From visuals to music choice, there’s a lack of style here that is only further emphasized by the film’s refusal to focus.

Samuel, who is also a musician under the stage name The Bullitts, makes an auspicious debut as a feature filmmaker. He knows when to deliver the expected punch and when to add his unique flourishes. The Harder They Fall trots along with invigorating confidence, a vision keenly realized.

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 gap between fact and fiction is where Bergman Island finds its murmuring potency. Its maybe unanswerable questions of self and creation give Hansen-Løve’s finespun film a sneaking weight. Perhaps one point of art is the guessing.

The Last Duel is a surprising jumble, a motley assemblage of tones that often work in perverse harmony.

The film has a sneaky momentum.

This is not a considered look at someone’s life; it’s a cash-in that just wants to get to the tragic end, hoping that the audience will convince themselves that they felt something along the way.

The result is an extremely thorough documentation of events, and a literal one. The Rescue is not so much a film as it is a record.

It sounds strange to say of a film about such impossible sorrow, but Mass is thoroughly entertaining. Or maybe engrossing is a better word. Its incisive dialogue and nuanced performances demand our attention, inviting us into a roiling weather system of guilt and sadness. The experience proves oddly nourishing, clarifying.

Let There Be Carnage tries to recreate the first film’s giddy shock while also upping the ante, taking what audiences liked and slopping more of that onto their plates.

Coen and his acting troupe make dense language wholly legible, bending famous phrases into intriguing new shapes. The film moves at a pleasant clip, eschewing cinematic digressions and driving, like a dagger, to the heart of the story. It’s an efficient little film, despite its fussy aesthetics.

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

Karam makes an auspicious directorial debut, one that captures all the tense, rattling mood of his stage horror while giving it a new, decidedly cinematic shape.

It would be easy to get lost in all that technical detail, to figure the impression—both physical and vocal—is enough. But Chastain digs deeper than the aesthetics, and locates something crucial in Tammy Faye. It’s a genuine, deep-seated, perhaps ruinously naive compassion, which Chastain illustrates with great care.

Chastain pulls focus whenever she can, operating as one of the film’s main resources of levity and acerbic bite. I wish the movie had more of that energy—McDonagh keeps the proceedings oddly muted given the circumstances—but at least Chastain is there, pepping things up a bit.

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.

What works best about Belfast is what Branagh doesn’t do.

With The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal easily proves her talent and instinct as a director by unflinchingly infusing a great story with her own ideas and images‚ and assembling an unbeatable cast and crew (including Happy as Lazzaro and Never Rarely Sometimes Always cinematographer Hélène Louvart) to bring it home.

Perhaps the film’s thematic intentions are noble. But its execution is glib, never finding the right balance between compassion and leering.

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.

Mills makes this genre feel new and insightful, as if he’s one of only a few filmmakers who has tackled the complex dynamic between adult and child.

What keeps us invested is the cast’s invigorating performances.

With Dune, Villeneuve has the chance to right the wrongs of David Lynch’s 1984 misfire (a misfire according to some, anyway) and truly honor Herbert’s text. But Villenueve can’t help but lacquer it all up into something hyper polished and hard to the touch.

You’ll leave the film unable to stop thinking about its dimensions.

While the core narrative is plenty compelling in all its creeping dread and curiosity, The Power of the Dog is not too concerned with being about any one thing. The film’s secrets are revealed while new ones bloom into being. Life tumbles after life in the ecosystem of all of us, seething amid the dust clouds we can’t help but kick up.

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.

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.

Beckett moves through the film not as an invincible badass, but as a man who is tired and in a great deal of pain. And there is indeed no rest for the weary: when Beckett has a brief respite from his physical odyssey, the grief rushes back in. It’s all pretty difficult to watch, as it probably should be.