David Rooney

This is a shallow snapshot of First World problems and feeble conflicts that makes you despair for the state of gay-themed drama, perhaps even more so because it's capably acted and assembled with a slick sheen.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

Audience patience undergoes a far more brutal butchering than anything onscreen in Delphine Gleize's wildly over-reaching feature debut, Carnage.

Sadly, there’s no trace here of the authentic fondness for his characters that illuminated Hill’s directing debut, Mid90s. Just a load of solipsistic L.A. brain rot trying to pass for satire.

It falls short on character definition, emotional involvement, narrative drive and originality.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

The movie morphs from sluggishness to confused ludicrousness, as it turns into a thrill-deprived thriller.

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

While director Martin keeps the film moving, its implausibilities turn from holes into canyons.

There's neither topicality nor bite in this bland pseudo-thriller, which lathers on composer H. Scott Salinas' high-suspense score like shower gel after sweaty sex, yet rarely musters an ounce of genuine tension.

This posturing, airless exercise is wearing rather than exciting.

Overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements starts intriguingly as a snowbound deep-woods chiller, but gradually dissolves into a mess of other-worldly invasion and military counter-offensive.

This is a high-concept, CG-saturated bore that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it huffs and puffs its way to a little poignancy in the end.

She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.

Though it's decidedly for perverse palates, some kind of cult audience seems assured for this one-note onslaught, which exercises a bizarre fascination despite its excesses.

The film is well-intentioned but dramatically unconvincing, full of clichéd situations and on-the-nose dialogue about kids getting their shot and living their dream.

It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.

Lyne’s take on the material, scripted without distinction by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmith’s story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession.

A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.

Beneath gets capsized as much by its knuckleheaded script as by its somewhat risible giant flesh-eating fish.

For all its manic energy, there aren't enough recreational drugs in the world to make Yakuza Apocalypse anything but a bloody silly bore.

A Lifetime movie on crack, The Quiet dredges up every lurid cliche from the well of teen hormonal havoc in a tale of dysfunctional family meltdown that seems unsure whether to push for suburban-Gothic psychosexual excess or tongue-in-cheek malevolence.

The characters are uninvolving, the emotional stakes never fully take hold and the physical action invariably promises more than it delivers.

This ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story.

The movie aims to make Daphne's journey raw and real, but mostly it's just insipid.

A gay auto mechanic comes out to his straight buddies in Fourth Man Out, but the shortage of dramatic texture, psychological insight or credible sexual tension in this toothless brom-com means he might as well be telling them he has a cold.