Allen is too self-aware and cold a creative personality to create a genuine tragedy in Wonder Wheel. Instead, he makes a gesture towards a tragic situation.

You can practically see the more complicated layers of the two men through the eyes of the performers alone, but they’re both left staring at a story that almost stubbornly refuses to excavate them.

Even with a more gleeful performance by Kate Hudson, Shell is merely a fine film that’s far too tame to completely pay off.

There are too few real humans in Life After Beth, resulting in a lack of both brains and heart.

The new film is ripe for big laughs with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson as, respectively, the snobby British bombshell with sticky fingers and the rough-around-the-edges though equally cunning con artist, but neither actress is given rich enough material to bring the film’s most interesting ideas to the finish line.

That Peaceful occasionally takes us out of the patients’ world and into the emotional strain put onto the nurses and other doctors is a deft way of showing how cancer affects all.

The Pass is finally nothing more than a modest stage adaptation and a vehicle for Tovey, but on that level it is focused and skillful.

This “based on a true story” underdog tale is infectiously determined to make you fall in love with it, like a mangy dog that plops its head in your lap and gazes adoringly at you until you scratch it behind the ears. Eventually, you give in and scratch. And then you wash your hands.

Fisk and Hoffman (the younger) make a fine pair on screen with a natural chemistry; it’s nice to see her back in a romantic leading role. You just wish the two had more substantive material to work with. In fact, the Hallmark holiday version of this film would likely have been more entertaining, or at least shorter.

The gendered themes at play here do little to boost the quality of Buck and Schlingmann’s storytelling, which is too tangled to follow at times.

For all its telling — and showing — of sex, Bloom Up never really gets going until its final few minutes. And that late-stage twist occurs during the rare scene in which everyone is fully clothed.

The film's look and feel are far more purposeful and propulsive than the story and script, but even so, Space Station 76 has more than a few laughs inside its brazen bizarreness.

There is a tug-of-war here between [Bailey's] attempt to explore her characters in a very serious way with a consistent emotional basis and the demands of the material as written by Glen Lakin, which is clearly meant to be played as farce most of the time, particularly towards the end.

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

As a portrait of an author on the verge of a breakthrough, this is a run-of-the-mill, occasionally clumsy biopic; as for contextualizing Christmas, it never explains how it functioned before Dickens and only briefly mentions how it changed after him.

Deception, as a novel and as a film, offers a curio for obsessives, a postcard for archivists, and a not-too-interesting bump in the road for everyone else.

Sincere but uneven, professionally acted but amateurishly presented — there’s a lot to like about Family Squares, but there’s always something getting in the way of its intended impact.

As a 20-minute short or even a 50-minute TV program, London Road might maintain its sharpness and its potency, but as a feature film, its cleverness wears a bit thin and its messaging gets too overblown.

Like pouring yourself a warm glass of milk or slipping into a hot bath, the languid and visually sumptuous romance lulls you into a sleepy sense of calm, never asking for more than gentle aesthetic appreciation for its impeccable craft.

Youmans ultimately grapples with several tough themes that center the black Baptist South in a way that is rarely seen on screen. Even so, the inept editing and screenplay ultimately bring down Burning Cane.

No amount of self-referential jokes can make up for a lack of heart and spirit. Thankfully, Annie lacks neither.

It’s undoubted that the Gibbons twins were both original thinkers who were victimized by a system that did not recognize them as autonomous people, but it’s unfortunate that The Silent Twins is keen to do the same, reducing them to vehicles for aesthetic flexing and moral lecturing, rather than, as they themselves would have requested, simply letting them be.

Ellis and editor Richard Mettler craft an agonizing and unforgettable finale; if their sense of pacing had been as sharp throughout, “Anthropoid” might have fulfilled its potential.

Even flashy, grumpy Jones can’t act like a defibrillator powerful enough to crank this generic movie into competition for Statham’s better solo outings.

For what it’s worth, The Upside is exactly what you think it is: the latest Hollywood effort that aims to show that a black man and a white man with seemingly nothing in common can see past their differences and develop a mutual friendship. It’s just as pat and basic as it looks and sounds.

One of the keys to executing a high-concept premise is knowing when to show restraint, when to say no to an impulse for something aesthetically “cool” if it means crafting a more compelling narrative. That subtlety is in frustratingly short supply here.

Mackenzie shaved 20 minutes or so after its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, but there’s still no getting around the fact that what starts as a human drama of occupation, unease, brotherhood, and political fracturing invariably must give way to the mechanics of lengthy, loud, and splatter-enhanced combat.

It’s all about radical acceptance but can only talk about the real-world application of its message in general metaphors, so people who don’t actually accept 'weird,' 'different' kids won’t have to think about how wrong they are.