Clayton Dillard

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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