Derek Smith

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.

A welter of dissonant intentions, the film fails to seamlessly intertwine its elements of realism and fantasy.

The Greatest Showman‘s spectacle is overshadowed by its archaic and misguided notions of American exceptionalism.

The film is unable to reconcile a desire to ridicule its own artifice with constant attempts to foster genuine empathy and dramatic tension.

It casually lays out the domestic space where the story’s events takes place with acutely detailed cultural specificity.

Like Loïe Fuller's serpentine dance, the film is structured on repetition: spinning and spinning but never actually taking us nowhere.

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.

Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.

Initially offbeat, Bitch awkwardly pivots toward a more inspirational story of regret and reconciliation.

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 pressures of Christmas prove too great to fight off and the need for feel-good holiday cheer inevitably veers the film toward half-hearted, sentimental drama that seems purely obligatory to its seasonal milieu.

Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.

The film is admirably frank in its depiction of lingering trauma but too often struggles to capture its more ineffable qualities.

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

The longer things drag out, All I See Is You becomes every bit as amorphous as its protagonist's vision.

Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.

Even overlooking its fictionalized account of an inexplicable political resurgence, the film falters in its needlessly convoluted plotting.

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

Walking Out is modest in scope, its concerns limited to man’s attempts to live both morally and harmoniously with nature.

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.

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.

David Gordon Green zeroes in on the intricacies of Jeff Bauman and Erin Hurley's dysfunctional relationship, offering up an unassuming portrait of wounded love and solitude reminiscent in its sense of detail of the filmmaker's early work, like All the Real Girls.

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

Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.

Despite The Good Catholic‘s interesting macro approach compared to other films of its ilk, it’s far less successful on a micro level.

William H. Macy's The Layover was clearly conceived and written by men who have no interest in approaching female friendships with any degree of complexity, curiosity, or respect.

Fernando Guzzoni's Jesus is at its best when it steers clear of pat moralizing and simply yokes its moody sense of atmosphere to the aimlessness of the story’s young characters.