Chuck Bowen

There's no beauty to this film, little rhythm, none of the physical grace that action-film fans crave even if they don't know they do.

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.

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

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

The doc is so obnoxiously simplistic that you find yourself strangely unsympathetic to its objectively inarguable aim to promote greater standards of elder care.

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.

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

Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.

After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.

Tom Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than "The Human Centipede II."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

So intent on being "art" that it's seemingly indifferent to providing simple niceties such as compelling performance, plot, and an atmosphere that isn't predictably oppressive.

The film is ultimately too concerned with courting the singer's fans to deliver anything more than a theatrical release of a very special episode of VH1's Behind the Music.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.

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.

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

For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.

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.

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

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

The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.

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

It transforms itself from a meek lo-fi indie stalker thriller in the key of May to a hysterically sexist and homophobic revenge film.

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

The title is apropos, but it's also an understatement.

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.

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

The film's subtitle is apropos, as this is a decidedly locked-down and lead-footed talk-o-rama.

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.

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.

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.

To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 film is ultimately more concerned with Caveh Zahedi's attempts to pursue a variety of dull passing fancies than with any larger agenda.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Charlie is a stereotype who doesn't know it--basically your typical broke dude in a near midlife crisis who thinks he's the first to have his dull problems.

It's less a film than an unimaginatively assembled series of talking heads.

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?

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

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

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

Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.

A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.

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

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

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

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

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

Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.

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

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

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

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.

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

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.

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