Andrew Schenker

Cassavetes puts over this simple, poorly acted story with moody lighting, self-consciously "beautiful" gore, and an annoying penchant for impressionistic quick-cut flashbacks, all of which get in the way of rather than enhance the supposed fun.

One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.

Gentler and less aesthetically assaultive than offerings like 0s & 1s and Catfish, but it's not necessarily any subtler or more enlightening.

When Diana's fixations begin to take over, Fidell seems ill-prepared to steer the film into strictly psychological territory, resulting in a project that loses its fraught sense of control at the same moment as its embattled protagonist.

This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.

Awesomeness seems to be the chief quality prized by both the film and its characters; all other considerations--like safety, property damage, and especially good taste--are secondary.

Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.

What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.

With Danny Way almost never weighing in directly, the film's attempts to portray his story as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity scarcely registers.

This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.

Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.

At the center of the film, festering like an open sore, is the stereotype of the psycho lesbian bitch.

A little too deliberately balanced in its depiction of its three leads, but it largely makes up the difference with its informed grounding in the economic and social terrain of contemporary France.

Albatross is simply a compendium of bad ideas.

Mostly the movie's varied storylines cough up the same platitudes: being pregnant sucks, having young children is a misery, but it's all worth it when you're holding that newborn in your arms.

The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.

A movie whose cinematic ineptitude is matched only by its ideological rottenness, Act of Valor features a cast of real-life active-duty Navy SEALS in order to grant the project's us-versus-them geopolitical worldview a sham moral authority.

Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.

Kat Coiro's film takes the comedy of discomfort to new levels of cringe-worthiness by presenting.

This is one vampire film whose sexless, generic ending betrays a promise of revisionist complexity.

Until its pair of ludicrous twist endings, which complicates its message and logistics in ways that make little sense, Gabe Torres's Brake plays like a more simplistic version of Buried tailored specifically to a hawkish right-wing crowd.

What's perhaps most off-putting about the movie isn't its increasingly stale humor, but the way it ultimately validates its characters' worst impulses.

Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.

Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.

The first half of the film is a virtual compendium of high-culture references, topical concerns addressed almost in passing, and narrative fracturing devices.

The film smartly avoids the sort of cynical hijinks that characterize the majority of Vegas-set flicks, though it can't come up with anything more compelling to place in its stead.

Enjoyment of Jeff Kaplan's film will vary given your capacity to simultaneously laugh and wink at the hijinks of two of the least palatable characters to share screen time in recent years.

By the dictates of the boys-will-be-boys party genre, 21 and Over is so tame that it barely manages to even be offensive.