Derek Smith

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.

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

The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.

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.

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

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

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

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

The film more or less keeps things efficiently moving, wringing white-knuckle tension less through jump scares than from the darkness of a seemingly infinite void.

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

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 is all surface, and its depiction of trauma becomes increasingly exploitative and hollow as it moves along.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If your hook is the promise of seeing Jason Statham go mano a mano with prehistoric sea behemoths, then leaning into the ludicrous is the only way to go.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Distractingly indebted to No Country for Old Men, the film’s wild tonal swings mostly leave it feeling impossibly disjointed.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

Milko Lazarov seems driven to record the inner workings of a singular slice of Inuit culture before it goes the way of the reindeer.

Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested’s prismatic look at a devastating new chapter in the War on Drugs lacks for cohesiveness.