Chuck Bowen

The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.

Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.

Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.

Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.

Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.

Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.

Heist is competently staged, but Scott Mann maintains audience interest with the preponderance of dissonant absurdities.

Gregg Araki's film suggests a hothouse melodrama that's been drained of the hothouse, the melodrama, and any other discernably dramatic stakes.

Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.

Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.

There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

Bart Freundlich alternates somewhat arbitrarily between his various plots, leaving a lot of loose ends in the process.

It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.

For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.

After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.

Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.

Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.

The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.

Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.

Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.

Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.

Director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland can’t seem to figure out if Psycho II should resemble a film from the 1950s or the 1980s, so they split the difference, and the result is a bland, meandering movie with no real look or tone at all.

Writer-director David Michôd's film renders existential crises of American entitlement dull and tedious.

Frédéric Mermoud's film makes an elaborate pretense of honoring the traditions of the observational procedural.

This remake proffers the sort of cinematic nowhere place that's all too common of an increasingly corporate, globalized cinema.

Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.

Nia DaCosta indulges one of rural quasi-thriller’s most tiresome gambits: humorlessness as a mark of high seriousness.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.

Sadly, Douglas Tirola's documentary doesn't follow its subjects' advice regarding the refinement of technique.

Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.

Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.

The director diligently keeps her heroine's ego in check, and that's awfully principled of her, but her audience may feel as if they've inadvertently booked a trip with no destination.

Like its protagonist, Philippe Falardeau's film gets lost in a haze of incidental cacophony.

Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"

The film ultimately leaves you feeling as if you're stuck watching your cousin's boring slideshow of his trip to Palookaville.

The film is in love with the tropes it ridicules, and it doesn't take long for that love to dwarf any possibility of critique.

There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.

A sexily chaotic parody of entitlement becomes just another tale of a white dude learning that there are worse things in life than essentially having no problems.

Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.

The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it's ultimately just as hollow.

The film is taken with comfy gags that celebrate these men's ownership of pop culture, filtering them through a lens of unrevealing caricature.

Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.

Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.

The film is impersonal and populated with wisps of characters who spend most of the running time wandering around in the dark yelling at one another.

The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.

Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is one passable joke stretched out over 98 minutes with nothing in the way of a real movie to support it.

The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story's central wolves wiggle out of the trap they've potentially set for themselves.

The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.

The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.

Writer-director Bernard Rose effectively conjoures an atompshere of poetic stoned-1960s British rebellion, a feeling of woozy, intoxicating possibility that will not-so-eventually be squashed.

The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.

As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.

After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.

The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.

The premise might make sense, if only hypocritically, but the film abandons this already flimsy parody of macho pride disastrously at the last minute.

It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.

The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.

The film is just another fantasy of living only the good portions of the life of an artist.

With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.

The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.

Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.

Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.

The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.

It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.

The film lacks the manic fly-by-night invention of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or even the ripe erotic ambiguity of something like Avatar.

Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.

There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.

The film is content as it is to run clever one-liners and 19th-century pop-cultural references into the same comedic whirlpool.

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.

One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.

The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.

One can't help but sense that underneath the complicated art-house game-playing of Isaki Lacuesta's The Double Steps resides a theme that's sentimental and old-hat.

The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.

The filmmaker's failure of empathy for those who strive to outlaw medicinal marijuana turns the protestors into hissable puritanical bad guys.

Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.

The film ultimately doesn't live up to this early potential, as Keanu Reeves loses his way in the third act with too many false climaxes.

Too much of Noma is composed of gorgeous pillow shots, which grow static and fussy, appearing to exist almost apart from the subject matter.

Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.

A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.

There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.

Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.

Like most of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.

As is typically the case with Joe Wright's films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interested in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.

The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.

Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.

It makes an occasionally spirited pretense of injecting the tensions of the United States's educational system into a familiar zombie-siege scenario.

David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.

A middling genre movie, but it's oddly likable for its conflicted, unresolved tension.