A.A. Dowd

The Eyes Of My Mother is a grotesque, depraved genre movie with the skin of an art film pulled tightly over its bones. If Ingmar Bergman had helmed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," it might look something like this exquisite nightmare.

It’s the kind of vanity-free, dignity-be-damned performance that Nicolas Cage regularly delivers, and by the time Keanu is bellowing hysterically about free pizza, the urge to surrender becomes difficult to resist.

Derives almost all of its very modest power from its relationship with its better half. McAvoy, turning up the broody charm, isn’t to blame. The trouble is that Conor’s drama, set against the backdrop of a lonely Manhattan, looks even more generic than Eleanor’s.

File 94 somewhere between the inspired, crowd-pleasing bloodshed of the second film and the series-low ineptitude of the third, V/H/S Viral.

With Damsel, the Zellners have made a kind of artisanal thrift-shop approximation of a Western.

Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.

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

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.

Fun, often funny, but about as disposable as an empty clip. We already have a Guy Ritchie. We don’t need another one.

The film is a one-joke comedy, but the joke is decent, and it helps that the actors know how to deliver it.

That it never quite sinks into caricature is thanks to the imposing presence in the lead. Refusing to fish for sympathy, even as his character circles the drain, Eidson delivers a complex, bravely off-putting performance.

In The Earth feeds the indiscriminate appetites of gorehounds and bong-rippers alike. Everyone else may find it as ghastly boring as the violence is just plain ghastly.

What the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lacks is not fidelity, but a spirit of genuine boyish fun.

There’s nothing remotely clever about this web-based fright flick, visually or conceptually. It’s flimsy genre junk of the most generic variety, just with a really groan-worthy Facebook spin.

Eli Roth finally adapts his fake trailer into a real slasher movie – and it’s not without its nasty charms

It may be the only official Star Wars feature that seems concerned exclusively with delivering a no-frills good time. Unfortunately, the film’s idea of a good time includes neither dynamite banter nor particularly memorable action scenes.

Here, it’s hard not to wish Downey were sparring with his costumed comrades again, instead of trading barbs with the far-less-colorful cast members — old and new — of this busy, sporadically diverting sequel.

This Godzilla doesn’t tap into deeper cultural anxieties the way its 60-year-old ancestor did. Nor does it engender much dramatic investment in its hero... Yet as pure popcorn entertainment, Godzilla delivers plenty of goosebumps.

Goldthwait is just having too much fun with his bantering couple and the eccentric, guitar-playing Bigfoot fanatics they encounter; the climax feels like an afterthought, the obligatory mayhem he had to provide as justification for making a shaggy romantic comedy about the cult of Sasquatch.

The film may upset and incense multiple sides of the political spectrum: those who see protestors as dangerous chaos agents and those who might be offended by a depiction of them that risks reflecting those fears. Ambivalence aside, it works as a kind of gripping apocalyptic horror movie. There are no zombies, but the rich get eaten.

For as much as Van Groeningen may have pulled from both of his mirrored source materials, for as deep as Chalamet digs into his character’s skirmish with own urges, Beautiful Boy holds us outside of his struggle.

Big Eyes has plenty of surface pleasures, but there was reason to expect more than that from it.

Macdonald exhibits a rewarding interest in the mechanics of running a sub—the complicated series of manual-labor tasks and coordinated analog processes required to keep one of these mighty boats afloat. It’s a submarine movie that cares how submarines work.

Skull Island has a lot of globe-trotting fun assembling its team of expendables.

For the most part, Veronica Mars plays like a very solid episode of the series, the kind unlikely to rank among fan favorites. It could, however, serve as fine fuel for a sequel, one that wouldn’t find Veronica resisting — for half of her time on screen — the urge to do what she does best. Keep your hearts (and wallets) open, marshmallows.

Bleed For This looks at Vinny Paz and sees only unshakable determination, and though there’s a certain queasy, even darkly comic thrill to seeing the man (courageously? foolishly?) bench press his injuries away, Teller can’t make much of a character out of nothing but raw conviction and a spectacularly crappy mustache.

Blending supernatural hokum with real horrors of U.S. history — namely, the MKUltra experiments performed by the CIA in the 1950s — The Banshee Chapter superficially resembles some lost episode of "The X-Files."

Because the film is meant to resemble documentary footage, West is forced to effectively “play dumb,” disguising his craftsmanship behind a lot of intentionally cruddy handheld camerawork. Still, that’d be less of a problem if the material he was gracelessly filming weren’t such run-of-the-mill claptrap.