The movie’s energies drop perceptibly in the middle section; lines of dialogue are recited at a sluggish rate, with lengthy pauses, as if the pressure of the presiding theme had numbed the characters’ tongues.

If you’re slow, like me, and find yourself bemused by the chronology, don’t worry; your reward will be a topnotch twist toward the end. By rights, that should make you want to watch the movie all over again, in order to sort out what belongs where, except that everything about it is so scummy—even the sight of creamer being stirred into coffee makes you gag—that a second viewing would feel like the grimmest of grinds. Destroyer is a thriller, but only just.

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.

Miracle is busy on the eye. As in a documentary, we follow the characters around from one task, whether grim or menial, to the next. Stand back, however, and Apetri’s careful patterning can be discerned.

In spite of its noirish glow, De Palma's thriller is oddly unsuspenseful. Although his vaunted technique and Hitchcockian effects are all here, there's no life in the story (co-written by De Palma and David Koepp), and the last-minute burst of sentimentality is especially lame.

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

It's too long by half an hour, and the director, Ted Demme, can't hold onto a rhythm, but the actors are uniformly sharp, and so are the actresses.

The picture strains for seriousness now and then, but even when it makes a fool of itself it's still funny.

What’s jolting about Shyamalan’s film is its call to capitulation. The director puts the onus on the liberal and progressive element of American society to meet violent religious radicals more than halfway, lest they yield to even worse rages, lest they unleash an apocalypse.

Crimes of the Future is, for better and worse, a conceptual film; it’s less an experience than it is an idea, less a drama of characters’ experiences than an allegory for Cronenberg’s despairingly diagnostic view of present-day crimes, ones that society commits against society.

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.

The action is loud and flashy, but there isn't really much suspense. The movie operates in such well-charted waters that it feels less like a dangerous naval mission than like a luxury cruise: the accommodations are cozy and the activities carefully planned.

It’s a contemporary story that feels as if it has been worn away to a featureless, atemporal perfection of the sort that has been handed down, in the industry, through producers’ dictates and story conferences, and which filters into the world of independent filmmaking by way of film schools and handbooks, rounds of workshops and mentoring.

The writer and director, Jeremy Leven -- himself a former shrink -- has taken a heavy conceit and lightened it into comedy, which is what it deserves.

Often seems on the verge of being funny, but the humor is too clumsily forced.

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.

It’s no surprise that the film should so often stumble and trip, yet I would sooner watch it again and sort through my mixed feelings about it than revisit, say, the nullity of “Joker.” There is genuine zest in the unease of Jojo Rabbit, and it’s weirdly convincing as a portrait of childhood under surreal strain.

What is most disconcerting about Dominik's film is his choice of rhythm. We pass from reams of conversation, or cantankerous monologue, to throes of extreme violence, then back to the flood of words - most of them to do with buying, selling, slaying, whoring, or doing time.

As a rule, movies about toys need to be approached with extreme caution; some of them have been bad enough to count as health hazards. This one is the exception.

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.

Unbalanced and unjust, Spencer is nonetheless perversely gripping. It dares to unbend, playing the angry fool amid kings-to-be, queens, princes, princesses, and all that jazz.

Hill lacks the conviction or the temperament for all this brutal buffoonishness, and he can't hold the picture together; what does is the warmth supplied by Paul Newman.

Paltrow is as radiant as ever, but she keeps picking parts that focus on technical skills like accents -- she has yet to perform the real star's trick of being herself, and inviting the audience to identify.

The picture is swill, but it isn't a cheat; it's an entertaining marathon of Grade-A destruction effects, with B-picture stock characters spinning through it.

Walter Hill has a dazzling competence as an action director; he uses the locale for its paranoia-inducing strangeness (it suggests Vietnam), and he uses the men to demonstrate what he thinks it takes to survive. Its limitation is that there's nothing underneath the characters' macho masks.

Judas and the Black Messiah needed a coup of casting in order to find a performance that’s up to the character of Hampton. Kaluuya’s seems, instead, to render the extraordinary more ordinary, to indicate and assert Hampton’s unique, historic character rather than embodying it.

The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.

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.