Desplechin and his co-writers have created an enticing set of characters who arouse a viewer’s curiosity not only about their connections to one another but about their relation to the world in which they live. But in “Two Pianos” there is no such world.

Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow.

For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention.

The script’s blank spots and evasions leave the drama feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfying.

The Drama plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.

Unfortunately, The Bride! falls victim to this hollowing out of character, and the result feels simultaneously like a reduction and an expansion—or call it an inflation, an accretion of curious traits that crop up conveniently but remain undiscussed and undeveloped.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.

Foster gives a taut performance despite the unstrung absurdities of the plot. The story is anchored in Paris’s Jewish community, but the context remains anecdotal and unexplored.

The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.

Unfortunately, the film only hints at its larger ambitions and leaves them undeveloped. The story is told mainly methodically, sometimes deftly, but with little verve, relying on a generalized sensitivity that never approaches imaginative curiosity. It holds attention as a yarn but doesn’t build the incidents of its plot into a world view.

Sandler isn’t doing a strained meta riff on his persona; he’s playing an honest-to-God character, plagued by stress, uncertainty, and an unfashionably big heart. There’s art to his performance, and no shortage of life.

Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm.

The emptiness of “Die My Love” isn’t a failure of adaptation but of observation; what’s missing isn’t a sense of drama but a sense of life.

Cooper’s movie certainly doesn’t make Bruce’s childhood look happy, but in limiting Bruce’s retrospective gloom to the personal realm, it ignores the singer-songwriter’s wider social vision. The movie doesn’t have the courage of the real-life Springsteen’s convictions.

The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford.

Only Johnson’s committed, precise, and vigorous performance suggests the power that inherently surges through the story and that the movie leaves nearly untapped.

Really, the problem with Eddington is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious.

It’s hard not to conclude that, in the case of “Eden,” Howard simply isn’t mean enough for this material. His temperament is better suited to stories of heroic resilience than ones of greed, bloodlust, and cynical isolationism.

Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem.

Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.

Rather than reconsidering history by intimate acquaintance with a lesser-known hero, it turns its hero into a stick figure no more personalized, complex, or contextualized than a comic-book creation. Far from arousing curiosity, the movie forecloses it.

Tsangari’s view of her world is blocked by her ideas; she is so concerned with what she has to say that she doesn’t see what she’s not showing.

Weapons is essentially a mystery, and a good one, if conventional...yet Cregger’s storytelling is slick and textureless, featuring characters whose personalities are reduced to their plot functions and a town that has no characteristics beyond its response to calamity.

Gunn is admirably overflowing with imagination, but he squanders his best material.

In striving for more than the original, it achieves far less.

The Life of Chuck confronts the mysteries of life and the universe and leaves no wonder at all.

I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, Materialists trips up on its own high-mindedness.

Ballerina—like the four John Wick films that it’s spun off from—is, strangely, far better at story than at action.

A movie needn’t be a work of art—and "The Final Reckoning," the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark.

The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording.

It’s no “Barbie”; the action is blatantly promotional and brazenly conventional. Nonetheless, it’s got enough personality to make me wish that Hess had had a still freer hand.

Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power—by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself.

Tasked with reinterpreting one of the most frightening and emblematic villains in the Disney canon, Gadot evinces no feel for malevolent cunning, or even knowing cynicism; smacked down repeatedly by her Magic Mirror, she can barely conjure a decently icy glare in response.

As a creative work, it’s mild, but it’s audacious nonetheless, and its audacity lies in its very existence—its dramatization of the making of one of the most famous (and, now, infamous) movies of all time, its portrayal of two of the greatest actors of all time, and its reconstruction of the scene of a moral crime and the crime’s agonizing aftermath.

With its clean lines and precise assembly, it's nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that's still in search of its characters.

The images aren’t only stripped of superfluities; they’re hermetically sealed off from anything that could impinge from offscreen, from the world at large. They feel designed, deadeningly, to mean just one thing.

What’s lost is the way a colossal spirit such as Dylan confronts everyday challenges with a heightened sense of style and daring.

Coming from such a probing director, the new work is a disappointment, and yet there’s something diagnostically very interesting about the movie’s failings.

Maria gets lost in a tangle of clichéd bio-pic narrative stuffing, and runs superficially through the protagonist’s reminiscences by way of an embarrassing contrivance.

Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life.

We are not not entertained.

Instead of suggesting depths of thought and feeling lying below the surfaces of busy lives, the movie’s exaggerations and artifices merely serve Audiard’s vigorous yet narrowly deterministic approach to the story.

It’s a strange movie—far better as a concept than as a drama, though the concept is strong enough to provide a sense of inner experience, making up for what the outer, onscreen experience lacks.

Fiennes and Tucci, in particular, spin dialogue with athletic deftness, but they and the rest of the cast are burdened with embodying stock characters who exist only through a salient trait or two. Instead of rising to the awe-inspiring heights of their settings, the refinement of the performances is narrowed to monotony.

There’s a significant work of art lurking within “Anora,” but it’s confined within the limits of a potboiler.

The supporting performances, impressive as they are, only sketch characters, rather than embodying them—because Abbasi’s merely efficient direction leaves the actors little time and little space onscreen to delve into their roles.

The movie tells an admirable and moving story about a woman overcoming her troubles, but it arouses no aesthetic interest, no sense of discovery in real time, no sense of creative risk.

In Phillips’s new sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” he walks back the hectic ideology that gave that earlier movie its energy, however dubious; the sequel is merely innocuous, grandiose in its scale of production but minor in its dramatic substance.

An action drama about the widespread legitimation of abuses by police departments, it arrives onscreen with a jolt but then subsides into a comfort zone of formulaic tropes.

It’s as if a filmmaker’s quest for dramatic universality has deprived his characters of their particulars, has pulled them out of time and space and rendered them all too abstract. What remains is a mechanism of thrilling power that’s missing a touch of mere humanity.

Like Cooper, Shyamalan confidently sees through the vanity. His vision is a sardonic one, and it feels as if his cinematic smirks conceal rage at the impotence and banality of which ordinary life is made.

This impersonal exaltation of heroic exploits leaves an unexplored dilemma at the foundation of the film.

The pieces are clever enough that the film is rarely boring—it keeps a viewer hoping that the spark of life will strike sometime before the lights go up. But it’s not to be: it remains a movie in search of an animating spirit.

The dramatic format seems borrowed from television, with multiple threads jumpily interweaved, to ward off impatience. With so many balls in the air at once, the movie lacks the kind of patient observation that this story demands.

It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact.

Yes, we all contain multitudes. And, yes, we must learn to take the bad with the good—a lesson that Inside Out 2 bears out more dispiritingly, I think, than its makers intended.

The Bikeriders displays the cost of noninterventionist direction, of sticking to source material with a self-inhibiting fidelity. These characters are still in search of their auteur.

An intricate time-jumping framework is a large part of what makes the film distinctive, but the compromises made to achieve this are responsible for a pervasive feeling of emptiness.

As a tribute to the work that journalists do, Civil War feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions.

In trying to do too much in its mere eighty-seven-minute span, “Kim’s Video” does too little. For all Redmon’s self-described passion for movies and obsession with the Kim’s Video trove, the film has little to say about a wider view of video-store life and its relationship to the movie-viewing experience.

Ultimately, the true genre of “Love Lies Bleeding” is a Kristen Stewart movie. That genre, too, is one that the director neither expands nor reinvents.

The result is a mere yarn that, lacking any sense of meaningful retrospect at a quarter century’s distance, remains untethered at either end of its time line and merely goes slack.

Rather than offering a stark and incisive vision, this aesthetic of tacitness delivers a sentimentalized prettiness. The results are merely vague, in a way that seems willfully naïve about Japan, about labor, and about art.

Ennio turns out to be overlong, overblown, and larded with such praises that Morricone, a modest if determined soul, would blush to hear them.

The paradox is poignant: the movie is, at its best, so alive to its characters’ immediate experience that it’s all the more regrettable that we do not really know them at all.

As a thriller, regrettably, “I.S.S.” fails to fulfill its mission. Any air of plausibility soon leaks out of the plot, and the whole thing drifts into silliness, tricked out with familiar tropes.

The failure of The Rider to see Brady in his intellectual and experiential specificity, to render him as interesting as the dramatic shell in which Zhao places him, is a failure of directorial imagination.

Spurning a fruitless bid at comprehensiveness, Cooper has conjured something as restless and as headlong as his subject.

Glazer’s movie is a presentation of nearly unfathomable horrors by way of bathos, alluding to enormities in the form of minor daily inconveniences. There’s conceptual audacity in the effort, yet Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ incuriosity about Willy is matched by their incuriosity about the star’s range and depth.

Large in conception, it comes across as small of spirit, cramped in its sympathies and crabby in its attitudes.

If the movie falters, it’s because, as a bio-pic, it cannot do otherwise. Even the most expert of storytellers is defeated by the essential plotlessness of the form: one damn thing after another.

The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished.

There’s enough going on in The Marvels—enough situations with dramatic potential, enough twists with imaginative power—to develop several decent movies. Unfortunately, they’re snipped and clipped, jammed and rammed, dropped into the movie (and swept out of it) with an informational indifference that doesn’t even have the virtue of speed.

The calculated silences and cagey revelations result in a movie of truncated characters, with truncated subjectivity, trimmed to fit the Procrustean confines of the script.

Despite the shafts of black comedy, and a sudden ruckus of violence, The Killer is oddly calculated and cooked up; it’s easier to be excited and amused by the proceedings than to be stirred or convinced.

Despite Cornwell’s striving for reflexivity, for getting behind the onscreen talk to explore his relationship to Morris, nothing so dramatic takes place; the high-stakes mind games that he likes to think he’s playing never really occur. The Pigeon Tunnel is nonetheless an absorbing, colorful self-portrait.

This movie (directed by Sam Wrench) hardly adds another level of experience to the performances, because its visual composition, moment to moment, is burdened by convention and complacency. This doesn’t get in the way of the music, but it disregards the authenticity of Swift’s presence, the physical side of her performance.

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

Who needs a movie that is almost all predators, with barely a word from their prey?

Dumb Money, touching on questions of the authority of personality and the importance of nonfinancial—even completely irrational—motives in the investment world, offers a gleeful romp through strange and treacherous territory that merits a closer, more careful look.

The experience of watching Bottoms is weighed down by the movie’s thin drama, hit-or-miss comedy, and merely functional direction—pictures of actors acting.

This is not a question of a movie selling its soul. The soul is in the selling.

Oppenheimer sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance.

Barbie is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter.

Biosphere, though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself.

So heavily does the movie strain for offbeat detail—a killer who watches cartoons at full blast; Jay equipped with a neck brace and a leaf blower—that it refreshes one’s respect for Wes Anderson, whose eye for oddities remains clear and bright.

Even if you regard the latest movie as a box of tricks, you have to admire the nerve with which Johansson, as Midge, delves into that box and plucks out scraps of coolly agonized wit.

It’s almost as if the movie were following the blueprint of a moral scheme, like the layout of a herbaceous border, and plausibility be damned.

Given this mockable array, Holofcener goes surprisingly easy on her troupe of fools. Could it be that, over the years, her approach to the hypersensitive has lost a pinch of sourness and grown more sympathetic?

BlackBerry plays like a prototype still waiting to be realized, a sketch that’s still undeveloped.

The movie is grandiose but not impressive, elaborate but not eye-catching; its most poignant simulation is the effort to make it feel like a movie for adults, with grownup concerns, which remain dramatically undeveloped but are delivered with a thudding earnestness.

The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life.

The story of young George’s childhood and rise to fame has a tense and turbulent charm, but the story of the professional heavyweight’s dash to the championship and everything that follows (up through the nineteen-nineties) has a whiff of a ghostwritten corporate autobiography.

To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality.

As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter.