Derek Smith

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.

A welter of dissonant intentions, the film fails to seamlessly intertwine its elements of realism and fantasy.

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

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

It casually lays out the domestic space where the story’s events takes place with acutely detailed cultural specificity.

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

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.

Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.

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

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 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.

Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.

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

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

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

Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.

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

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

Walking Out is modest in scope, its concerns limited to man’s attempts to live both morally and harmoniously with nature.

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.

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.

David Gordon Green zeroes in on the intricacies of Jeff Bauman and Erin Hurley's dysfunctional relationship, offering up an unassuming portrait of wounded love and solitude reminiscent in its sense of detail of the filmmaker's early work, like All the Real Girls.

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

Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.

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

William H. Macy's The Layover was clearly conceived and written by men who have no interest in approaching female friendships with any degree of complexity, curiosity, or respect.

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.

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.

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

As the film spirals outward from its central relationship to delve into other characters’ hidden pasts, the story becomes too unwieldy and fragmented for the audience to develop a comprehensive understanding of Callum Turner's Thomas or his personal evolution.

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

The Last Face's shameful exploitation of Africans doesn’t stop with the mere privileging of its two wealthy white doctors and their trivial personal struggles within the narrative.

The film creates a deeply rooted sense of realism that contrasts the austere, surreal illustrations.

Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.

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.

Aside from further vilifying the Nazis, the film's ideological endgame remains a bit too slippery.

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.

Mauro Borrelli's The Recall has the look of a SyFy original movie and the self-seriousness of Ridley Scott's recent Alien films.

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 Hunter’s Prayer packs its brisk 85 minutes with an impressive array of car chases, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, and foot pursuits, all cut with a precision and an economy that heightens the impact of every hit.

Its gory conclusion is presented with an ostentatious grandiosity that the rest of the film simply doesn’t justify.

Its incoherent turn of events attempts to stupefy us into mistaking its deeply flawed internal logic for ingenuity.

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

Hounds of Love builds to a crescendo that earns its emotional catharsis while staying true to its roots as a truly chilling and intense thriller.

From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.

The film never quite pushes beyond the archetypal nature of its scenario to fully unearth its characters’ psychological turmoil.

Economic anxiety is rarely spoken about in the film, but the life-and-death importance of dollars and cents is felt in every frame.

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.

It's anchored by a pair of dynamic, intuitive performances which mine the psychological complexities of an understandably troubled relationship.

This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.

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

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.

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.

Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.

The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.

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.