Chris Cabin

All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.

A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.

The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.

The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics.

Indeed, the film flies by and feels weightless, like a spectacular rainbow-colored hydrogen balloon that passes out of our memory the moment we lose sight of it.

Arvin Chen's Taiwan is dominated by eccentricity in tone and atmosphere, but in a very careful, pronounced way, as to never really run the danger of being truly strange.

That Dom is so clearly an up-to-11 caricature, embodied with reliable pizzazz by Jude Law, makes the sentimental moments feel especially false.

All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.

A surprisingly thoughtful romantic comedy that shirks a great deal of reason and consequence in the name of love.

However messy this overextended and oddly compelling work feels from moment to moment, the end result evokes the life of working artists without sentimentality or undue grandeur.

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.