Derek Smith

A sweet ode to childhood innocence turning sour upon its introduction to the public is an intriguing notion, but Simon Curtis incomprehensibly crams the events of Christopher’s early childhood stardom, his difficulty coping with the ubiquity of his namesake’s legacy, and his ultimate defiance of his father into less than one-third of the film.

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

Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.

Ben doesn't deserve our sympathy, in part for how noxiously the film has imagined the female characters who surround him.

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

Evan Rachel Wood and Julia Sarah Stone have a natural chemistry together that brings a feverish and unsettling intensity to their characters' tumultuous relationship, but there's no reprieve from the dour tone of the film.

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.

As it strives for a grander metaphor of life in America, The Forever Purge resorts to sweeping generalizations that make the prior films in the series feel like pinnacles of subtlety.

Despite its title, Life Itself doesn’t revel so much in the joys and travails of life as it does in the shameless emotional manipulation stemming from the ham-fisted tendencies of its own maker.

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

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

The film’s tendency to break the “show, don’t tell” directive becomes especially irksome in its homestretch.

Like Lisa and Kate’s pendular swings between hope and despair, Johannes Roberts’s film can’t help alternating between the genuinely terrifying and the just plain dumb.

Will Gluck’s rom-com doesn’t bother to create a compelling world around its charming leads.

The film suggests a gene splice of a slasher flick and supernatural horror. But as enticing as that combination may sound, André Øvredal’s rendering of it is as bland and listless as the blues and grays that dominate the film’s color palette.

The film Despite its weird flourishes, the film succumbs to the tropes and emotional contrivances of the family melodrama at its core.

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

The film’s manic blend of gore and relentlessly cheeky comedy eventually leads to diminished returns.

The film largely evades any perspectives that might question the institutions that put our soldiers in harm’s way.

The film is an easily digestible replica of the truth, bathed in honeyed cinematography and sentimentalized adulation.

The film is an unwieldy array of muddled ideas that never gel together into a cohesive whole.

Robert Rodriguez’s film, like The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, fundamentally lacks a sense of wonder.

Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.

It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.

While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.

The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics.

The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.

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