Christopher Gray

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.

Remarkably faithful, except in how it rather boldly transforms Dave Eggers's drama into a broad comedy.

A square journey through choppy waters, it boasts a Greatest Generation nostalgia so thoroughgoing it might as well be called Boys Becoming Men.

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

The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.

The portrait it paints of its Marines is appropriately discordant, redolent of the twitchy frustration caused by a long stint in a sparse landscape with a hazy mission.

The film elides politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.

Throughout, writer-directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's film buckles under the weight of its symbolism.

Jodie Foster manages the interlocking tones of outrage and low humor with an unfailing rhythm and an engagingly casual cynicism.

Director Jonathan Demme grasps the well of feeling of Diablo Cody's script and eventually harnesses it in his own image.

The script labors to give the film a strong sense of place, but strange lapses confirm a sense that the city isn't a character here.

It does astounding work animating the mind of its young soldier, but it runs into technical difficulties whenever it tries to grasp the bigger picture.

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.

It forgoes its promise of twisty adult thrills in favor of a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.

The narrative is helplessly adrift, a yarn that extols vague grit and determination with no discernible through line.

As Zac Efront's Cole tiptoes away from his past, the film keenly observes a character who doesn't know how to secure his future, or his identity.

Maris Curran never reconciles the film's impulse to interiority with its weakness for hothouse melodrama.

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.

If it stumbles when it seeks our sympathy, it thrives when it's exploiting our fascination with the surface of things, and all that's unknowable underneath.

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

It's a bizarre and retrograde spectacle, as clueless and incurious about friendship as it is about the rudiments of composition and screenwriting

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

Each of Table 19‘s faint glimmers of grace are overwhelmed by elements of general spatial and narrative incompetence.

In its philosophical and criminal investigations (largely imported from Kathryn Bigelow's original), the film moves in dozens of illogical directions, but not without achieving a patina of earnest credibility.

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.