Carlos Aguilar

Destined to fade into obscurity in the presence of the other two films about Reality Winner, Fogel’s version should at least indicate to other filmmakers that they must leave this story alone and move on to other preoccupations.

Ramchandani’s baffling screenplay contains the most obvious, stock archetypes of people recurrent in Hollywood’s uninteresting depictions of Latino communities. Yet, its dialogue, which ranges from the laughably stereotypical to the downright absurd in the context of a sweatshop, stands out as the most unforgivable affront.

Crowded with shallow characters (particularly Jinzhen’s loved ones: his wife and adoptive family) there to forcefully inject emotion, overlong and technically pristine while devoid of cinematic personality, “Decoded” is pleasant to look at but difficult to feel much toward.

An insipid mishmash of trite genre tropes, Borderlands is devoid of any real edge.

It’s a Garfield movie for audiences who have never heard of Garfield, which reads as an attempt at erasing history and reintroducing him in this high-octane, overly stimulated form for a generation with reduced attention spans.

Little insight is gained from what’s on screen.

Following her well-received debut “First Match,” Newman hits a sophomore slump with this literary reinterpretation, where the performances in general renounce nuance for theatricality and most storytelling decisions unfurl like a subpar pastiche of vague components we’ve seen and heard plenty of times before.

Bay’s latest reeks of falsehood veiled as righteousness.

It’s better than nothing to mark the cheesy holiday, but the lack of effort shows.

Certainly among the worst films of the year considering the reputable talent involved, this inspirational drama stains Washington’s directorial filmography.

Chunks of childhood trauma, a dash of the opioid crisis, a few drops of environmental distress, and Native American mythology swim together in a foggy concoction of a plot without meaningfully merging.

As an intellectually empty piece of genre cinema, “Yakuza Princess” can’t even sit alongside movies that offer similarly obtuse ideas but that gain some favor through impressive spectacle.

The film, unfortunately, is poorly acted and offers Hallmark Channel-level craftsmanship.

The problem isn't that this concept has been reworked to death, but that Quintana and co-writer Chris Dowling (the scribe behind Christian dramas such as Run the Race and Priceless) fail to mold it into a winning catch.

Rather than speaking to the moment coherently, the movie communicates its message in loud fits of dull screaming.

All My Life is too passionless to earn even a begrudged sniffle. It’s all paint-by-numbers, from the requisite “screaming inside a car” shot expressing a character’s frustrations to the store-bought spontaneity of a couple jumping into a fountain fully clothed.

One of the most atrocious viewing experiences of the year, “The Tax Collector” relies on a trite visual language built on obvious flashbacks and bland imagery that match the unimaginatively dreadful writing where every Latino in sight is a gangster.

Mann, an emerging Latino filmmaker, exhibits signs of vocation for the craft that could lead to a more fruitful product some day. For now, what he serves is a tortuous trick with a confusingly dark punch line for an ending.

A poorly produced experiment by writer-director Dae Hoon Kim, also the act’s lead singer on- and offscreen, the film’s mere existence baffles.

Awfully bewildering till the end, a final bombshell catapults the persistently nonsensical plot onto a level of implausibility that defies basic logic and ethics.

On-the-nose in its use of music cues for emotional effect, this showcase of subpar filmmaking unabashedly regurgitates clichés in a story that shows little concern for the history of the location it is exploiting.

Killerman lacks personality both stylistically and in its overall story construction.

What’s never visible, through the monologues and hackneyed one-on-one chats, is a desire to use lighting beyond flat luminosity. Visual delivery matches the insipidness of the material.

Displaying writing barely apt for an outdated sitcom, ludicrously trite dialogue, prosaic execution and overacting galore, this pseudo-romantic all-nighter unsuccessfully attempts to wax poetic in regards to second chances, Catholic guilt and personal reinvention.

Effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews, passed off as harmless plot points to entertain young audiences.

At best, it’s an amateurish effort with ill-judged ambitions that surpass both the skill level involved and its budget. At worst, it’s an incoherent collection of brutishly crafted and edited scenes.

Short on cultural specificity or distinctive attributes, “Maria” is utterly universal in the most discouraging manner.

Lacking poignancy at every level, what could have been a moderately exciting, if unoriginal, occupation thriller instead becomes a muddled and dispirited disappointment from the director who once earned high praise for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”