Chuck Bowen

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.

Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.

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

The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Claflin is best in show, but his performance is undercut by the film’s inability to escalate or explore the ramifications of its premise.

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

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

Even by the woeful standards of decades-too-late comedy sequels, Coming 2 America is desperate, belabored, and thin.

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

As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.

The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.

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

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

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

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

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

Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.

Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Eddie Alcazar’s film is a purposefully inscrutable, wandering, disconnected, symbolic, and highly precious mood bath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from a fetishizing of "keeping it real."

The film relegates Nicolas Cage to a supporting player and crowds him with considerably less charismatic performers.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.

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

The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.

With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.

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.

The film is so humorless and in love with its own obviousness that it grows laughable.

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

It attempts to dress up torture-porn tropes with a late-inning switch to science fiction that spectacularly backfires.

Throughout Queen of the Desert's narrative, there's no sense of danger, of texture, or even of a rudimentary idea of what's truly driving Gertrude Bell.

Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.

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

Rings is unsure as to whether it’s a sequel to the other entries in the series or a contemporary reboot.

Robert Legato's film is lifelessly composed of the usual tropes of horror films set in mental asylums.

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

Gonzalo López-Gallego's direction isn't confident enough to allow us to ignore The Hollow Point's contrivances.

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

Though the film strives to be audacious and galvanizing, it's easily shaken off as an exercise in stunted necrophilia erotica.

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

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

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

Emmerich rewards our patience with an impersonally massive set piece involving the usual generic stew of mass CGI-imagined demolition. The insensitivity displayed toward human life in these sequences would be galling even by Emmerich's standards, if this pitiful albatross of corporate capitalism could work up enough energy to be offensive.

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

Julio Medem's film has enough hanky-courting plot mechanics for three remakes of Beaches.

This enterprise is so listless that one can't even work up a proper head of self-righteous steam over the spooky Native American clichés that drive the plot.

It inspires retrospective gratitude for the empty yet slick craftsmanship of someone like James Wan.

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

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

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

Travis Zariwny detachedly regards the material as shtick to be waded through with quotation marks.

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.

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

With the film, director William Monahan offers audiences a bundle of fetishes dressed up as an existentialist thriller about the class system.

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

It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.

The premise, of a terrible event unleavened by the easy out of someone being at fault, should be prime fodder for Wim Wenders's brand of poetic regret.

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

Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.

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

Slacker and even less involving than the similarly terrible global kill-fest Last Knights, but easier to watch for the inadvertent camp value of two of the prominent performances.

The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.