Chuck Bowen

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

Taste and good intentions are only going to get one so far with a script this tone deaf and direction this ugly and monotonous.

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

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.

Writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos barely capitalizes on the luridly sacrilegious implications of the film’s premise.

Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds.

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

The film can't reconcile Ron Rash's apocalyptic tenderness with its own eagerness to revel in romantic star allure.

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

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 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.

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

Like Better Luck Tomorrow, it tries to cut cool-movie poses under the pretense of providing an alternative racial viewpoint to typical genre tropes.

Eddie Alcazar’s film is a purposefully inscrutable, wandering, disconnected, symbolic, and highly precious mood bath.

It attempts to dress up torture-porn tropes with a late-inning switch to science fiction that spectacularly backfires.

Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.

Laredoans Speak is bad in a special kind of way that inspires the obviously piteous description of "well-intentioned."

Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.

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

Loosies never establishes a consistent tone; it feels made up as it went along, and not in the electrifyingly free-wheeling fashion of, say, a Godard or Altman film.

Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.

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

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.

It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.

Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.

An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.

Fifteen minutes into Festival of Lights you come to the discouraging realization that you know every infuriating plot beat that will follow.

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.

Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.

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.

Pauline Chan's film is a jumbled mixture of redemptive uplift and genre hijinks.

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

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

The premise, of a terrible event unleavened by the easy out of someone being at fault, should be prime fodder for Wim Wenders's brand of poetic regret.

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

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

Emmerich rewards our patience with an impersonally massive set piece involving the usual generic stew of mass CGI-imagined demolition. The insensitivity displayed toward human life in these sequences would be galling even by Emmerich's standards, if this pitiful albatross of corporate capitalism could work up enough energy to be offensive.

As a portrait of a self-pitying drunk's wet dream of inexplicable atonement, it's fairly effective, but as a story meant to take place on some rational version of planet Earth, it's utterly hopeless.

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.

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.

Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.

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.

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

Julio Medem's film has enough hanky-courting plot mechanics for three remakes of Beaches.

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.

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

After a promising entrapment scene that offers some casually eerie narrative details, the film collapses, lurching awkwardly between a variety of tones and intentions.

Simon Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.

The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.

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

This is less a movie than a dutiful renewal of a recognizable title's licensing rights.

As one incoherent action scene follows another, one's left staring at a film with nothing to respond to, waiting for it all to be over.

Drive Hard is the action-film equivalent of one of those folks who relentlessly speak of having it tough all over as they plan their third yearly vacation.

Inside Out should be wild and violent, playing on the soap-operatic mood swings that drive televised wrestling; instead it's one or two murders away from being a Lifetime movie of the week.

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

Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.

Another macho celebration of fighting for "freedom" because someone else told you to, devoid of any acknowledgement of the inherent irony of that ideology.

This enterprise is so listless that one can't even work up a proper head of self-righteous steam over the spooky Native American clichés that drive the plot.

Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.

The film's so preoccupied with being "inspirational" that it disastrously fails to evoke the allure of rock n' roll, particularly in America in the 1950s, when it represented an erosion of racial and sexual barriers.

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.

Rings is unsure as to whether it’s a sequel to the other entries in the series or a contemporary reboot.

A nasty, cleverly revealed monster might have redeemed some of the monotony of the first (seemingly endless) hour, but the beasty here manages to be ludicrous, dull, and unoriginal somehow all at once, compromising the marginal hope you may have been holding out for the film.

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.

Thomas McCarthy evinces no interest in the people who come into Max's store and wind up as fodder for his increasingly violent and self-absorbed escapades. Not a shred.

The film offers a veritable smorgasbord of dated, only-in-the-movies clichés about the debt-ridden working class.

Ultimately plodding and resolutely old-fashioned, a corporate thriller for folks too square to indulge the possible existence of hungers so strong they must be satisfied at any cost.

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

Any pretense of satire collapses by the film's midpoint, leaving only the contempt.

The film relegates Nicolas Cage to a supporting player and crowds him with considerably less charismatic performers.

So flimsily constructed, visually and narratively, that it resembles a middle-school play that's been hastily filmed on an antique camcorder.

The tension almost immediately leaks out of the narrative once we realize we're watching a found-footage horror movie.

The film's method of admitting its own hypocrisy so as to enable it to further indulge said hypocrisy grows more grating than if it were merely indifferently conceived junk like Falling Down.

You may feel as if you're watching two or three abbreviated episodes of Law & Order in quick succession rather than a fully realized movie.

The film’s horniness and amorality, a slap in the face of fanatically cautious contemporary mores, might’ve been more shocking if it weren’t placed so firmly in quotation marks.

Robert Legato's film is lifelessly composed of the usual tropes of horror films set in mental asylums.

It inspires retrospective gratitude for the empty yet slick craftsmanship of someone like James Wan.

Travis Zariwny detachedly regards the material as shtick to be waded through with quotation marks.

The film, for all its trite lessons, forgets that people mainly play golf because they enjoy it.

Writer-director Andy Gillies's film is extremely self-conscious, but in a fashion that generally serves the material.

Not much happens in The Victim, but the events that do manage to transpire consistently support a reading of the film as an older man's fantasy of virility.

Tom Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than "The Human Centipede II."

Peter Wiedensmith's methods aren't as cinematic as they could be, but even this seems to ably mirror Marilyn Sewell's humility.

The film provides a crisp, succinct answer to a question that nags most Americans: What the hell happened?

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

The film is a tedious narrative shambles that's almost hilariously unaware of its racism and sexism.

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.

It's eventually obvious that Cory McAbee mistakenly believes that his characters' resolutely dull adventures speak for themselves.

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

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.

The film is an ultra-violent parody of unearned self-entitlement, of people who feel tricked into a lifestyle they refuse to challenge for the comforts it still offers.

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

It captures the frustration and the longing of forever wanting more and better at the expense of casualness of being.

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

Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.

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.

Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.

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

The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.

Throughout, artists intermingle in scenes that have been rendered with an Altman-esque sense of personal panorama.

The characters don’t exist solely to affirm the film’s various themes, and as a result, their humanity gets under your skin.

Amos Nachoum has a vulnerability that he manages to locate in animals without diminishing their capacity for violence.

The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.

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

Connoisseurs of Hong Sang-soo’s cinema will no doubt be fascinated by the transcendent minimalism of the film, which suggests Picasso knocking off a sketch on a piece of paper in a matter of seconds.