Derek Smith

Vanessa Caswill’s film feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact.

The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics.

The decision to have Allison Williams and Dave Franco, both in their late 30s when the film was shot, play their characters as teens may be the most egregious example of Regretting You’s indifference to verisimilitude.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.

Like its predecessors, the film is an often awkward mix of YA drama and R-rated gore.

David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.

Here is all moments, some small and many big, but it’s lacking in gravitas, concerned as it is with tugging at our heartstrings by serving up little more than signifiers that we can project our own memories or personal baggage into.

There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.

As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

The film’s treatment of its subject is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.

The remake gets bogged down by a superfluous, hackneyed backstory and narrative threads that are conspicuous for their lack of emotional gravitas, causing the film to feel like a wheel-spinning exercise.

The film is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.

Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.

The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.

The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.

The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.

This shaggy, disjointed film is less interested in the complexities of Marley’s personal or professional life than it is in presenting him as a hero and an inspiration.

It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.

By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.

In the instances where it’s not going hard, Dicks is a surprisingly flaccid affair.

The film views its main character’s culture, as well as her struggles to suppress her identity in order to fit into her suburban world, with a nonchalance that often scans as negligence.

The film suggests a gene splice of a slasher flick and supernatural horror. But as enticing as that combination may sound, André Øvredal’s rendering of it is as bland and listless as the blues and grays that dominate the film’s color palette.

What ultimately sinks No Hard Feelings is its inability to convincingly meld its excessively bawdy humor and its Hallmark Channel-level drama of two opposites who help one another to embrace life.

The film is a pointlessly complicated house of cards that crumbles due to its own hollowness.

The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.

As Champions tediously veers between the increasingly rote narrative beats of an inspirational sports story and a love story of opposites attract, it further stresses its own archaic qualities with a consciously anachronistic soundtrack that includes Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” EMF’s “Unbelievable,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya.”

Quantumania feels less the start of a new phase of Marvel films than a tired retread of adventures we’ve already been on.

The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.

Ultimately, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.

The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.

The film spins a soapy yet dramatically inert and often tone-deaf yarn about societal rejection and female empowerment in the wetlands of North Carolina.

The Takedown’s supposedly inclusionary, pro-immigrant messaging is constantly undermined by puerile and dated humor.

Martin Campbell’s film never shakes off its familiarity, and as such seems destined to, well, be lost to public memory.

The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.

Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age comedy betrays rather than upholds the values of the very kids it wants to revere.

Ultimately, the film tries so hard to do so much that it doesn’t end up doing any of it particularly well.

The Desperate Hour’s broad, vague rendering of its characters is part and parcel of its troubling approach to its material.

Instead of elaborating its plot, Blacklight offers up repetitious, dialogue-driven scenes that deliver only the shallowest of exposition, advancing the story at a sluggish pace.

Rather than thoughtfully reflect on post-collegiate ennui and disillusionment, the film settles for erecting a monument to its main character’s awesomeness.

The film is too narrow-minded to explore the notion that a saint-like man may want to satisfy his normal carnal desires.

The film is so caught up in its own idea of national exceptionalism that its tagline might as well be Make England Great Again.

Rarely has a film used its foreknowledge of a happy ending as a reason to remain so uncritical and incurious of its central subject.

As far as improvements go, Michael Myers’s revitalized brutality is arguably the only successful one that Halloween Kills makes.

Birds of Paradise lacks the nuance and finesse needed for its story to really take flight.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly plays out as a showcase for Jessica Chastain to bring as much emotional sturm und drang to the woman as she lurches between various states of turmoil.

There’s so much discernible IP baked into Shawn Levy’s film to make its calls for artistic ingenuity feel hypocritical at best.

The fundamental ineptness of Gunpowder Milkshake appears to be a consequence of the exponentially swelling glut of streaming options.

As it strives for a grander metaphor of life in America, The Forever Purge resorts to sweeping generalizations that make the prior films in the series feel like pinnacles of subtlety.

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard improves on its 2017 predecessor only insofar as it runs 20 minutes shorter.

The reality of Nazi Germany and its looming atrocities feels as if it exists only beyond the edges of the film’s frame.

The film’s arguments against endless war end up seeming more than a bit disingenuous, especially given how much time it spends glorifying the actions and morality of those who help buoy ongoing American occupation of foreign nations.

Robert Rodriguez’s film, like The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, fundamentally lacks a sense of wonder.

The film is an unwieldy array of muddled ideas that never gel together into a cohesive whole.

Peter Segal’s film is pulled in so many different directions that it comes to feel slack.

Some of the film’s narrative threads are frustratingly unresolved, while others are wrapped up in arbitrary fashion.

The film largely evades any perspectives that might question the institutions that put our soldiers in harm’s way.

Dolittle’s inability to completely develop any of its characters reduces the film to all pomp and no circumstance.

Its inconsistent, half-baked characterizations would be more forgivable were they at least in the service of some inspired comedy.

The filmmakers’ overly simplistic depiction of good and evil is mitigated to some degree by the presence of Landon (Caleb Eberhardt).

If there’s an ethos that Justin Dec’s film believes in, it’s only that “death sucks.”

The film is imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls Shakespeare in Love.

Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point.

Almost every element of the film has been seemingly engineered to be the ne plus ultra of slapdash ineptitude.

The film sends the curious message that that any time an abusive parent spends with a child is time well spent.

Like other gender-swapped films in recent years, The Hustle plays the identity politics game as an end in itself.

The film preaches of the love of creative freedom, yet finds no original form of expression of its own.

What’s self-worth in the 21st century without a dollar amount attached to it, and what value does UglyDolls have if kids aren’t walking out of the theater nagging their parents for toys of their favorite characters?

With The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring universe has damned itself to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.

The Best of Enemies may be based on a true story, but in so stubbornly turning the spotlight away from Atwater and the radical, grind-it-out community activism that took on the racism that Ellis helped to foster as a segregationist, it more accurately resembles an all-too-familiar Hollywood tall tale.

The film’s threads of personal loss and cultural friction are all but lost amid the tawdry romantic entanglements.

The film’s tendency to break the “show, don’t tell” directive becomes especially irksome in its homestretch.

The film uses the grieving process to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.

The film becomes overrun by an increasingly preachy and tiresome series of life lessons about race, class, and love.

A blatantly telegraphed mid-film twist helps turn Second Act into one of the strangest and most misguided rom-coms of any year.

The film quickly reveals that the only angle it’s interested in is the one that most sympathizes with Gary Hart.

The film is a second-rate airport thriller that makes The Hunt for Red October seem like nonfiction by comparison.

Relying on such arcane gags as prat falls in knight’s armor, fake French accents, and an array of gadget-based explosions, Johnny English Strikes Again seems almost hellbent on aiming for the lowest common denominator at every turn.

That a drop from John Williams’s Jaws score wouldn’t be out of place on this film’s soundtrack goes to show how tactlessly Paul Greengrass milks tragedy for titillation.

The film uncomfortably dwells in a murky middle ground where everything is overblown but meant to be taken at face value.

As the historical specificity embedded in the film’s more expansive opening act is abandoned, the more predictable, archetypal trappings of a revenge narrative begin to take hold.

Despite its title, Life Itself doesn’t revel so much in the joys and travails of life as it does in the shameless emotional manipulation stemming from the ham-fisted tendencies of its own maker.

The Nun is the cinematic equivalent of a Conjuring-inspired maze at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios.

The film aims only to shock, refusing to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.

The Bookshop is steadfast in avoiding drama at all costs.

Aside from the occasional idiosyncratic comic beat, Dog Days remains committed to coloring within the lines of established tropes in the animal-centric family film.

The film trots out thinly conceived villains and a murky plot twists that leave crucial details needlessly shrouded in mystery.

There are only so many monster-centric jokes to be made before they become toothless, and only so many ways to preach tolerance before it sounds more like blunt moralizing.

Rob Reiner's film rests on broad, sweeping proclamations about the importance of factual reporting.

Akiyuki Shinbo and Nobuyuki Takeuchi's time-travel device mostly just exists to complicate what is, at heart, a trite and sexist love story.

All of the broad physical humor in the world can't distract from the fact that the film is an endorsement of psychological exploitation.

It fills the screen with a series of explicative conversations set in offices, hotels, and cars throughout which people don’t so much talk to each other as indirectly to the audience.

The gravity of Krystal's situation is undermined at every turn by the filmmakers' excessively broad, comedic strokes.

Writer-director Susan Walter's film seems almost determined to disprove the causality of social phenomena.

Throughout, the film's tone vacillates jarringly between corny, broad humor and unrestrained treacle.

Evan Rachel Wood and Julia Sarah Stone have a natural chemistry together that brings a feverish and unsettling intensity to their characters' tumultuous relationship, but there's no reprieve from the dour tone of the film.

The circuitous narrative of Nash Edgerton's Gringo is such that it never allows for a character or storyline to develop in a particularly efficient way, as every few minutes an abrupt twist or turn sets things off in a new and unexpected direction.

The seesaw of effect of oscillating between extolling Sidney’s genius and lingering on his anguish begins to feel like a child slowly burning an ant with a magnifying glass, occasionally taking breaks to truly savor the harm he or she is committing.