Amy Nicholson

Together, these tales feel like the hangover at a wake for mankind. The film’s dusky pastel color palette recalls dying flowers on a grave. Yet, even as the synth score mutters anxiously in the background, Alexander takes a prankish delight in her own doom and gloom.

"Dark Web” skates by on saturated nastiness, one terrific kill, and the audience’s engagement in seeing if the filmmakers can pull off the stunt. Barely, but it’s fun to watch them try.

The script is ridiculous, the bodies are great and the film skates so long on the line between knowingly bad and bad that by the time the body count hits 100 and the booby count hits 1000, we've lost track of the difference.

The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene.

Free Samples is a film about wasting time, and it feels like it. Despite clocking in at 79 minutes, Jay Gammill's comedy drags by no fault of its delightfully sour lead.

Mr. McKay’s comedy is at its best when his tone is big, ridiculous and cheerfully subversive.

An uneven, uneasy fable of desire.

Even if you don’t know her music, the film still works an acidic sketch of fame.

Deep Water is a wickedly funny potboiler about sex, gossip and hypocrisy that Mr. Lyne has transplanted from the suburban Northeast to New Orleans, a city that sweats menace despite the film’s chilly blue cinematography and coldly erotic score.

Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that's at once bland, well-intentioned, and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children.

Blast Beat cares far more about testing the limits of the family’s togetherness, and while the resolution doesn’t have the sweetness of a pop song, Arango is happy to settle for heavy metal discordance.

No Iraq movie has better captured our country’s nationalistic nonsense, and the inner chaos of the men and women returning home to this noise.

Director Francis Lawrence drains the pleasure out of seeing a pretty girl in her panties. He refuses to let us leer at Jennifer Lawrence’s long legs without a jab of shame. What’s left is cold and perverse, heat provided only by the satisfying ways Dominika out-thinks the creeps while pretending to be their “magic pussy.”

Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

David Gordon Green's Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy.

There's no credibility to Arielle and Brian's romance. We get why he likes her — who wouldn't? But what does she see in this nine-years-younger naif she treats like a slow child?

Frost can play lovable losers in his sleep, but to succeed, Cuban Fury has to make him dance. A fat man falling down gets a cheap laugh; a fat man with magic feet makes us cheer. Director James Griffiths splits the difference between ridicule and respect, and the resulting comedy is as trite and cloying as a rum and coke.

The bigger the scope and the more Cooper’s psychology is explained, the less taut the film feels.