Derek Smith

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Like Loïe Fuller's serpentine dance, the film is structured on repetition: spinning and spinning but never actually taking us nowhere.

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

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

Mark Felt is a kind of hagiography, and it leans toward whitewashing its subject's legacy, which extends even to the man's illegal break-ins and wire-tapping of the leftist activist group the Weather Underground.

The film turns the realities of a tragic, deeply complicated life into a sanitized popcorn film.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

There's no follow-through or follow-up on how the main character's voyeurism informs his burgeoning sexual perversions.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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’s flashbacks, which are either too clipped or excessively scored, effectively step on the actors’ toes.

Forever My Girl makes one wonder if Bethany Ashton Wolf actually thinks this is what true love is like.

In attempting to grapple with issues of bullying, mental health, burgeoning sexuality, and pedophilia, the film bites off more than it can chew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

The Greatest Showman‘s spectacle is overshadowed by its archaic and misguided notions of American exceptionalism.

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?

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.

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

The Bookshop is steadfast in avoiding drama at all costs.

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.”

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

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.

Like Lisa and Kate’s pendular swings between hope and despair, Johannes Roberts’s film can’t help alternating between the genuinely terrifying and the just plain dumb.

The pressures of Christmas prove too great to fight off and the need for feel-good holiday cheer inevitably veers the film toward half-hearted, sentimental drama that seems purely obligatory to its seasonal milieu.

A sweet ode to childhood innocence turning sour upon its introduction to the public is an intriguing notion, but Simon Curtis incomprehensibly crams the events of Christopher’s early childhood stardom, his difficulty coping with the ubiquity of his namesake’s legacy, and his ultimate defiance of his father into less than one-third of the film.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Ben doesn't deserve our sympathy, in part for how noxiously the film has imagined the female characters who surround him.

The longer things drag out, All I See Is You becomes every bit as amorphous as its protagonist's vision.

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

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

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

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