Christopher Gray

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.

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

It's hard to come away from the film feeling anything but disdain and a twinge of embarrassment toward Gay Talese.

The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.

When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.

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

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

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