A.A. Dowd

The more The Watchers comes together, the less interesting it becomes. It’s a puzzle best left unsolved.

The movie leaps to life whenever the bullets start flying. It's the generic gangland stuff in between that's not up to snuff, even with Hardy lending his trusty gruffness to the haunted-cop boilerplate.

The American remake of Speak No Evil mostly recaptures the squirmy dread of its shocking Danish inspiration… until it doesn’t.

From the sincerity of the lead performances to the cartoonish gore offered by Werewolves Within director Josh Rubenn. There are much worse ways to spend Valentine’s Day than a genre cocktail for saps and gorehounds alike.

It’s nice to see June Squibb land a starring role for once, but her quest for revenge in this Sundance crowdpleaser is more cutesy than charming.

This buddy comedy lives or dies on your affection for its stars, offering complementary shades of good-natured Bostonian ineptitude.

Better jokes, better imagery, and two (!) inspired comic performances by Jim Carrey give this Sonic sequel an edge on its predecessors.

As a blunt object, a machine built to put nerves on edge and fingers over eyes, Annabelle is still crudely (and cruelly) effective. Fear comes cheap.

McLean puts the pedal to the metal from the start, forgoing suspense in favor of instant, gruesome gratification.

Birth briefly staggers to life when the topic of race comes up — not because that angle on Night hasn’t been covered ad nauseam, too, but simply because it seems to inspire the most provocative discussion.

Payne, who never met pathos he didn’t feel inclined to puncture with slapstick humor, has somehow made his best drama and his worst comedy rolled into one.

A comedy that proves that an appealing cast (Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore) and a wonderful premise are no guarantee of big laughs.

1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.

Shelton, who used to make scrappy, wholly improvised indie gabfests, continues to sand down the rough edges of her style, so that each new movie feels a little less distinct — and a lot less transgressive — than the one before it.

World War Z bucks the current trend in summer blockbusters by feeling weirdly understuffed. It’s an episodic adventure without enough episodes.

Unfortunately, this handheld coming-of-age story is frequently interrupted by variably convincing stretches of channel surfing, as though someone recorded over much of the former with the latter. And even with pros like Charlyne Yi and Kerri Kenney lending their deadpan chops, real weird TV is funnier. Weirder, too.

There’s no doubt that Spielberg has made The BFG his own, drowning everything in the tinkle of a familiar John Williams score and even managing to incorporate a kid in a red coat. But maybe this is one story that didn’t need to become his own, or really anyone else’s. State-of-the-art special effects are no substitute for Dahl’s inviting prose, for the dreams he blew into adolescent imaginations.

Here and there, some of this starts to feel a little less like homework and more like fun. Though part one used up many of the good monsters—like Medusa and the hydra—part two is a fleeter entertainment, free of origin-story requirements.

If it’s possible to be both impressed and appalled by a movie’s pull-no-punches savagery, Maniac earns that dubious distinction.

[An] unconvincing, oppressively somber take on the Lizzie Borden story.

With The Monster, writer-director Bryan Bertino plants a prickly mother-daughter drama at the center of a violent creature feature. It’s an intriguing combination in theory, but the individual elements both feel a little half-baked, and stirring them up into one doesn’t help. They’re two mediocre tastes that taste mediocre together.

he performances are strong, and the situation itself presumably carries a harrowing veracity, but an ordeal is about all the movie offers. Shaking your head over and over again is the only suitable reaction.

Certainly, viewers may feel a kind of seasickness, their stomachs doing somersaults during this supremely discomfiting movie.

Unfortunately, the script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski is clunky—in the convoluted nature of its reveals and also in the sometimes-baffling behavior on display.

Wahlberg, delivering a performance that feels like community service, just isn’t up to driving a drama whose conflict is almost entirely internal; his default setting of sneering irritation is the wrong tool for the job. It leaves you wondering if this should have more fully been Jadin’s story, especially given the sensitivity of Miller’s turn.

For anyone who’s followed Favreau’s career since the mid-’90s, the temptation to read Chef as veiled autobiography will be overpowering.

The result, unfortunately, is a movie featuring a teenage hero who spends most of his screen time watching from the sidelines, passively observing events that just sort of happen around him.

As interesting as it is to see the filmmaker move out of his wheelhouse, Tom At The Farm is neither dramatically satisfying nor psychologically convincing. Something was clearly lost in its transition from stage to screen.