Charles Bramesco

There’s nothing clever or subversive about Playing It Cool, which makes the film’s overt self-satisfaction exponentially more infuriating.

It’s by no means impossible to carve a challenging, meaningful story out of difficult interchanges between the east and west. To return to Scorsese, consider Silence, a fine film about European men slowly realizing just how little they understand of Japan. But neither Zandvliet, Baldwin, nor Leto care to look beyond themselves. They’re worse than the simple gaijin, or the over-affectionate weeaboo – they’re tourists who think they own the place.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

Watching a foot-tall plaything flip over a dinner table would be either hilarious or terrifying, and either direction would be an improvement over the flavorless slurry Bell is dishing up.

A viewer may find themselves appreciating how the non-visual element of music allows figurative language to retain some wisp of mystery, whereas onscreen it’s made to wear its significance in blatant, artless ways.

The first-time feature director still has some growing up to do—the glaring genuflections to his influences betray his rookie status—but Patch Town has just enough laughs, imagination, and sincerity to follow through on its naked bids for cult adoration.

As with all overwhelmingly poor movies, it’s the delicate confluence of many varied factors that creates the critic’s familiar feeling of despairing hopelessness in the cinema.

Bound To Vengeance is not necessarily an evil film, or even a hateful one. It’s confused at best, though it’s more likely that the film’s misguided pseudo-feminist subtext is a result of simple thoughtlessness.

This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it’s the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

An evolutionary marvel, Reeves has figured out how to adapt to the hostile environment of mediocrity, and here he takes to the gobbledygook and gaps in logic like a genetically altered fish to water. When the guy’s good, he’s great, and when he’s bad, he’s still serviceable.

A sequel so wholly anodyne that it doesn’t even deserve its exclamation point.

What keeps Jersey Shore Massacre lively is that this mean-spirited, aggressively stupid film constantly finds new and shocking ways to be terrible.

Beyond its mere unfunniness and stupidity, Septic Man is criminally unimaginative.

The film’s unexpected nastiness has a way of livening up its otherwise tired story beats.

The trouble is in Williams’ execution: His characters convincingly strive and struggle with love, but then go ahead and express their angst in the most typical, banal ways imaginable.

There’s a lot to ponder in Prototype, not least in the confounding coda that suggests a note of hope for rebirth, but the film’s powers are visceral as much as (if not more so than) they are cerebral.

We all share universals like hurt and hope, it’s just that their expression differs for McConnell. Like the act of childbirth itself, something that has happened trillions of times and yet always feels intimately personal, he’s one of us and one of a kind.

Loeb mostly tamped down the lunacy endemic to an obscure corner of choir-preaching moviedom, and for what? No critical mind runs the risk of mistaking this partisan broadside for innocent edutainment.

In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages.