Clayton Dillard

The cinematography looks striking enough throughout the various set pieces, but little happens in them to elevate Heart of Stone past its hackneyed foundation.

Jamie Sisley’s film looks at its serious subject matter through a maudlin lens.

There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.

The Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.

Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.

The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.

The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.

The film seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.

The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.

The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.

Elvira Lind's film is closer to an advertisement for Bobbi Jene Smith than a film about the contemporary dancer.

A routinely assembled mélange of provocative material consistently undone by its maker's perplexing need to foist himself into the center of every conversation.

The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.

The House's limp comedic pieces are only sporadically enlivened by a game cast.

The film is intended to be placed at the altar of Julian Schnabel, an artist so singular that words simply fail.

The Institute seems constantly on the verge of dipping into spoof, though of what exactly is difficult to say.

The film wants to have its flesh and eat it too, but even more damning is how little meat is on its bones to begin with.

Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.

It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.

For a film that warns against believing in a mirage, Burn Country seems all too comfortable perpetuating one.

It believes that the avenue to proving humanity is through banalizing gestures of quotidian significance.

The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.

A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.

There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.

Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.

Christian Carion's film shamelessly wrings excitement from the recreation of violent ideological conflict.

Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.

The documentary renders poverty a mysterious entity instead of a curable malady of systemic exclusion.

The film is an incoherent and aesthetically barren harangue masquerading as a revisionist history lesson.

It never addresses Disney's wholly manufactured stranglehold on turning adolescent desire into a consumerist impulse.

Jin Mo-young fetishizes his subjects' wholly modest behaviors as cute manifestations of a pure form of human interaction.

The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.

It hopes to jolt audiences with OMGs instead of edifying them about the empty lure of Buddhafield's cult mentality.

The film's very design turns out to be a whimpered bark followed by a toothless bite.

Andrew Rossi pays sporadic lip service to recognizing cultural specificity before returning to his star-gazing ways.

The film quickly devolves into a contemptible, exploitative presentation of sociological matters.

The film is overrun with characters, but it's less interested in their identity than their plasticity.

Paul Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament.

It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.

An aimless, if sporadically clever, parody that tirelessly conceives of human sexuality as punchlines for its shortsighted cultural ribbings.

The premise thoughtlessly combines elements from Marvel comics, Men and Black, and a swath of '80s pop culture to curiously neutered effect.

As in Judd Apatow's films, crassness is boasted as shamelessness, and calculated sentimentality is dressed up as empathy.

It's symptomatic of the one-man-show form of polemical exposé that's come to dominate, and deteriorate, documentary practice.

Tim Blake Nelson's film immerses itself into as many pain-induced (and painful) subplots as it possibly can.

Ross Partridge seems flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.

It's more about hyping Russell Brand as a constituent for the people than locating the means for sustained economic transformation.

A brain-dead slog whose bankrupt aesthetics ironically soil the very legacy it purports to aggrandize.

The film is less a revisionist take on the circumstances of John Gotti's 1992 indictment than a tedious love child of Bonnie and Clyde and Goodfellas.

It doesn't trust the inherently complex material to speak for itself or care to consider its consequences beyond instances of manufactured, gut-wrenching immediacy.

The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.

Director Stephen Daldry, working from an exploitative script by Richard Curtis, opts for a full-on Slumdog Millionaire imitation.

Everything in Mikael Håfström's film is needlessly bloated to accommodate its status as an international, prestige production.

It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.

The film displays little ability to utilize Ashby's violent actions for means other than high-concept fodder and out-of-place bloodshed.

Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.

A mostly laugh-free, paint-by-numbers approach to a pair of former pros vying for relevance as they enter, kicking and screaming, into their mid 30s.

Instead of using the titular metaphor as a means to seek deeper, darker ends, Isabel Coixet proceeds to restate it over and over again.

A hodgepodge of horny-old-man clichés writ large, staged as a gleeful affirmation of its male lead's ego and entitlement.

Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another "growing up is hard" dot on the grid.

The kind of wholly misconceived thriller that begs asking precisely what its filmmakers were seeking to accomplish.

Here's a documentary so insidious, so comprehensively scrubbed clean, that it argues for the therapeutic powers of consumerism.

One senses that all of these kinds of documentaires are finally aggrandizing shrines made by artists trying to erect something out of nothing.

Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.

The film plods from one gruesome moment to the next, as if its mere aversion to optimism constitutes a philosophy.

Not merely rote, Boulevard is contemptible for a belief in its own stature as a daring attempt to parse through the minutia of its core relationship, where Nolan's uncertain sexuality would be terms enough to laud the film's provocative insights.

Whether because of race, shame, shelter, or fright, 7 Minutes remains white in the face throughout.

It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.

The film wants to reveal the anguish of mental illness and infiltrate the mind of its protagonist through constant affirmation of his pain.

The opposite of enlightenment, the film hides its anxieties behind a mélange of third-rate grit and playful xenophobia.

The film's troubled aesthetics are exacerbated by a screenplay that contains the trappings of amateur toil, including dialogue that harps on innocuous moments and trifling exposition.

It's the cinematic equivalent of a pat on the back accompanied by a slap in the face.

Never is there an Iranian perspective on the proceedings, giving the documentary the jingoistic bent its title implies.

It perverts cinephilia by asserting that anyone who engages in criticism actually, deep down, wants to be a practicing artist.

The film is unable to specify narrative urgency beyond a broad sense of "based on a true story" pathos that's by turns hollowly uplifting and tragic.

The thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.

A shamelessly derivative and preposterous would-be blockbuster that goofily fashions itself as a sweeping romance, time-travel sci-fi tale, and gallant period piece all at once.

The premise amounts to numerous raised glasses and classical music cues, but little of this schmoozing strikes a notable chord beyond the démodé back-patting engaged throughout.

The film lacks an ability to construct significant instances of character drama as symbolic of larger concerns pertaining to nationalist dilemmas.

Vice takes the basic premise from 1973's Westworld and morphs it into an incoherent slog.

If Junebug focused on quieter moments of extended family dynamics, with its city-meets-country clashes delving into resonant, region-specific sensibilities, Angus MacLachlan never goes beyond signpost sentiment.

It ironically reveals its intent to suture shut any remote ambivalence regarding its own gung-ho ethos, in effect engaging the same sort of oppressively dogmatic tactics it so outwardly denigrates.

Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.

The filmmakers play Catherine's disgustingly narcissistic sense of entitlement as endemic to the supposedly girl-next-door charms befitting the film's thoroughly normative gender politics.

Much like a spate of recent summer blockbusters, there's a tiring sense that every single facet of the narrative has to be rendered with truculent solemnity.

The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.

There's a disingenuous offering of pathos to accompany the film's ridiculous and violent denouement.

As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.

A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.

Rich Hill is poverty porn, examining lower-class spaces with pity as its operative mode and engendering little more than a means for viewers to leave the film acknowledging its sadness.

The characters, the sets, and the scenes all exist to propagate the notion that pleasure derives from repetition and remediation.

Paco Cabezas's film is little more than a revenge relic pretending that the ethical treatise of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence never happened.

A film so comprehensively miscalculated in its desire to be a batshit think piece that it potentially creates a new category of offense.

For all of the supposed passion and anguish in Saint Laurent's clothing and relationships, Jalil Lespert consistently neglects to imbue the film with such a comparable level of ambition or desire.

An art-house con destined to make viewers who've ever used the term "mindfuck" as praise rack their brains trying to come up with alternate readings for a film that invites many but convincingly offers none.

Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.

Jerome Sable's debut feature couldn't be further from De Palma's delirious cinematic essays on vision and genre.