Chris Cabin

All Is Bright remains engaging, for the most part, but most of the big narrative turns feel both predictable and forced, and at odds with the natural charms of the cast.

The underlying, redundant, and underwhelming theme of the film is the pursuit of family unity at all costs.

It does well to put more focus on delivering a plethora of jokes, imitations, zippy repartee, and sight gags than its plot's familiar machinations.

The narrative doesn't want for ambition, but Marc Webb proves unwilling, or incapable, of making this unwieldy story feel like anything but a deluge of backstory.

The film is thin on concept and limited in style, but the filmmakers have the good sense to let their characters remain playful and goofy throughout.

Tina Gordon Chism's film collapses into a series of clumsy improvisatory sketches, tied up in cheap, risibly sentimental catharsis.

It essentially uses a major global issue to cheaply dress up what is two hours of hit-and-miss erection jokes.

Adrián García Bogliano ends up merely toying with the death-steeped concerns of his characters, and taking the furious and bitter perspective that powers the narrative's ponderous dramatic core for granted.

Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.

If the film's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.

The thorough goofiness the film luxuriates in, as compared to the covert self-seriousness of nearly every teen comedy ever made, sets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure apart and heads and tails above the glut of its ilk. Most triumphant, indeed.

A dim anti-privatization parable that preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.

One long trial of moral duty, and one that excuses repugnant behavior and psychological warfare in lieu of a repetitive, condescending sermon on honoring thy father.

The film is a redundant showcase for Seth MacFarlane's racy, dick-centric sense of humor.

Like most of Neil LaBute's work in the field of "emotional terrorism," the film protests that bad behavior isn't only good, but also essential to art.

An awfully expensive and grossly extended Cialis commercial.

The film delivers the same misogynistic, faux-modernistic jolts of trashy humor and labored plotting that typify the work of co-producer Michael Bay.

We're only allowed an insufficient glimpse of the anxiousness and curiosity that drive these creatures, a tactic which feels suspiciously like hesitance masquerading as enigma.

Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.

What the film lacks in narrative drive, coherence, and performance, it makes up with thoughtful lighting, strong cinematography from Raoul Lomas and an uncredited João Fernandes, and, of course, Savini’s lovingly overblown and impossible splatter effects.

The breadth of Vince Vaughn's gregarious persona has never been given free reign by any director and this certainly isn't the game-changer.

It should be said that this negligible absence of Brooks’s boundary hopping wit and untamed performances doesn’t quite render Men in Tights unwatchable. There’s an appropriate, albeit languid merriment to the proceedings kept alive by a few choice cameos (Dick van Patten, Dom DeLouise, Brooks himself) and a handful of gags that land on their feet.

Though the cast partially eschews the family-friendly timidity that the film defers to in the end, this would-be wild thing remains little more than a rowdy endorsement of the status quo.

It's hard to see the fiscal woes at the center of Zach Braff's second feature as anything more than a fashionable depiction of first-world problems.

Clue is comfortable with its pedigree, even giddily enthused by it, which gives its creators freedom to produce not a nostalgic entertainment, but a sustained and sincerely old-fashioned entertainment, laced with wicked miscreancy.

The films that Robert Rodriguez emulates here are known for similar unexpected narrative turns, but the crucial value that he misses is their actual cheapness.

The film refuses to openly engage the isolationism and hardened cynicism that's often part and parcel of being a career police officer.

The film doubles down on the love-hate relationship with ultra-violence that typified its predecessor, but A History of Violence this is not.

There's no sense of visual artifice to match the ludicrous pitch of the script, and subsequently, the film comes off as awkward and uncertain.

After a while, the film's sing-a-song-for-the-world vibe, so buoyantly optimistic at first, becomes grating and smug.

The film is ntermittently inventive in its visual and physical effects, but its politics are unthinking and obvious, a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum imbedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.

Even when compared to other films posing as Ford Mustang commercials, Need for Speed isn't particularly memorable for anything other than the startling incompetence and dull sheen of the end result.

The lack of any visual ingenuity, reflexivity, or awareness of genre tropes diminishes the intermittent pleasures of the action's slightly involving kineticism.

The film is absent of humor and thrills, and accented with designs and color schemes that are equally notable for their lack of risk.

Jason Reitman fails to take into account any of the positive endeavors enabled by social media, which will no doubt be used to promote and market his film.

The strain to make the film both an educational tool and a child-minded entertainment is noticeable throughout.

There's no personality in the design or the script, which only renders the cynical aftertaste of this convoluted one-squirrel-against the-world story all the more potent.

By the time a blackmailing plot is introduced, the film seems to be surviving solely on the fumes of curse words and frequent shots of Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz's backsides.

For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.

Raja Gosnell's particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.

The art of storytelling is both of distinct narrative interest and personal issue in the latest payload of calcified nonsense from one of modern cinema's oddest would-be auteurs.

Fantasy is heavily dependent on vision, which Mark Helprin had in spades, but the look of Akiva Goldsman's fantasy is limp, timid, and occasionally outright awkward.

Josh Heald's script takes the easy way out, ending the film with a torrent of slapdash sentimentality.

Maniac simply exists as a wretched yet unforgettable succession of scenes meant to corrupt even the purest of minds, if you can help yourself from laughing uncontrollably at its overwhelming amount of inconsistencies.

The obvious amount of hard work that went into this out-of-touch sequel is partly what makes it so irritating.

Wang Bing's no-frills style of documentation visually echoes the preadolescent trio's simple yet unforgiving world and its sense of labor as life.