The film is so busy working through what it’s trying to say that it loses its specific pacing and texture, tumbling toward a finale that subverts its own rules and confuses its argument.

Watching Love Lies Bleeding becomes a trial of patience, as the viewer waits for the plot to rise to meet the film’s good looks, or for those stylish aspects to blossom further into elegant abstraction. Instead, the film hobbles along, revealing ever more contrivances.

As was true of the stage production, the Dear Evan Hansen film wants to have it both ways, to see the awful lie at the center of Evan’s message of hope and to still have it play as hopeful.

Believer is in tortured dialogue with the original Exorcist, attempting to expand that film’s worldview while also paying reverent homage. It seems a bit guilty in its grave robbing—which is commendable, in a way—but it’s still doing the robbing.

It was hoped that the picture would have a large appeal for children, but the consensus of opinion seems to have been that even the Little Ones had rather see Jean Harlow any day, or else stay home in the nursery and play Tick-Tack-Toe.

The King of Staten Island is about growing and learning lessons—but not much is learned, and there’s little growth.

Layton’s portentous style does the story no favors. It’s all mood, mood, mood: sharp angles, dark interiors, long pauses, and quietly thrumming background music.

Smith is the lifeboat leading us to a more pleasurable film, one where it doesn’t so much matter that the sets look cheap, to say nothing of the CGI keeping Smith’s head plastered on a floating blue body.

Mulan is not awful. It’s just inert, a lifeless bit of product that will probably neither satisfy die-hards nor enrapture an entire new generation of fans.

While I admire the movie’s attempt to more deeply mine the identities of sister-princesses Anna (sweet, non-magical) and Elsa (restless, can control snow and ice), its discoveries are rushed and are served up half-baked.

Hopefully the deceptively stern ideological stance of The Secret has been dampened enough by Tennant and his cast’s efforts (the great Celia Weston is also a standout as Miranda’s hovering, lightly nagging mother-in-law) that only the better, more wanly encouraging notes of its decidedly capitalist fantasy will linger in people’s minds.

The film is mostly just a rehash of Lord of the Flies set in space. It turns down all the expected corridors and leaves most of its chilling implications unexplored.

With more patience, and a little rigor, Military Wives could have been a massive crowd-pleaser. As is, it’s only fleetingly charming.

Little clarity can actually be wrestled out of Cooper’s dank creation, a shallow, dour film that pays rote adherence to the mandate that horror must and should offer profound personal or social commentary.

The Cloverfield Paradox reaches for so many outlandish twists, turns, and sci-fi tropes that it forgets to build the one thing that genre stories of its kind need: believable and sympathetic human characters.

There are personal fragments of interest here; it’s useful to see how a man like Bannon narrates the story of himself, mythologizes himself, if only for the glimpses of worldview that sneak through in his presentation of the details. But the failure of Morris’s film is that it snuffs so much of that out.

The results are, understandably, thrilling at times, because violence is thrilling—vengeance even more so. But what it adds up to is a chaotic, misbegotten mess.

The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going.

We get a smattering of piercing thoughts about family separation as sanctioned by the U.S. government and a roster of deeply felt performances, but not the vision to see it through.

Second Act is a kitchen-sink drama that goes for surprise over real seriousness. It’s a Jennifer Lopez vehicle, and thus still worth a look. But Second Act’s second act proves pretty hard to follow.

For the most part, the film’s offhanded, listless vibe feels like an insult to viewers, especially those who will pay actual money to see this thing.

Sure, it provides some summer work for talented people—director F. Gary Gray, stars Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth—but beyond that, there’s no real justification for why the movie has to be here. And yet here it is, playing like a long trailer for a fuller movie that never arrives.

Lisbeth loses a bit of her individuality in her conversion to action star, becoming a more generic butt-kicker with plainer motivations.

Save for a few likable robots, The Electric State is charmless and curiously dull. It’s almost as if all the money and tech in the world are not sufficient replacements for imagination.

Last Christmas is not good. It’s not terrible, exactly, but it has the dismaying, tinny rattle of a thing not living up to its potential.

It’s a turgid rush toward a conclusion I don’t think anyone wanted, not the people upset about whatever they’re upset about with The Last Jedi (I feel like it has something to do with Luke being depressed, and with women having any real agency in this story) nor any of the more chill franchise devotees who just want to see something engaging.

All of this is not bad, exactly; it just takes no time to be good. World Tour is barely a movie. It’s a jumble of half-length animated music videos stitched together with the thinnest of throughlines.

There is simultaneously a beautiful movie and a good play hidden somewhere in Woody Allen’s new melodrama, Wonder Wheel, a slight and clunky period piece that offers teasing glimpses of something more rich and interesting.