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.