Derek Smith

The film feels like sitting through extended acting exercises where everyone is giving it 110% every take.

The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison’s wonderful rapport helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real.

The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.

It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.

The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.

A taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.

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.

The film is almost sadistically driven to turn a woman’s trip down memory lane into fodder for cringe humor.

The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.

The film is admirably frank in its depiction of lingering trauma but too often struggles to capture its more ineffable qualities.

Fernando Guzzoni's Jesus is at its best when it steers clear of pat moralizing and simply yokes its moody sense of atmosphere to the aimlessness of the story’s young characters.

Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt.

Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Avi Nesher’s film continually trips over itself.

The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.

The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.

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.

The film is loaded with inconsequential detours and questionable and inconsistent character psychology as it stumbles awkwardly to its foregone conclusion.

Beginning with the reversed names in its title, the film announces itself as a distinctly feminine spin on the Grimm fairy tale.

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

Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.

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.

Eytan Fox’s film is a low-key observance of two men finding the beauty in each other’s mysteries and contradictions.

A Simple Favor haphazardly vacillates between suburban satire, goofy comedy, and dark, twisted psychological thriller. Which is to say that the film doesn't evince the seamlessness of presentation of its clearest antecedent: David Fincher's "Gone Girl."

Keith Behrman’s film comprehends the malleable, often inscrutable nature of desire.

The original Brian and Charles short focused entirely on its titular characters, and it’s clear that was for the best.

Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny.

The film vibrantly articulates all that’s lost when people are held under the draconian decree of warlords.

Joe Cornish’s film is vigilant in its positivity and hope for the future at nearly every turn.

Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.

Throughout, the too-brief depictions of Luciano Pavarotti’s flaws are conspicuously shrouded in a veil of hagiography.

All of the time spent on Thomas Munro’s various campaigns for reconciliation and harmony between two Māori tribes hampers the film, which would have been better served had it expounded on the grander conflicts that it only superficially acknowledges.

The documentary ultimately reveals itself as a paean to female strength and resistance.

For all of its slavish devotion to Mary Poppins, the sequel doesn't even seem to recognize its greatest attribute: its star.

If the film’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam just a tad as SpongeBob’s stay in the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants is still charming, spirited, and ludicrous enough to prove that it’s not quite time to tell this series to walk the plank.

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.

The film celebrates individuality even as it suggests that everyone needs their own A.I. tech to validate everything they like and think.

For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film.

While Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution.

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.

Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.

Art, commerce, and immigration are inextricably bound in Kaouther Ben Hania’s playful and gently moving, if uneven, film.

Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.

There are enough left turns here to allow us to shake the impression that we’ve been to this rodeo before.

The Bad Guys is a heist film that steals all of its moves.

The film's biggest problem is its inability to lend its clichés and tropes any dramatic thrust or satirical bite.

It’s as if by being confronted by new innovations that appear to have come straight out of a sci-fi film, Werner Herzog exercises his galaxy brain to see what we could be capable of a decade, even a century, from now.

The film plays like a mixtape of various sensibilities, partly beholden to the self-contained form of the bildungsroman; surely it’s no coincidence that a James Joyce poster hangs in the background of one scene.

With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Ari Aster traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.

Like so many shoot-‘em-up video games that repeatedly break for cutscenes, the film too often diffuses its tense energy by whipping up context.

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.

Sadie remains a clear-eyed portrait of maternal love, teenage turmoil, and the singular type of tight-knit bonds formed, out of necessity in many cases, in low-income communities.

The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.

Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious.

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.

The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.

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

Throughout, director Masaaki Yuasa’s imagination runs so wild that it becomes impossible to resist.

The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.

The film reeks of the extremely idealistic notions of young love that plague many a YA adaptation.

Lin Oeding’s action thriller thrives on both the beauty of its natural, snowbound surroundings and the brutal instincts of man.

Suncoast spends much of its runtime trafficking in tiresome coming-of-age tropes, until the resulting crowd-pleaser has snuffed out much of what’s so singular about its central story.

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

With Ocean's 8, Gary Ross serves up a mildly engaging riff on the heist film, but he rarely strays from the established formula of Steven Soderbergh's original Ocean's trilogy.

The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.

Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, which is nearly defined by its handheld camerawork and the medium close-ups on Riz Ahmed’s face, is one of the more intimate adaptations of Shakespeare’s play to date.

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 Lost City is proof that star power and chemistry can only take a film with a mediocre script so far.

As effective as director Josie Rourke is at exposing the emotional and physical toll of reigning as queen when exploring Mary and Elizabeth's relationship, her portrait of an endless string of betrayals ends up as simply faceless and impersonal.

Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.

The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.

The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.

George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.

As the film becomes increasingly reliant on predictable narrative tropes, it evolves into the very thing it set out to parody.

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

Ridley Scott’s tale of greed and revenge practically begs for melodramatic excess.

John Crowley’s film blunts the force of the naturalistic performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as it shifts around the timeline of the story with little rhyme, reason, or rhythm.

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.

Once the film shifts into a broader comedic register, it no longer capitalizes on Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae’s gift for gab.

On the Basis of Sex is too often busy revering Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her confidence and brilliance to bother with presenting her as a living, breathing human being.

Behind the violence and gore, Nobody 2 only offers the skeleton of a narrative.

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

As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to be.

So many grandiose tactics portend a grander revelation than the film’s otherwise low-key three-hander delivers.

The charitable representation of Bryan Cranston’s character greatly diminishes the emotional resonance of the film’s dramatic turns in the final act.

The only past that Dial of Destiny is interested in plundering is the glory of its predecessors.

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.

In the end, the film is all too ready to transform into just another shiny pop object indistinguishable from so many others before it.

The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins.

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 muddies its sense of moral righteousness by suggesting that violence and vengeance can only be defeated by more of the same.

The film gives palpable expression to the sense of hopelessness felt by those who fall under the control of cults.