Nick Allen

Interceptor is about putting on a show, and Pataky has the muscular charisma to carry it.

Take away the cameos—in the recording booth, and animated on-screen—and you get something that's a little too close to the same old junk.

The Takedown works overtime to uphold the façade of heroic policing in the most generic way possible, for god knows what greater good.

It's ambitious, but with such hand-holding dramatic direction and a dreary visual palette that never creates terror out of random corn stalks, it couldn’t be more dull.

It is too touch-and-go, too speculative about her life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose.

While this documentary from Alison Klayman can be insightful in taking us inside a phenomenon, its approach can be too broad, with filmmaking that relies on its own weaning sense of trendy.

Even though it’s more of a vision board of what it could be, the film introduces a nifty premise that recalls not just “A Nightmare on Elm Street” but how that series was able to make multiple irresistible sequels. Choose or Die is also the rare mid-budget Netflix movie that gets better and better as it goes along, owning its weirdness and not playing it easy.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

With fascinating confidence, “See You Then” honors the gradual evolution of a long talk, so much that their literal pacing reads as its only unnatural flourish—they take several minutes to walk about two blocks. But that rhythm, of one step at a time, nearly takes on a hypnotic effect.

Moonshot is the kind of movie that’s frustrating because of what makes it endearing—there’s so much that makes you wish it were more original. No rom-com set in space should feel this ordinary.

7 Days has an overall sweetness that keeps it charismatic for its 85-minute runtime, with an agile directorial eye that makes sure the back-and-forth scenes of them talking have enough life in them.

They’ve shared home movies previously, but this documentary—meaningful in concept, but fleeting in its expression—puts them in close-up, with Gainsbourg behind the camera in her debut.

When this time travel story is at its best, it gives Reynolds space to convey the frustration one can have about their past, including when facing their younger self. The movie doesn’t fill out this concept with too much imagination about time travel or villains, but it does wind up with a powerful parable about healing.

While its minimalism can make for a mixed bag of surprises, “Killing Ground” director Damien Power ensures that No Exit has enough of his own striking signature.

Studio 666 is the kind of broad horror-comedy that could certainly stand to be a little scarier, a little funnier, and more clever overall. But then again, no other horror-comedy stars rock band the Foo Fighters as themselves, which is the main pull for this special Foovie event.

There’s so much going on in Three Months, so many emotional pieces in motion, but very little of it is particularly moving.

This movie has Jeunet doing “The Jetsons” while ruminating on what a robot uprising might inevitably look like, but that proves to be less exciting than one could ever imagine.

Jenny Slate and Charlie Day deserve better than “I Want You Back,” a leaden rom-com that gives them a shot at being funny, charming, and sweet, only to squander it scene by scene.

Co-written with Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, “Moonfall” is a lumbering, long locomotive of one cliche attached to another, making time pass slowly even though there is so much juggling of these different one-dimensional relationships.

The Wasteland is the unique case of a horror movie with a more robust visual sense than a lot of its contemporaries, but that still doesn’t create a larger terror. It’s more the stuff of directors' reels, not nightmares.

There’s incredible merit in the action seen in “The Matrix Resurrections,” but those aren’t the elements that free the mind of the medium like bold storytelling, like “The Matrix” preached and then became a game-changing classic, only to become a docket for satisfying shareholders. Blue pill or red pill? It doesn’t matter anymore; they’re both placebos.

As the overly long movie becomes about 130 minutes of his own propaganda, Washington romanticizes an ideal of man that has never actually existed, instead of a human being who did.

A disastrous movie, Don’t Look Up shows McKay as the most out of touch he’s ever been with what is clever, or how to get his audience to care.

The extremes uncovered in this film become revealing of what we accept as necessary, in what we as a nation rationalize as justice even without procedure. It is eye-opening, and yet also like Gibney’s best work, affirming in the worst ways.

Try Harder! is a charming dark comedy with a light touch, with part of its self-deprecating humor right there in the title.

8-Bit Christmas may have a more grounded approach to gamer culture than you'd expect, but it’s constantly beat by its own limited imagination.

There are endless horror movies out there in which a slow burn seems like it's just killing time before it's actually time to kill. But "The Feast" does well with that dread—it's the main course that proves to be the rip-off, however gory, indulgent, and horror-ready it is.

Mayor Pete has a compelling subject, but it's most gripping when it’s trying to secure your curiosity, not just your future vote.