Chuck Bowen

Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.

Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.

It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.

The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.

With the filmmakers unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.

Hold the Dark's ludicrous seriousness comes to feel like a mask for what's essentially a genre story of murder and mayhem.

The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.

The film essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Ted Bundy’s admirers.

Writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos barely capitalizes on the luridly sacrilegious implications of the film’s premise.

The film covers "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.

Like Better Luck Tomorrow, it tries to cut cool-movie poses under the pretense of providing an alternative racial viewpoint to typical genre tropes.

A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.

In the film, Joshua Marston leaches the narrative of nearly all the social texture that infused and empowered “Heretics,” the 2005 episode of the This American Life podcast that inspired this biopic.

As a character, Catherine Weldon suffers the same fate as Sitting Bull, having been reduced to a signifier of the filmmakers' retroactive political correctness.

The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.

Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.

Deon Taylor seems uncomfortable with the escalating relentlessness of a siege film, eventually splitting Traffik off into a variety of other tangents and genres, diluting the potent subtext at the film's center.

Benicio Del Toro's performance is showy, a great actor's parade of indulgences that occasionally sets the deranged camp tone that should have been the narrative's starting point.

After a promising entrapment scene that offers some casually eerie narrative details, the film collapses, lurching awkwardly between a variety of tones and intentions.

With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.

The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.

The film may take the notion of implication over illustration a bit too far.

By the end, audiences will most likely feel as if they've been locked out of the drama that's presumably unfolding right in front of them.

The film insufficiently connects the book's prophecy with its present-day, real-world forms of realization.

A sluggish, obvious fusion of a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with a comedic family crime romp that abounds in stiflingly over-emphasized Boston-crime-movie details.

Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.

Raymond De Felitta’s film offers a sampler course of formulas, which creates a strangely unfulfilling tension.

Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.

Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.

Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.

The film is dispiriting because there's virtually no sign of Dario Argento in it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of an oft-told tale.

Phillip Montgomery's film is ironically as undeveloped and busy as the sensational media it criticizes.

It joins its American cousin in the scrapheap of family dramedies that no one watches, unless by default out of boredom on TBS or TNT.

Throughout, it’s difficult to sort the contrivances that writer-director Jason William Lee is parodying from those he’s indulging.

Time and again, the filmmaker cuts the money shot meant to theoretically cap a sequence.

The imagery fails to express either the characters' or the filmmakers' obsessions or synchronicities.

Terry Gilliam has imposed a mix tape of his greatest hits, whose greatness was debatable to begin with, on a whiff of a story that might've flourished under the maxim "less is more."

The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.

Daniel Augusto relies on familiar tropes pertaining to the sexy, rebellious rock-star artist who does things his own way.

Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.

The film too often suggests an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.

The problem with the film isn't the contrivance of its premise, it's that writer-director Jessica Goldberg doesn't know it's contrived.

The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.

Bits of editorializing dialogue throughout James Franco's In Dubious Battle suggest the resonant film that might’ve been.

Scott Cooper's film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.

Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that’s more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.

It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.

Vincenzo Natali’s film divests itself of stakes in the name of total meaninglessness.

The film ultimately boils down to people bludgeoning one another in unimaginative close-ups.

The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.

The film's mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is experimentally disingenuous at best.

Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.

Atom Egoyan is a much better director when he drops the art-film fanciness and wrestles directly with his inner voyeuristic weirdo.

The film is shrilly, luridly, dully, and unremittingly ugly, preaching to a choir that it also demonizes.

The film occasionally benefits from the weird energy shared between Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots.

With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.

Jon Watts does nothing with the scarily funny notion of a respectable professional who suddenly refuses to shuck a party costume.

Time and again, the film shortchanges the human elements of its stories for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's film is ultimately a genre item that operates on alternately prestigious and campy autopilot.

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.

Ricky Gervais's film hopscotches through a variety of premises, looking for jokes that never arrive.

The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.

Though far more elegant in execution than most Rob Zombie-imitating films, Jackals smugly wears its violent tediousness as a badge of honor.

Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.

The setup is so familiar that frustration sets in before the title has barely faded from view.

Frontloaded with a surprising amount of plot, the film takes forever to get going, but it's the filmmakers' hypocrisy that really grates.

An almost offensively "tasteful" dud that remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters' motivations.

Viewed charitably, Logan Marshall-Green’s sketchy protagonist and vague atmosphere are meant to achieve the effect of a parable.

A few trite race and religion jokes goose up what's mostly a sentimental story of a dysfunctional family suddenly and magically learning to function again.

The filmmakers attempt to acknowledge the pain of warfare within the framework of a redemptive story that lends it an unforgivably patronizing sense of closure.

Jamie Dornan is a stiff whom Jon Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why the film is so tedious and unsatisfying.

The absence here of a joke is meant to be hilarious, or to at least congratulate the audience for willfully submitting to a denial of pleasure. Every element of the film is studiously, painstakingly random.

Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.

The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.

Down the Shore suggests what might happen if TBS and Bruce Springsteen were to collaborate on a sitcom set in hell.

The film seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered.

Mark Pellington's Nostalgia is less a living, breathing film than a presentation of sentiments revolving around a pat question: Are the objects of our lives merely detritus, or are they vital to our identities?

Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Roxanne Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction.

It relies less on in-camera stunts than editing that renders vague gibberish of the altercations.

Writer-director Jacob Gentry's film has the emotional fatuousness of uncertain softcore erotica.

The film comes to concern a selfless martyr before morphing, most absurdly, into a disease-of-the-week tearjerker.

Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.

The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.

The film is determinedly unclassifiable, blurring genres with a fervor that grows tedious.

Zeros and Ones is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for his badness.

Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.

If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.

Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.

J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.

We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.

Throughout, Saverio Costanzo hypocritically drapes his scenes in a cloak of faux-empathy.

Christopher Felver is too reverent to properly convey the invigoratingly profane, angry messiness of the sense of community that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his peers too briefly brought to life.

The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.

It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.

An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.

Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.

Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.

Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.