Derek Smith

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

The filmmakers’ ability to seamlessly explore rapidly shifting Chinese cultural norms within the context of the classic trope of a mother who’s hostile toward her son’s partner is the film’s most impressive feat.

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.

As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.

The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.

The film trots out thinly conceived villains and a murky plot twists that leave crucial details needlessly shrouded in mystery.

There are only so many monster-centric jokes to be made before they become toothless, and only so many ways to preach tolerance before it sounds more like blunt moralizing.

Rob Reiner's film rests on broad, sweeping proclamations about the importance of factual reporting.

The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.

Akiyuki Shinbo and Nobuyuki Takeuchi's time-travel device mostly just exists to complicate what is, at heart, a trite and sexist love story.

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.

It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.

Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.

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

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

All of the broad physical humor in the world can't distract from the fact that the film is an endorsement of psychological exploitation.

In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.

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.

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

The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.

Writer-director Susan Walter's film seems almost determined to disprove the causality of social phenomena.

Throughout, the film's tone vacillates jarringly between corny, broad humor and unrestrained treacle.

Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.

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.

With a surprisingly compassionate eye, the film susses out the comic and tragic elements borne from the daily struggle of living with autism.

The circuitous narrative of Nash Edgerton's Gringo is such that it never allows for a character or storyline to develop in a particularly efficient way, as every few minutes an abrupt twist or turn sets things off in a new and unexpected direction.

The film is subsumed by the unshakable sense that Jared Leto is intended to make Martin Zandvliet's take on the yakuza underworld more palatable for American audiences.

The seesaw of effect of oscillating between extolling Sidney’s genius and lingering on his anguish begins to feel like a child slowly burning an ant with a magnifying glass, occasionally taking breaks to truly savor the harm he or she is committing.