Derek Smith

The original Brian and Charles short focused entirely on its titular characters, and it’s clear that was for the best.

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

The film seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.

On the Basis of Sex is too often busy revering Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her confidence and brilliance to bother with presenting her as a living, breathing human being.

Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny.

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.

Throughout, the too-brief depictions of Luciano Pavarotti’s flaws are conspicuously shrouded in a veil of hagiography.

The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.

Although Last Rampage's overarching narrative travels a well-tread road, it strikes a number of potent grace notes along the way.

The film seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.

Whenever its main characters are pulled apart, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.

The Bad Guys is a heist film that steals all of its moves.

Den of Thieves displays a reverence for the taut and moody tension-building tactics of Michael Mann's Heat, but without a single compelling character or backstory to speak of, it's unable to bring even a modicum of emotional resonance to action.

So many grandiose tactics portend a grander revelation than the film’s otherwise low-key three-hander delivers.

The film is loaded with inconsequential detours and questionable and inconsistent character psychology as it stumbles awkwardly to its foregone conclusion.

By the end, it becomes what it initially parodies: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.

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

After a while, the film’s parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.

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

John Crowley’s film blunts the force of the naturalistic performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as it shifts around the timeline of the story with little rhyme, reason, or rhythm.

The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.

As the film becomes increasingly reliant on predictable narrative tropes, it evolves into the very thing it set out to parody.

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.

As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to be.

While Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution.

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 often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.

The reality of Nazi Germany and its looming atrocities feels as if it exists only beyond the edges of the film’s frame.