Ed Gonzalez

Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.

The film doesn’t lock on a target long enough for it to work up a head of steam as satire about the art world and how it thrives on nepotism, let alone one about the frustrations of the immigration process.

When Dominion isn’t suffocating itself with world-building, much of it frustratingly untapped, it’s wholly given over to corny fan service.

There are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them.

The film is a muddle of clichés and unremarkable action sequences that bleed together into a cacophony.

No Man’s Land mostly suggests a performance of allyship on the filmmakers’ part.

Through to the end, you can’t get off on the thrill of this film’s craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man’s cruelty is the point.

By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.

A shrill and insipid spectacle of cross-cultural communion, but don’t call it stupid, as that would suggest that it doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing.

The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it’s as if it’s been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.

Hotel Artemis quickly reveals its future setting as an empty pretext for a banally convoluted and sentimentalized show of emotional rehabilitation.

Complicating Sophie Turner's character would have allowed the film to feel as if it had more on its mind than pulling the rug out from under us.

Emotional complication is what this film, so abundant in last-minute getaways, fake-outs, and half-hearted nods to the franchise's greatest hits, needed so as to elevate it out of its programmatic torpor.

At best competently mounted and at worst a case study in watering down chaos for an American market.

The film is only in the business of supplying the sort of fear that hinges entirely on the shock of the exotic.

The film evokes nothing more strongly than a live-action adaptation of a Crate and Barrel catalog.

The film cartoonishly admonishing Big Oil while hypocritically fetishizing the gas-guzzling appetite of a cute and cuddly machine-creature hybrid.

It's a misnomer to label the climax of Steven C. Miller's patently sick Arsenal an actual climax.

By the time the film limps toward its Marrakech-set epilogue epilogue, its experiment in social osmosis is as much a failure as its B-sitcom-grade yuks.

Every incident in the film is a time-bidding maneuver, completely and unimaginatively untethered from logic.

The film's weird reformulation of the Electra complex is nothing short of a sexist fantasy of salvation.

The sheer amount of people and incident indifferently presented throughout this film suggests only an obligation to quota-filling.

The Drake Doremus film all comes down, simplistically and repeatedly, to “feelings make us feel alive.”

The film is committed to the sort of broad strokes that reduce a great artist's life to a spectacle of self-pity.

Every short exudes a commercially slick anonymity that effectively flattens any potential excitement.

Criminal's absence of style, the lack of relish the filmmakers take in the material's inherent ludicrousness, is a failure of conviction.

The film is the cinematic equivalent of watching a Rubik's Cube noisily solve itself for 90 minutes.

The so-called suicide forest's cultural value is trivialized in the bum-rush to liberate the main characters from their agonies.

At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.

In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.

The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.

Gaspar Noé's lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker's delayed adulthood.

The film quickly settles into a depressingly one-note groove as a culture-clashing circus act.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.

Every set piece brings to mind an Epcot Center attraction built from borrowed parts, geared toward reinforcing the young audience's belief that adults just don't understand them.

The film squanders the promise of its scrutiny into how people recalibrate their sense of morality in times of crisis.

It merely exudes an aura of cheap manipulation by which the audience is simply asked to rank the film's characters on a d-bag scale and root for their survival, or destruction, accordingly.

The film's corporate blandness is almost as dispiriting as its disinterest in exploiting the inherent saliency of the material.

It trivializes victim trauma by treating its main character's best-laid plans as punchline fodder.

In Brad Peyton's San Andreas, the biggest earthquake in recorded history is less natural disaster than divorce negotiation process.

Its only claim to uniqueness becomes running the standard zombie narrative through a Hallmark-card filter.

Throughout, Helen Hunt obsequiously tends to her character's evolution as a parent through a flagrant indulgence of sitcom-ish scenarios.

The film is at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state's rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.

If all a movie needed was a boy with abs and a gun (or slingshot), then Beyond the Reach would be a masterpiece.

The story, more a tangle of violent, symbolic gestures, regards economic exploitation with fetishistic, impossibly overdetermined abandon.

The film's relentless turning of its characters' experience into platitudes and homilies is served for our too-easy consumption.

This juvenile horror-comedy spoof is primarily, if unintentionally, a cautionary tale about the perils of allowing brahs to make movies.

David Gelb doesn't evince so much as a single compositional sleight of hand, merely delighting in turning lights on and off and watching Zoe appear in random places.

The action-movie pyrotechnics succeed only at reinforcing Simon West's macho bona fides and condescendingly forcing Jason Statham back into his wheelhouse.

The film splits its time evenly between half-heartedly pretending it's an allegory for our current war on terror and pretending that it's not.

The camera regards Guzman's buttocks and Lopez's breasts with an evasion of visual pleasure that could be blamed on the actors' nudity clauses if the entirety of the film didn't resemble a Lifetime movie embarrassed to have found its way to theaters.

As juvenile and frivolous a wish-fulfillment fantasy as one might expect from the visionary behind the lightsaber and Princess Leia hogtied to Jabba the Hut, Strange Magic depicts war as a series of scarcely muddied binary oppositions: between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and singing and death by karaoke.

The cacophony of visions, broken mirrors, and mutilations only points to the ghost in the machine respecting The Craft as its spirit animal.

Whatever scant insight the prior films offered into Spain's waning Catholic belief has now been entirely replaced by fascist, cartoonish shows of wish-fulfillment prevarication.

Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart's artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice from the banality of its Lifetime-movie execution.

In the wake of Bobcat Goldthwait's Wolf Creek, Exists's metaphorical ambitions are as under-realized as its story-circumscribing use of found footage.

It's a story arc that wouldn't be out of place on Game of Thrones, except it lacks for the HBO program's dense and surprising dramatic reflexes.

Unlike David Lynch, Ivan Kavanagh isn't interested in catching ideas like fish, of linking the degradation of film to the degradation of consciousness.

No cartoon has ever conveyed the struggle for self-actualization with such an inexpressive sense of imagination as this cheap and glorified babysitter.

It suggests the worst possible gene splice of a barbed Terrance and Phillip South Park appearance, Fargo's blithe condescension, and the smuggest of Quentin Tarantino pastiches.

The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.

Jeff Baena's film, at heart, is just another overly familiar story of a boy struggling to get over his first love and who's rewarded for his troubles with a less volatile replacement model.

Paddy Considine's benumbed ambiguity at least works against writer-director Shan Khan's reduction of honor killings to grist for the cheapest of pulpy thrills.

A jump scare isn't just a jump scare in the films of Scott Derrickson, which isn't to say this wannabe master of horror has entirely perfected the art of sudden dread.

Just as queerness is conspicuous by its absence, so is any serious consideration of the drug use that often pairs with extended tastings of EDM.

At least the irony with which this transparently written and dispassionately aestheticized film so demagogically argues for the value of words and pictures is brutally convincing.

With dubious scruples, and much Broadway-style caterwauling, the film imagines what The Wizard of Oz would look like with a should-have-gone-straight-to-video chimney on her.

The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.

A few jolting scares are deployed throughout, but more difficult to shake is how the story's overacting lambs walk a rather programmatic path toward slaughter--or at least anal probing.

One can never fully shake the feeling that the sense of unease the filmmakers rouse, every act of seduction, infiltration, and vengeance they orchestrate, is borrowed.

Mac Carter repeatedly compromises his intuitive, and often elegantly framed, glances at his main characters' teenage blues by too busily going through amateur-night gesticulations of spooking his audience.

It proves that the zombie narrative is still capable of subversion, but does so with the laziest, Lifetime-grade intimations of social relevance.

Rather than capture truly pained souls tangled in exuberant horror tropes, the filmmakers settle for retrograde anguish and warmed-over artistry.

JCVD may not say it best, but he does say it aptly, when his manically cartoonish baddie caps one murder with the assertion that "shit happens."

This window into the world of youthful competition almost entirely disposes of social awareness in favor of routine drama.

Remarkably, the highlight of Benson Lee's film, essentially a fiction reboot of his Planet B-Boy, isn't the scene where Chris Brown gets punched in the face.

The film heroically stretches out its governing water metaphor to a point that allows it to best Garden State's Guinness World Record for most incessant navel-gazing.

The film's sense of conviction and psychological nuance never rises above that of the "I Learned It from Watching You" anti-drug PSA.

One wishes it had spared us the remedial theorizing on media culture and artistic representation and license and less apologetically acted the part of a straight-up horror film.

A rote home-invasion thriller afraid to be seen as just another rote home-invasion thriller, the film turgidly grasps for profundity by framing bloodlust as patriotic duty.

The premise isn't even worthy of executive producer Guillermo del Toro, who will apparently lend his name to any film as long as it fulfills its quota of moths and vulvic openings.

More chilling than the horror of the alien's close-quarters assault is the rank misogyny that more than offensively underscores the Melrose Place-grade human drama.

Gus Van Sant's new film offends for how it views the struggles of the landowners at the heart of its story as subservient to their oppressor's triumph of the spirit.

A sham realist's disaster movie, tackily insulting the deaths of 300,000 people by reducing the horrors of the Indian Ocean tsunami to a series of genre titillations.

If a fourth entry wasn't already in the works, [Rec] 3: Genesis could have easily represented the nail in the franchise's coffin.

Robert Lieberman's Perverted Justice advert spins its wheels with scene after scene impatiently cut like a montage sequence.

Yesterday, Solondz blocking the screen meant something, even if it was just his own petulance. Today, a blurred sign only signifies his capitulation to peer pressure.

John Gulager is neither artist nor genius, bringing only straight-to-video conviction to Piranha 3DD.

The film's inconsistent, largely bankrupt style is second to how hard and tackily it leans on the horror of child abuse to goose audiences.

The title alone invites you to cuss at this smug film, and you may do so the second you catch a whiff of the portentous first shot: a Wes Anderson put-on.

By the end of it, you'll be crying uncle--or wish you were watching The Help instead. At least that was a more artful lie.

Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps.

In Xavier Gens's The Divide, the revolution will not be televised, only the degradation of human civility--and in a mire of clichés more toxic to the mind than the radioactive dust that causes everyone's hair to fall out in the wake of a nuclear explosion.

The purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on "The Omen."

Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.

A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.

God bless Robert Duvall. An American cinematic institution, our greatest living actor makes the fortune-cookie bromides of Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia sound like Yates.

Does Katie Holmes's hubby get script-doctoring rights even on her own film projects? That would explain why Troy Nixey's inane Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, at times suggests an anti-Rx PSA.