While Ryan’s bountiful charm is as evident as ever, her character unfortunately comes across like an older version of the manic pixie dream girl. And the movie’s heavy-handed magical realist elements counter the slightness of the material to deadly effect.

While De Angelis knows how to create visceral action and moments of intensity, he’s incapable of the slightest hint of subtlety.

The film works best when Waititi gets out of his own way and lets the characters speak for themselves instead of self-consciously extinguishing any warmth with jokes.

It offers plenty of cheap thrills, or more accurately cheap kills, presented with the sort of attention to bloodthirsty detail that horror aficionados crave. Pity, though, that there aren’t really any more actual grindhouses.

The result is more admirable than captivating, losing its way in old school hijinks (wacky professors, evil spies, a femme fatale) that grow outlandishly phantasmagorical as the plot thickens.

Wicked Little Letters swerves between comedy and tragedy without ever hitting its stride. The movie is at its best when it doesn’t strain to turn every moment into a joke, instead letting the story breathe a bit.

Although anchored by a number of strong performances, particularly those of Ben Foster and fresh-faced Toby Wallace as estranged half-brothers attempting to find common ground despite their different upbringings, Helgeland’s meandering film still feels stuck in another place in time.

The frenetic mayhem becomes tiresome in its repetitiveness, although kids already hopped up on candy and soda will presumably not mind at all.

The convoluted storyline is too clever by far, and might have proved entertaining if the film had been intended as an absurdist black comedy. Unfortunately, Keaton goes in a more neo-noir direction, with the generally grim tone only accentuating the narrative absurdities.

Despite the best efforts of the directors, Hell of a Summer just isn’t scary. Bryk and Wolfhard know how to tell jokes, but struggle with establishing a truly creepy atmosphere.

If you come to this film looking for a brisk overview of his achievements in couture, you might find High & Low more than serviceable. . . But if you’re expecting the definitive closing leg of the redemption tour, it’s unlikely you’ll find this a persuasive argument for separating the art from the a-hole.

Even during its more successful moments, Wish’s magic falls flat. The film is weighed down by its purpose: to revel in Disney nostalgia while soaring into the future.

The Convert is uneven and doesn’t fully live up to its thematic ambitions. But it’s handsomely made and thankfully avoids falling victim to white savior syndrome.

Working from a discursive screenplay he co-wrote with Jon Baird, Costner is not at his best as a director with this kind of multi-branched narrative. He struggles to keep all the story’s plates spinning, as characters are sidelined and resurface with too little connective tissue.

Chapter 2 proves to be more fun to watch than 1, at least for this critic.

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film. That it achieves those goals while relying tediously on almost all of the genre’s most overused formal devices, offering shockingly little variation from countless other docs you’ve seen on similar subjects, makes it a so-so film.

Newton, Sprouse and the delightful Soberano are all more appealing than the sloppy package and undercooked characters deserve.

The body-swap comedy isn’t good so much as it is completely and totally innocuous. Its characters are drawn in the broadest of strokes and the plot points unfold along creakily predictable beats, but it’s too blandly sweet to be irritating or offensive.

Imaginary, which starts out as a relatively low-key suspenser with intriguing psychological depth, eventually succumbs to the inanities plaguing so many recent horror efforts (like the killer pool in the same company’s Night Swim).

Without a more psychologically insightful script and less predictable story developments, Our Son shows that gay couples’ problems can be just as uninteresting as any other couples’ problems. Welcome to post-marriage equality humdrum!

There’s much here to appreciate, not least of which is the admirable attempt to simultaneously provide belly laughs for children and emotional resonance for adults. IF may be guilty of trying too hard, but it’s a refreshing change from so many family movies that barely seem to be trying at all.

This fetid stew of sex, death and tech may be an aphrodisiac for hardcore Cronenberg fans, but more casual viewers are likely to find it all rather slapdash and undercooked here.

The Actor can be fun to think about, but hard to stay connected to. Johnson’s film works on an intellectual level — batting around questions about how identity is constructed — but the director struggles to translate the stakes of those questions.

Holland boasts striking advancements in the director’s style and committed performances from Kidman, Macfadyen and Bernal, but these qualities can’t quite save a narrative fundamentally confused about its purpose.

Gaga is a compelling live-wire presence, splitting the difference between affinity and obsession, while endearingly giving Arthur a shot of joy and hope that has him singing “When You’re Smiling” on his way to court. Their musical numbers, both duets and solos, have a vitality that the more often dour film desperately needs.

A work that is very recognizably Serebrennikov’s, which is to say it’s nostalgic for the Soviet era, outlandishly celebratory of the callow charms of bohemian youth (compare with his pop-music-themed Leto), baggy to the point of undisciplined (see Petrov’s Flu) and full of long, fluid, roaming, handheld single takes (applicable to nearly all his works).

For a film about big themes like mortality, memory, truth and redemption, Oh, Canada feels both slight and stubbornly page-bound, too unsatisfyingly fleshed out to give its actors meat to chew on.

This story of corruption and conspiracy in a small Louisiana town might have passed as a taut if familiar action thriller — if it had actually been taut.

While the events in the first Omen seemed to be taking place in a real world that just happened to include demonic figures, this film seems more like a fever dream, its outlandish storyline taking a back seat to a nightmarish vision that’s more about mood than narrative coherence.

The fight scenes are extremely well choreographed, filmed and edited, but they’re so relentless in their non-stop pacing that the viewing experience becomes numbing.

The film is not good, but it is singular — and absolutely chaotic.

The film is very invested in proving the validity of the social relationships created in virtual space. To me, that’s the easy part. Video games can absolutely be nourishing and substantive and healthy. And I’m not even sure Ibelin confirms that in a smart way.

Red Right Hand doesn’t add anything particularly new to the well-worn genre. But it features enough bloody action sequences and shootouts to satisfy fans, who will be more likely to catch it on VOD than at drive-ins.

Immaculate works best when it abandons its attempts to be a kind of surrealist portrait of Catholic terror and leans into the campy horror of B movies.

Chronicling a covert World War II mission manned by a band of renegades, the movie is diverting but remains awkwardly stuck between a larkish caper and a more gripping combat action thriller.

Unfortunately, despite everyone’s best efforts to deliver a femme-driven actioner revolving around a central character who comes across like a female Rambo, Trigger Warning, premiering on Netflix, proves distressingly familiar.

The robot war is mere pretext for the saga of a woman learning to love again, starring a celebrity whose public persona is largely built around her willingness to let herself love again. Never mind the fact that there is no actual human love interest — in structure and theme, Atlas is a J.Lo rom-com in shiny metal packaging.

Neither dull enough to be painful nor fun enough to be engaging, it’s simply too bland to make much of an impression at all.

Suspended Time does provide some of the pleasures frequently associated with Assayas’ work. . . Mostly, however, the project feels like the result of a writer-director killing time, sketching impressions of a life put on hold by outside circumstances, without figuring out what he wants to say with it all.

Director Tom Gustafson (Were the World Mine) has crafted a sweet if plodding love story but it’s hard to truly hate on this whirling candy-colored poetic fairytale — it’s just too sincere, much like the musical source material.

After a compelling first hour, the director can’t seem to get to the dramatic and emotional crux of the epic story, which runs a bloated three hours. When he finally does get there it’s in the dreaded Big Speech, which even an actor of Rogowski’s generous gifts can’t make into anything but a teachable moment.

For a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

Relentlessly fast-paced and filled with hyperkinetic visuals, the sequel hits the sweet spot in terms of what its target audience wants, even if adult non-aficionados will find little of interest other than the starry vocal cast.

Mooney eagerly mines the trove of Y2K cultural references to shape a narrative fine-tuned to a particular millennial sensibility, but struggles to meet the very low demands of its internal logic.

Salem’s Lot is a clipped horror that partially works thanks to a handful of assured performances and key style choices.

It’s an intriguing premise. ... But The Greatest Hits is the kind of film that should sweep you away with its charm and emotion. Instead, it’s too transparently button-pushing to go beyond the stale tropes of the weepy drama.

The comedy never quite settles into a comfortable rhythm, and eventually backs itself into a corner so far away from any recognizable reality that it threatens to undermine the very message it wants to send.

Despite a juicy hook built on heated emotions and drastic actions, Magpie proves too cold and ultimately too timid to spark much of a reaction.

The Contestant is a missed opportunity. It’s a documentary about voyeurism that, in the absence of freshly delivered insight, just reintroduces and rehashes the voyeuristic impulse it’s largely condemning.

After its darkly comic set-up, the mild proceedings seem generally undercooked, lacking the subversiveness that could have given the remake a reason for being. It coasts along mainly on the charms of Jones, who displays considerable comic chops as the beleaguered Tanya.

Fine performances and powerful visuals only partially compensate for the inevitable air of familiarity that accompanies Marco Perego’s debut feature.

Indeed, the film’s main strength is not its overly familiar if convoluted plotting but rather the strong performances all around.

The film is a concert movie for Shyamalan’s daughter, the musician Saleka, wrapped in a middling thriller kept afloat by a compelling performance from Josh Hartnett.

Taken together though, the script’s rather shaky foundations and Crowe’s bombastic performance effectively derail the narrative in the second half.

This latest addition to an apparently unkillable franchise adds nothing original to the formula. It’s a formula that works, to be sure, making for a pleasant enough time filler. But that’s about it.

It’s not terrible but it’s far from great, instead landing in that dispiriting morass best identified as “passable entertainment,” designed to make critics grasp for new ways to say “Meh.”

There’s much to appreciate in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it.

The ending is a bit flat and anti-climactic.

There are amusing moments reminiscent of the original, but in terms of tone and coherence, the movie loses its way.

Flight Risk manages to deliver some high-altitude thrills in its breathlessly paced 91 minutes. But its clunky dialogue, uneven performances and less-than-grade-A special effects ultimately make it the Spirit Airlines of airborne thrillers.

That the film works to the extent that it does is largely due to the unique charms of its muscular leading man and the well staged, extremely brutal fight sequences featuring enough gore to test the boundaries of an R rating.

Unfortunately, the superbly orchestrated car chase/shootout, taking place both in a tunnel and on winding mountain roads, occurs nearly two hours into this equally bloated sequel’s 144-minute running time. Until then, you spend a lot of time watching the characters luxuriate in the European settings via consuming copious amounts of croissants, gelato and tiny cups of coffee.

Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool. It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold sui generis experiment than a hot mess.

This is a documentary about psychics that make you think Ouija boards might be a better investment.

Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.

It would be difficult to convince anybody without a pre-existing interest that this constitutes compelling storytelling on any level.

The gimmickry ultimately wears thin and you find yourself thinking less about the inventive way the scenes were shot . . . than the flimsy narrative.

For a movie covering such an expansive passage of American life, Here feels curiously weightless. It’s no fault of the actors, all of whom deliver solid work with characters that are scarcely more than outlines.

Ultimately, for all its wildly entertaining elements, Kalki 2898 AD feels like too much of a good thing, resembling the sort of lavish buffet meal that leaves you feeling overstuffed and exhausted. But fans of this particular style of cinema are not likely to mind.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever never quite lands its most poignant moments because Imogen and her siblings remain stubbornly at a distance.

Fun is banished from Aja’s latest, which starts out mildly intriguing and chalks up a few bracing jump scares before running out of juice.

If his new movie feels 25 years too late, it’s also a reminder of what made the original so special in its day. Those who manage to discover The Killer through this serviceable remake would be better off revisiting the one that started it all.

If the film teeters unsteadily between sci-fi and psychology, it nonetheless confirms Clapin’s visual talents, which are backed by a dreamy score from Dan Levy, who also scored I Lost My Body. In its best moments, Meanwhile on Earth takes us beyond our desolate everyday lives to a place we can indeed dream of — and also witness on screen.

The film yearns to capture the stages of this emotional exhumation, but a clunky screenplay makes for a less affecting watch.

This violent first feature is carried more by leads Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan than by its dour storytelling.

Chew-Bose’s screenplay doesn’t explore the characters deeply enough to replace the book’s jaw-dropping quality with any psychological depth.

Despite bursts of intelligence, especially when it comes to conveying the fractured quality of trauma narratives, Without Blood’s vagueness ends up blunting many of its lessons.

Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts.

Vigalondo’s film has a compelling premise, but the story (he also wrote the screenplay) gets away from him, resulting in a film that never quite hits its stride.

Is it all poetry or just a put-on? Again, Baby Invasion is a bit of both, and viewers are likely to either vibe out or tune out.

Had all those assets been funneled into a movie with some tonal consistency and a script that built credible relationships, the result might have been a nasty bit of fun. Instead, it wobbles awkwardly between creeping mob menace and scrappy sitcom, inching toward a violent climax that still doesn’t acquire cohesion.

For a movie that aspires to antic comedy, it brings way too much casting firepower to a slim plot and even sketchier character development. Whether a streaming audience will even notice the mis-calibration is probably irrelevant, as long as they remember the mismatched brothers.

Devara: Part 1 is ambitious, exhausting and so high-decibel that when it’s finished, after nearly three hours, you might need to pause and reorient to reality. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Derrickson offers a handful of memorable shots and genuine jump scares, but the director’s attempts to build dread in these moments come too late to have their intended impact. With so much of the film dedicated to establishing Levi and Drasa’s backstory and their romance, The Gorge is slow to get going on the action.

Director Campbell clearly knows his way around this sort of material, resulting in some tense, well-staged action sequences that make Cleaner reasonably diverting for its concise running time. But the film never achieves the heights of the classic actioners that clearly inspired it, and its overuse of familiar genre tropes (for once, can’t the main villain be uncharismatic, like so many in real life?) soon becomes wearisome.

Despite solid performances from Edebiri and Malkovich, Opus never takes off. It mostly meanders, relying on leaden expository monologues to move the plot, and rarely delivers on the promised horror of its atmosphere.

Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap has a creepy sense of dread, striking images of invasive nature and an intriguing baseline about the otherworldly properties of sound, making it a somewhat promising debut feature.

Despite its shadowy visuals and insidious soundscape, it’s neither frightening enough to play like full-fledged horror, nor complex or curious enough to pack much weight as psychological drama.

Gates offers an incredibly compelling premise, shedding light on the scale of military propaganda in the United States, but in taking on so much, her film ends up not saying enough.

With Game Changer (which this critic saw dubbed in in Hindi), Shankar’s signature maximalist storytelling instincts have gone into overdrive. Every beat is heightened. Every expression is exaggerated. Every emotion is drilled into our brains. For two hours and 45 minutes, this film veers between ridiculous and even more ridiculous.

Taking place in real time, Mercy mercifully moves along fairly briskly. But after it’s over you’ll definitely feel the need for a digital detox.

As riveting as she is, Roberts ultimately is ill-served by a film so studiously cryptic that it ends up just frustrating. To be fair, there are several electric confrontations, distributed evenly enough to ensure that After the Hunt remains absorbing. But even so, this is a date movie to be used in relationship sabotage maneuvers.

I wish I could say I found Hot Milk affecting, but it’s continually dragged down by inertia, by a writer-director whose approach is too intellectual to give space to emotion.

My problem with The Age of Disclosure isn’t the lack of opposing voices. It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.

The problems with The Rivals of Amziah King emerge in the stitching, when Patterson (working with editor Patrick J. Smith) must turn a series of fine vignettes and memorable musical interludes into a coherent narrative.

The film is the sort of mindless, glossy entertainment tailor-made for streaming, even if its large-scale action sequences and exciting locations would look great on the big screen.

Wright seems almost constrained by a film that ends up neither as compelling nor as deep nor as wildly entertaining as it seems to believe.

On a few occasions the film lives up to its potential, but overall it's too slick and unintentionally funny. [12 Jan 1998]