Derek Smith

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.