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.