Chuck Bowen

One may wonder if Night School's most revealing material has been left on the cutting room floor, so as to offer the sort of uplift that inadvertently marginalizes the very inequalities that drive the film.

Álex de la Iglesia has a real flair for wild action sequences that remain exhilaratingly coherent and sensical.

Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.

Unlike Malcom & Marie, Daniel Brühl’s feature-length directorial debut proves to be authentically self-castigating.

It fails to go deep enough, suggesting an appetizer offered as an opening to an ultimately unserved meal.

Ultimately, Anders Thomas Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which his protagonist viscerally annihilates a violent gang.

For Paul Schrader, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.

As preachy and repetitive as The Little Prince can be, it offers enough moments of poetry to keep it flirting with greatness, or at least goodness.

In the film's best scenes, Jeff Grace displays a delicate understanding of various modes of male fragility.

Lydia Tenaglia's direction is occasionally flashy and cluttered, but her empathy for Tower is evocative and poignant.

Robertson’s sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction was more fulsomely evoked by The Last Waltz.

Throughout Alex and Benjamin Brewer's film, Nicolas Cage holds the screen with his distinct timing and expressive force of being.

Oz Perkins exhibits a committed understanding of the cinematic value of silence and of vastly underpopulated compositions.

The filmmakers never really answer inevitable questions: What's the point of these fussy allusions?

With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.

It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.

The film doesn't add up to much, but it's a diverting tour of Takashi Miike's anything-goes, splatter-paint sensibility.

Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.

D.W. Young navigates his varying moods with an ease that's particularly impressive for a director making his feature debut, but he never capitalizes on his ability to coax down our guard.

What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films is Jack Fessenden's sense of quietness.

A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.

It has a bouncy sense of lunacy, wearing its derivative junkiness on its sleeve with surprising lightness of authority.

Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.

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.

Jake Meginsky's documentary is insular, precious, and too pleased with its unwillingness to reach out to the unconverted.

The film fails to lift off from this sturdy aesthetic launching pad; it never allows the characters, however stock, to evolve in their respective dealings with one another, which is the primary source of tension and escalation for a thriller set in a confined place.

The Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points.

The film is ultimately stultifying because the disconnection between the various characters is so immediately accepted as such a foregone conclusion that nothing ever seems to be at stake, and the heavily horizontal imagery, though accomplished and evocative, if fussy, only evokes two states of mind: loneliness and disconnection.

The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.

The film's aesthetic is striking, but feels almost intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.

The film occasionally and promisingly suggests an obsessive and free-associative paean to regret.

The film blends the Bard with National Geographic, failing to make a case for the inexplicability of their union.

52 Pick-Up loses its sense of social texture in the last third when everyone begins to die by decree of formulaic three-act screenwriting, and its indifference to the plight of Harry’s wife (Ann-Margret) is unseemly, but the film is an often nightmarish gem awaiting rediscovery.

Jay Baruchel's Goon: Last of the Enforcers faces an uphill climb that's inherent to retreads, as it's almost impossible for the film to honor its predecessor without lapsing into contrived and preordained formula.

Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.

In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.

Even the director’s most rabid fans will find Cronenberg’s debut to be a tough sit.

It collapses into repetition and unintended self-parody, as it's devoid of the subtext and empathetic audacity.

The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.

Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.

A blunt satire of the dehumanization inherent in social media that also gets off on said detachment.

Where Bonnie and Clyde is gloriously tragic, The Highwaymen is blunt and anti-climactically savage, fulfilling as well as somewhat critiquing former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer’s bloodlust.

Rodrigo García’s film is fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.

The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.

The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.

Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.

Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.

Craig William Macneill's film is a sporadically frightening slow burn with a fatally overlong fuse.

Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.

Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.

Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.

Pang Ho-cheung can't help but humanize Vulgaria's characters, which is a kiss of death for what's meant to be a farce of escalating obscenity.

In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

The film quickly settles into a holding pattern of repetitive porno-movie hijinks and increasingly listless murder scenes.

In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.

The main character is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency.

The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.

The film's characters are stock types without enough satirical texture to fulfill their function in the narrative.

The Dead ultimately doesn't have much of a pulse, as it fails to transcend the banality of its inevitable theme.

The film is ultimately devoted to formula, as Nick Simon discards his jumbled meta-media conceit at around the halfway mark.

The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.

Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.

The actors have the showmanship to chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.

France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as a symbol of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.

Only Michel Shannon’s off-kilter timing brings The Quarry to sporadic life.

It could have used far more of King's mordant humor, which might have imbued the metaphorical autumnal proceedings with a much-needed jolt of pop anarchy, or even pathos.

Standoff isn’t quite inspired, but it coasts on unexpected modesty of professionalism.

As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.

There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.

One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.

A mediocre, quasi-diverting B movie.

The filmmakers don’t examine the psychological terror, the bitterness, and lust that gave rise to many of the works they cherish.

The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.

Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.

Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.

Its openly mercenary ethos initially scan as a bracing lack of pretense in a market crammed to the gills with insidious faux-sentimentality, but its overstuffed relentlessness proves almost equally tedious.

The film simplifies Winston Churchill's legacy for the dubious purposes of narrative momentum and emotional lift.

The film doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.

The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.

Society never entirely decides whether it’s a plot-centric horror-mystery or an imagistic fantasy; the film’s self-conscious emptiness drains the incestuous conceit of its shock value, defanging a nervy gross-out.

Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.

Hello Lonesome isn't really that much of a movie, but it has something that a number of more polished pictures in the same vein don't: human decency. Sadly, that's noteworthy.

It evinces a qualified kind of courage in its anonymous convictions, parodying a world that barely ever existed by barely existing itself.

In the end, it feels unavoidably dull, as there isn't much thematic ambiguity to be found in the assertion that humans deserve life that's defined by more than indentured servitude.

Chad Archibald doesn't quite land Bite's transition over from claustrophobic character study into full-blown monster movie.

The film belongs to a long tradition of horror films that offensively suggest that all atheists might as well hang a Welcome sign up for the devil.

The pacing is so humorless and funereal that it squelches the possibility of heat or conflict arising between the characters.

Salt and Fire is a doodle, suggesting an assemblage of ecological riffs and fantasias that Werner Herzog may have entertained while making Into the Inferno.

Yoav Factor can't decide whether he wants to play his broad scenario as an exaggerated farce or as a heartwarming testament to blood ties.

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.

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

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

The film is dispiriting because there's virtually no sign of Dario Argento in it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of an oft-told tale.

Phillip Montgomery's film is ironically as undeveloped and busy as the sensational media it criticizes.

It joins its American cousin in the scrapheap of family dramedies that no one watches, unless by default out of boredom on TBS or TNT.

Throughout, it’s difficult to sort the contrivances that writer-director Jason William Lee is parodying from those he’s indulging.

Time and again, the filmmaker cuts the money shot meant to theoretically cap a sequence.

The imagery fails to express either the characters' or the filmmakers' obsessions or synchronicities.

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

Daniel Augusto relies on familiar tropes pertaining to the sexy, rebellious rock-star artist who does things his own way.

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

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

The problem with the film isn't the contrivance of its premise, it's that writer-director Jessica Goldberg doesn't know it's contrived.

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

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

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

Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that’s more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.

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

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

The film ultimately boils down to people bludgeoning one another in unimaginative close-ups.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ricky Gervais's film hopscotches through a variety of premises, looking for jokes that never arrive.

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

Though far more elegant in execution than most Rob Zombie-imitating films, Jackals smugly wears its violent tediousness as a badge of honor.

Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.

The setup is so familiar that frustration sets in before the title has barely faded from view.

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

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

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

A few trite race and religion jokes goose up what's mostly a sentimental story of a dysfunctional family suddenly and magically learning to function again.

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.

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

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.

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

The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.

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.

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?

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

It relies less on in-camera stunts than editing that renders vague gibberish of the altercations.

Writer-director Jacob Gentry's film has the emotional fatuousness of uncertain softcore erotica.

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

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.

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