleasures are not enough to sustain the tension.

As adept as Together is at capturing the challenges of the pandemic — the uncertainty, the anger, the bone-deep exhaustion — it’s rather less convincing as a love story.

Blood Brothers struggles under the weight of its subjects.

It’s watchable enough, but ultimately has the counterfeit feel of a filmmaker dabbling in a genre that’s not a natural fit and finding little joy in it.

That Best Sellers works to the extent that it does is a testament to Caine’s ultra-professionalism — he truly is a treasure who can make any film worth watching — and Plaza’s canny underplaying. They work together so well, you wish they were in a better movie.

The results, although sporadically arresting, feel awkward, like a child wearing clothing a few sizes too big.

As a character study of a man with good reason to wean himself off the very basic human instinct of hope and teach himself, even at some personal cost, to care for no one and nothing, Sundown gains texture from its stark setting in a seaside playground stained with blood. But of all the director’s films to date, this might be the most airless.

There’s no doubt Mirica can film the hell out of a location or a character’s face, but as for telling a fully gripping and involving story? The jury’s still out on that one.

Big George Foreman isn’t bad exactly, merely serviceable. You keep waiting for it to deliver a knockout blow that never comes.

It’s hard not to wish that in the future, Harold will stick to the cartoon world where he belongs.

The high-concept, low-satisfaction psychological thriller marks an ambitious upgrade in scope for Wilde from the character-driven coming-of-age comedy of Booksmart, and she handles the physical aspects of the project with assurance. It’s just a shame all the effort has gone into a script without much of that 2019 debut’s disarming freshness.

South of Heaven is the type of film that’s good enough to make you wish it were better, its problematic whole being less than the sum of its admirable parts.