Chuck Bowen

The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.

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

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

The film attains a chilly existential quality as Matt Johnson's character discerns the weight of his actions.

Leyla Bouzid successfully dramatizes how young people eroticize peril and risk due to a lack of experience.

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

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

Underneath the impersonal formal beauty and good acting is a familiar moral about self-imposed limitations.

The film has been executed with a sense of formally stylish and thematically symmetric panache.

It movingly posits acting as a metaphor for the search for connection, through visceral texture rather than platitude.

It routinely alternating between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.

The film shrewdly capitalizes on Mel Gibson's off-screen embarrassments and controversies.

The film's images have a loose, rough, textured liveliness that honors the spirit of Chinatown Fair.

It offers lively and layered images that reveal the chefs both as individuals and components of a larger social organism.

It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.

It displays an intimate chemical understanding of the exhausting and unrelentingly impotent agony of failure.

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.

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.

Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.

It offers a wonderful visual reprieve from the cumbersomely mechanized aesthetic of so much contemporary fantasy.

The film insufficiently connects the book's prophecy with its present-day, real-world forms of realization.

The film covers "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.

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.

It infuses an outdoorsy survival tale and a coming-of-age story of friendship with Taika Waititi's penchant for distaff flakiness.

Noah Buschel shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.

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

The lack of ambiguity reflects Benoît Jacquot's treatment of the text, which is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.

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.