Derek Smith

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 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.

Its most amusing moments are in the interplay between the central characters as they adjust to an abruptly shifting reality.

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 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.

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

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

The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.

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

Writer-director Joe Chappelle’s An Acceptable Loss is a B movie with a morally urgent message.

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.

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

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.

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.

While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.

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

The film Despite its weird flourishes, the film succumbs to the tropes and emotional contrivances of the family melodrama at its core.

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

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

The film is less hagiographic than most documentaries of its kind, which isn't to say that Tom Volf's adoration of his subject is ever in doubt.

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.

The film is most interested in homing in on the ways Nadia Murad's fragility and self-doubt arise as collateral damage from her fame and steadfast activism.

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.

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

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.

Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.

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."

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.

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

The filmmakers’ ability to seamlessly explore rapidly shifting Chinese cultural norms within the context of the classic trope of a mother who’s hostile toward her son’s partner is the film’s most impressive feat.

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.

As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.

The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.

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.

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

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

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.

It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.

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.

The film seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.

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

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

In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.

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.

The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.

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.

Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.

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.

With a surprisingly compassionate eye, the film susses out the comic and tragic elements borne from the daily struggle of living with autism.

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 film is subsumed by the unshakable sense that Jared Leto is intended to make Martin Zandvliet's take on the yakuza underworld more palatable for American audiences.

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.

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

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

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

Danny Baron's film awkwardly melds Bollywood romcom tropes with a half-hearted critique of the GMO industry.

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