Derek Smith

The film plays like a mixtape of various sensibilities, partly beholden to the self-contained form of the bildungsroman; surely it’s no coincidence that a James Joyce poster hangs in the background of one scene.

With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Ari Aster traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.

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 film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.

Sadie remains a clear-eyed portrait of maternal love, teenage turmoil, and the singular type of tight-knit bonds formed, out of necessity in many cases, in low-income communities.

The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.

Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious.

The Bookshop is steadfast in avoiding drama at all costs.

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

The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.

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

Throughout, director Masaaki Yuasa’s imagination runs so wild that it becomes impossible to resist.

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

The film reeks of the extremely idealistic notions of young love that plague many a YA adaptation.

Lin Oeding’s action thriller thrives on both the beauty of its natural, snowbound surroundings and the brutal instincts of man.

Suncoast spends much of its runtime trafficking in tiresome coming-of-age tropes, until the resulting crowd-pleaser has snuffed out much of what’s so singular about its central story.

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

With Ocean's 8, Gary Ross serves up a mildly engaging riff on the heist film, but he rarely strays from the established formula of Steven Soderbergh's original Ocean's trilogy.

The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.

Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, which is nearly defined by its handheld camerawork and the medium close-ups on Riz Ahmed’s face, is one of the more intimate adaptations of Shakespeare’s play to date.

The film is imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls Shakespeare in Love.

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 Lost City is proof that star power and chemistry can only take a film with a mediocre script so far.

As effective as director Josie Rourke is at exposing the emotional and physical toll of reigning as queen when exploring Mary and Elizabeth's relationship, her portrait of an endless string of betrayals ends up as simply faceless and impersonal.

Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.

The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.

The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.

George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.