Derek Smith

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

6 Days boils down the intricate relationship between Iran and the West into a tense standoff of conflicting ideals where the values and perspectives of only one side really matter.

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

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.

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

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.

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 Bookshop is steadfast in avoiding drama at all costs.

Writer-director Robin Swicord's film seems content to merely carry out its absurdist premise until the bitter end.

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

The film is lazily content to simply put its female characters through the potty-mouthed, gross-out comedy ringer.

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

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.

The film remains too uncompromisingly black and white as a character study and a story of the conflicts of faith.

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 unable to reconcile a desire to ridicule its own artifice with constant attempts to foster genuine empathy and dramatic tension.

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

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

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.

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

Even overlooking its fictionalized account of an inexplicable political resurgence, the film falters in its needlessly convoluted plotting.