April Wolfe

The closest comparison for this film is 2017’s joyfully schlocky Beyond Skyline, though that boasted far more original set pieces. Bleeding Steel seems content to rehash old ones, cutting and pasting Chan into familiar scenes, with the welcome exception of one battle that takes place atop the Sydney Opera House — but I’ll be damned if I could figure out why or how they got there.

Monsters and Men seems as if it was made for the world that existed a few years ago. I honestly can’t tell if my dissatisfaction is with the movie or the era into which it is released.

A slow approach requires careful atmosphere-building, and these days West is actually stronger at writing funny dialogue than he is at creating atmosphere.

Asante’s already proven she can world-build while wrangling a romance with her indie hit Belle, but she needs a jewel of a script, and this one is no diamond.

Hugh Jackman is charming as ever, and two dance scenes are mildly inventive and well-executed, yet Jackman’s goodwill and a splash of inspired choreography are not enough to earn the greatest in the title.

The attention paid to images does not translate to character development, story, or dialogue, leaving little emotional resonance, while making me seriously wonder if the men telling these stories understand much at all about female sexuality.

If there’s one thing I can say for this movie, it’s that the cast is delivering, even if the story they’re in cannot.

It’s so gorgeous you can sometimes forget the train wreck of a story. But only sometimes.

Rather than a grand buildup, Colonia just gives the sense of one thing happening, and then another thing happening.

There might be a good story somewhere deep inside this tangled narrative, but Dekker seems more focused on creating a succession of "scary" images than he is on that.

If Charlie were just unlikable, it all might be palatable and even fun. But his behavior draws more of an eye-roll than a laugh or a snarl, despite Robinson's confident, believable performance.

This film is in dire need of some atmosphere and a rewrite to make the twists work.

As evocative as the production design and cinematography are, multiple cheesy scenes with one-dimensional characters undermine Howell’s efforts to spook, let alone redefine a genre.

Though the script by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian is taut and surprising, I’ve felt more absorbed in an episode of Murder, She Wrote than I did in this film, because, there, it’s story and performance that we’re invited to savor, not just tech and technique.

Those seeking out some titillating times would be better satisfied by Googling “feminist porn” and clicking randomly. But if you relish a mindless soap operatic story that leans into the silliness of the genre, Fifty Shades Freed might do the trick.

Imagine The Trip meets Lost in Translation (Coppola’s daughter Sophia’s debut), but with stale dialogue and neither much romance nor comedy

Hoffman’s feature debut is hampered by well-worn tropes the writer-director seems at first to be aware of — and playing with — before he leans so hard into them that whatever originality the film at first displayed crashes right into a well of rom-com cliché.

What’s most disappointing is that Staub proves himself to be a formidable director of action and visual effects. Please, someone just give him a better story.

Lyew kills the story with implausible twists, but he does craft some effective, original set pieces.

Despite worthy performances from the entire cast, this movie’s a prime example of a director admiring some great movies but only having a cursory, superficial understanding of what it was that made them work.

All of this is attractive, yet I felt nothing for these people, their pain, or their possible lost future.

The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.

Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.

There’s frightfully little atmosphere to this film — anything from creepy sound design to evocative cinematography — rendering the flaws in the story all too visible.

Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.

In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.

What follows is something like Veronica Mars, only set in snowy D.C. and on heavy sedatives.

Compounding the manic energy of the editing is dialogue that muses mostly on long-winded ideas that don’t lend themselves to any kind of visual representation.