Derek Smith

As the historical specificity embedded in the film’s more expansive opening act is abandoned, the more predictable, archetypal trappings of a revenge narrative begin to take hold.

The film views its main character’s culture, as well as her struggles to suppress her identity in order to fit into her suburban world, with a nonchalance that often scans as negligence.

The film uses the grieving process to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.

Mark Felt is a kind of hagiography, and it leans toward whitewashing its subject's legacy, which extends even to the man's illegal break-ins and wire-tapping of the leftist activist group the Weather Underground.

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

The film becomes overrun by an increasingly preachy and tiresome series of life lessons about race, class, and love.

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.

As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

The film’s arguments against endless war end up seeming more than a bit disingenuous, especially given how much time it spends glorifying the actions and morality of those who help buoy ongoing American occupation of foreign nations.

The film is a second-rate airport thriller that makes The Hunt for Red October seem like nonfiction by comparison.

David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Rarely has a film used its foreknowledge of a happy ending as a reason to remain so uncritical and incurious of its central subject.

The film is a pointlessly complicated house of cards that crumbles due to its own hollowness.

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

It fills the screen with a series of explicative conversations set in offices, hotels, and cars throughout which people don’t so much talk to each other as indirectly to the audience.

Rather than thoughtfully reflect on post-collegiate ennui and disillusionment, the film settles for erecting a monument to its main character’s awesomeness.

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

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

In attempting to grapple with issues of bullying, mental health, burgeoning sexuality, and pedophilia, the film bites off more than it can chew.

Vanessa Caswill’s film feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact.