Derek Smith

To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.

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.

Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.

Ultimately, The Boogeyman is like so many other modern horror films that prioritize mood above all else.

Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.

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 seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.

Initially offbeat, Bitch awkwardly pivots toward a more inspirational story of regret and reconciliation.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

After a while, the film’s parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.

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

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

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.

Will Gluck’s rom-com doesn’t bother to create a compelling world around its charming leads.

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.

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

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

The film’s manic blend of gore and relentlessly cheeky comedy eventually leads to diminished returns.

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

The film is an easily digestible replica of the truth, bathed in honeyed cinematography and sentimentalized adulation.

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

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

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.

It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.

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 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 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.

Although Last Rampage's overarching narrative travels a well-tread road, it strikes a number of potent grace notes along the way.

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.”

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

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

Like Vice before it, the film too often uses satire as a tool of castigation rather than as a means of truly attacking the status quo.

Den of Thieves displays a reverence for the taut and moody tension-building tactics of Michael Mann's Heat, but without a single compelling character or backstory to speak of, it's unable to bring even a modicum of emotional resonance to action.

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

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

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

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 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 is content to peddle the naïve notion that love is the panacea for all that ails you.

Greenland 2 plays out as a much more generic thriller than its predecessor.

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

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

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.

By the end, it becomes what it initially parodies: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.

The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.

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

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.

Because it so consistently fails to meld its comic sensibilities and love stories with its generic action premise into a seamless whole, The Hitman's Bodyguard sometimes just appears to be parodying the sort of mess it ends up being.

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

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

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 conspicuous means by which Will Raee stacks the deck against Leanne, the real victim of this story, is matched only by a moral grandstanding that seeks to condemn rather than understand the character’s decisions.

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

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.

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

The film’s gore is just as likely to invoke fear as to serve as a killer punchline to one of Rodo Sayagues’s set pieces.

Despite The Good Catholic‘s interesting macro approach compared to other films of its ilk, it’s far less successful on a micro level.

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.

England Is Mine is a tour ride through a legend’s formative years that’s more concerned with the familiar signposts than the intricacies of the scenery along the way.

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.

Ultimately, Kidnap is an efficient vehicle for the delivery of some lean action that's frequently weakened by a scarcely whip-smart script.

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