Derek Smith

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

Some of the film’s narrative threads are frustratingly unresolved, while others are wrapped up in arbitrary fashion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.

Its inconsistent, half-baked characterizations would be more forgivable were they at least in the service of some inspired comedy.

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

Throughout, the film's tone vacillates jarringly between corny, broad humor and unrestrained treacle.

Dolittle’s inability to completely develop any of its characters reduces the film to all pomp and no circumstance.

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard improves on its 2017 predecessor only insofar as it runs 20 minutes shorter.

By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.

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

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

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.

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.

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.

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

If there’s an ethos that Justin Dec’s film believes in, it’s only that “death sucks.”

Like other gender-swapped films in recent years, The Hustle plays the identity politics game as an end in itself.

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

Instead of elaborating its plot, Blacklight offers up repetitious, dialogue-driven scenes that deliver only the shallowest of exposition, advancing the story at a sluggish pace.

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 will-they-won't-they of the film is a non-starter, and as such the film's climax is stripped of suspense and even the most basic of dramatic payoffs.

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

The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.

With The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring universe has damned itself to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.

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.

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

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.

A blatantly telegraphed mid-film twist helps turn Second Act into one of the strangest and most misguided rom-coms of any year.

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

The film aims only to shock, refusing to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.

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

The Desperate Hour’s broad, vague rendering of its characters is part and parcel of its troubling approach to its material.

Almost every element of the film has been seemingly engineered to be the ne plus ultra of slapdash ineptitude.

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.

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

The Takedown’s supposedly inclusionary, pro-immigrant messaging is constantly undermined by puerile and dated humor.

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 too narrow-minded to explore the notion that a saint-like man may want to satisfy his normal carnal desires.

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

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’s treatment of its subject is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.