Derek Smith

The filmmakers’ overly simplistic depiction of good and evil is mitigated to some degree by the presence of Landon (Caleb Eberhardt).

The film is all surface, and its depiction of trauma becomes increasingly exploitative and hollow as it moves along.

If there’s an ethos that Justin Dec’s film believes in, it’s only that “death sucks.”

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

Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point.

Almost every element of the film has been seemingly engineered to be the ne plus ultra of slapdash ineptitude.

The film is at its best when its focus remains on Ivins’s fierce commitment to her ideals and willingness to speak her mind.

Milko Lazarov seems driven to record the inner workings of a singular slice of Inuit culture before it goes the way of the reindeer.

The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.

The film more or less keeps things efficiently moving, wringing white-knuckle tension less through jump scares than from the darkness of a seemingly infinite void.

The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.

Jay Maisel’s former home suggests a bastion of creativity in a neighborhood whose rough edges have been completely sanded down.

The film captures a man haunted by his past mistakes and nearly certain that he doesn’t have the time left to begin making up for them.

Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Avi Nesher’s film continually trips over itself.

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

Tom Harper’s film empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement.

The film sends the curious message that that any time an abusive parent spends with a child is time well spent.

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

The film is content to peddle the naïve notion that love is the panacea for all that ails you.

Like other gender-swapped films in recent years, The Hustle plays the identity politics game as an end in itself.

The film preaches of the love of creative freedom, yet finds no original form of expression of its own.

What’s self-worth in the 21st century without a dollar amount attached to it, and what value does UglyDolls have if kids aren’t walking out of the theater nagging their parents for toys of their favorite characters?

With The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring universe has damned itself to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.

The film plays like a mixtape of various sensibilities, partly beholden to the self-contained form of the bildungsroman; surely it’s no coincidence that a James Joyce poster hangs in the background of one scene.

Its most amusing moments are in the interplay between the central characters as they adjust to an abruptly shifting reality.

In the end, the film is all too ready to transform into just another shiny pop object indistinguishable from so many others before it.

The Best of Enemies may be based on a true story, but in so stubbornly turning the spotlight away from Atwater and the radical, grind-it-out community activism that took on the racism that Ellis helped to foster as a segregationist, it more accurately resembles an all-too-familiar Hollywood tall tale.

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