Christopher Gray

By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.

It aims to foster a spirit of giddy anarchy in order to tie a ribbon around its shambolic script and rickety pacing.

Thanks to a strong performance by Nicholas Hoult, all reptilian sinew and heroin-chic vacuity, it keeps threatening to become more dynamic and self-critical than its final result.

This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.

A sequel that functions as origin story, apologia, and harbinger of a second expanded universe of overpopulated action bonanzas.

The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.

Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.

Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.

It doesn't seem to aspire to much more than proving that there are nice, talented people behind the New Yorker's walls.

Even after the film (quite entertainingly) explains itself, it never feels like more than a howl of frustration and cynicism.

Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.

Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.

Superficial when it means to be elliptical and regressive in its attempts to promote pride and tolerance, Sebastián Lelio’s film is beautiful but vacant, the type of melodrama that reminds us that they shouldn’t always make them like they used to.

Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.

Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out, and still fewer are so insensitive about it.

If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.

It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.

It's too busy skipping through subplots to do much more than gloss over such heady issues as the fundamental subjectivity of truth and self-identity.

Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.

Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.

By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.

The documentary isn't advancing an argument so much as simply restating a European socialistic breed of fact.

Dan Stevens navigates the film’s literal and thematic alleyways with the same enthusiastic befuddlement that convinced many to soldier through Legion‘s more impenetrable stretches.

Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.

It’s hard to tell who’s being lampooned and who’s being treated with sincerity at any given point.

The heart of T2 lies in the relationship between Renton and Sick Boy, but their rocky reunion is another victim both to the wheel-spinning innate in Hodge’s script and Boyle’s relative lack of fresh ideas.

A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.

It takes its literalism to such an extreme that, at points, it's difficult to determine whether or not the film is operating with a semblance of irony.

If Black Swan was filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's fevered valentine to the artist's self-abnegating drive toward greatness, then Mother!, his loudest and most comprehensive work to date, is either a critique of or a doubling down on that impulse.

Unfortunately, the film's occasionally thrilling visual sleight-of-hand comes at the ultimate service of a boilerplate early-mid-life-crisis drama.

The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.