Somehow, a James novella whose subtext has been debated for over a century has been rendered almost free of subtext—and it sort of works.

Nosferatu is a sensory pleasure. But on a story level, it leaves much to be desired.

The nightmare that unfolds is certainly effective. At the same time, there's an emptiness at the movie's core.

Lizzie isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t accomplish all that it wants to—and all I wanted it to. We’re never as immersed in its psychological swirl as we should be, and every character in it is either such a creep or a flinching headcase that it’s hard to get our emotional hooks in any of them.

McCarthy’s sly, amoral performance is far and away the best part of the film. Every time she’s onscreen, the movie finally seems, well, animated.

In picture form, Cavalcade is a superlative newsreel, forcibly strengthened by factual scenes, good music, and wonderful photography. It is marred by pat and obvious dramatic climaxes, and by a conclusion which is anti-climactical and meaningless.

Director Olivia Wilde has made an obvious and intermittently entertaining sci-thriller, one that borrows heavily from many better things but uses those pilfered parts effectively enough. For a while, anyway.

The film doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, or to retain audience interest. Jackman, dutiful thespian as always, gives it his all, but the specter his character is running after doesn’t have enough shape, or meaning.

I remain as curious as ever to see what Goddard does next. But this film, for all its canny presentation, is a mishmash of compelling narrative premises clumsily fused together. It manages to be both overwrought and under-developed, disappointing less for what it is than for what it could have been.

Lisa Frankenstein never gets its blood up, essentially playing as a casual mood piece rather than full-bodied horror or romance or comedy.

Its preference is for plucking the lowest hanging fruit and, more urgently, letting its own audience off the hook. Though Irresistible occasionally lands a point—a soul surfaces briefly, thanks to Cooper—the movie ultimately doesn’t have the guts to be the movie it needs to be.

Lister-Jones has a lot of good ideas that are given short shrift in this film. The potency of their implications is sapped by, among other things, the film’s seemingly hyper-conscious worry that it might put a foot wrong, especially within such a limited run time. Which may actually be The Craft: Legacy’s most modern dimension: it probably should have been a Netflix series.

The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.

Huppert and Jordan are certainly capable of turning up the volume, but for whatever reason they pull back in Greta, getting stuck somewhere between shlockly art and arty schlock. That’s not a good place to be, even if it is a Greta one.

Now 80 years old, Ford still glows with that unique charisma. It’s a shame, then, that Dial of Destiny doesn’t do right by its heroes—both Ford and Dr. Henry Jones, archeologist adventurer.

Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.

Glass is simply Shyamalan giving a book report on the basic structure of comic-caper narratives. There’s something endearing about his eagerness to explain these simple things, to show us what he knows. But Glass still suffers for that pedantic self-seriousness.

It pains me to say this. I spent a good deal of Us straining to like it, to get on its slightly preening wavelength, to be nourished by its heady stew of tropes. I couldn’t get there, though. As loaded up on stuff as Us is, there’s not enough to grab onto; it’s an alienating idea piece that lumbers away just as it’s about to reveal its true nature.

Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film.

Mostly, Tenet is a straightforward caper movie—maximally staged and very, very loud, but flimsy at its heart.

It’s an odd, lumbering patchwork of a film, occasionally fascinating but otherwise bloated and aimless.

It is a proper movie, one that probably would have fared decently in theatrical release. I believe there was genuine artistic intent put into the making of the film, which distinguishes Disenchanted from HP2 and so many other chintzy streaming endeavors.

The new film This Is Me…Now is a passion project, about passion, that curiously lacks that essential quality.

There isn’t truly standout work from anyone in the cast, even if the cast is what makes the movie work when it does work. Thank God for Hader’s unassuming sense of humor, Ransone’s jitteriness, Chastain’s steely, intuitive resolve.

Craig is certainly sent off in grand fashion, but it’s a grandiosity that isn’t quite fitting for his run of films.

Mitchell has made a stylish, occasionally intriguing film, by turns idiosyncratically funny and downright scary. But he says and shows a lot of bothersome things throughout, which I’m not quite sure how to approach.

The story’s themes—fear of death, societal atomization at the dawn of the information age—are clearly stated, but there’s little passion pulsing beneath the thesis. It’s a respectful, and respectable, film to a fault; it’s hard to locate the animating why of White Noise. Despite some alterations, the film seems to exist more as a recitation of the book than its own kind of invention.

Dumbo... makes a mishmash of less immediately cherished I.P. It’s corporatized sentiment from a director who seems caught between his own fading impulses and the surging ones of capital.