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.