Andrew Crump

While the director clearly has a few tricks up his sleeve for hitting his viewers with the heebie jeebies, what he doesn’t have, at least for The Sonata, is a sense of how to weave those tricks into a unified, cohesive narrative.

Juvenile is as juvenile does, but the Broken Lizard fellows supplement their puerile nonsense with abiding endearment. They’re idiots, but sincere, disarming idiots. Like the characters they play in both movies, they mean well, but meaning well comes in second to antics when spending your career making concerted efforts to avoid responsibility.

Three films into his career, Pesce is batting below average: Last year, he dropped his inventive sophomore stunner, Piercing, and demonstrated range and precision not as evident in his hollow, unrepentantly nasty debut The Eyes of My Mother. With The Grudge, the worst proclivities of that movie override the sensibilities of Piercing and combine with studio horror’s “just play the hits” ethos, resulting in one of the year’s most unpleasant releases to date.

It’s possible for cinema to weave this many themes and concerns together into one cohesive film. The Unforgivable simply doesn’t.

As it stands, Gibson and Goggins carry the show and the Nelms stick to their stern tone without wavering. Whatever other marks the film misses, at least it has conviction.

Everything about Pitch Perfect 3’s foundation is openly half-baked. If it winked at its own indifference anymore than it already does, you might mistake its indifference for outright contempt.

Farrelly’s too busy making a Big Important Movie instead of making a movie that matters.

After storing up goodwill with its construction, melodrama and lead performance, The Visitor pulls back the curtain on its narrative, and its revelation, put vaguely, is a bummer.

Avnet likely means well, just as Rokeach meant well. Three Christs needs more than a deep focus on the Christs themselves, and on the system that so utterly failed them. It needs to focus on Stone, and on the collision between ego and benevolence that led to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti’s birth. That should be the story.

Behind You stumbles on inconsistency at best and hesitation at worst.

Trimming the film’s manipulations and inessential qualities would only improve it, but judicious editing would leave very little meat on its bones.

Chaos Walking feels like a condensement of Ness’ trilogy of books instead of a straightforward translation of the first, and consequently there’s too much that needs to happen in too slim a running time, which leaves little space for making the movie’s conflicts matter.

Life Upside Down is a clunky, graceless movie, but it’s utterly engrossing as a stage for letting Odenkirk, Mitchell, Huston and the rest vent their own stir craziness. If you think of the film as more of an outlet than a functioning narrative, it gains value. But that reflective detail isn’t enough to hold our attention, no matter how likable and gifted its authors.

Mute is in desperate need of a firmer hand. Once upon a time, that hand might have been Jones’. Now he’s invisible in his own pastiche.

But there’s so much done wrong as the film tries to be funny that when it is funny, the funniness goes down like a bitter pill: Why can’t it be good all the time?

No one can top Hooper or “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or even match them. Garcia is smart enough not to put on airs. He just lets Leathersaw rip.

It’s genre salad, and every ingredient is wilted at a moment in America where Kings’ historical makeup remains fresh.

Granted, the film might not have turned out much better had Smit stuck with one perspective or the other, but at least it would have had constancy. Instead, it reads strictly as a video game, sans the requisite interactive gratification.

The Book of Henry means well, but it doesn’t do well. It does incoherent pastiche and self-congratulatory pap instead.

Kids deserve better entertainment than Dolittle. They deserve not to have their intellect insulted with half-assed celebrity vocal cameos and a plot that concludes not with a bang, but with a fart joke. Neither Gaghan, nor his ensemble, nor Universal have an excuse. Downey doesn’t either.

Imagine spending an hour and a half or so watching a film that, the minute the credits roll, dissolves from the mind like cotton candy in hot water. That’s Vanquish. Nothing that happens throughout its narrative happens for any good reason, other than the plot dictates it must for the sake of limping to the next scene.

From top to bottom, The Last Days of American Crime is a lumbering referential malfunction. Nothing about it works; everything about it is offensive.

The Emoji Movie’s most insidious trait is its surface-level innocuousness.

For a production founded on a tried and true indie formula – start with your characters, add in existential malaise, substitute plot with antics and awkward conversation – Pet Names is made with remarkable urgency

Without spoiling either Max Cloud’s action or its comedy, Owen makes the running gag about Max’s macho bluster into some of the sharpest gaming criticism released this year.

The drama rests on their efforts to claim self-agency that the circumstances of their success have accidentally denied them. The effect of the message and the medium is trim and unsparing; the sendoff is surprisingly uplifting. Altogether, the package is remarkable.

The Last Matinee embraces the cat-and-mouse game between the killer and those to be killed as horror’s naughty pleasure. It’s central to the genre’s function in cinema.