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.