Ed Gonzalez

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Fraulein almost entirely shuns backstory, coloring around the lives of its characters with ostentatious style (in this case, fuzzy-wuzzy visual vibes and music tailored to each character’s generation) and hoping audiences won’t mind filling in the blanks.

The collection of clever quips on parade here are both tiresome and predictable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Aladdin is ultimately less offensive than patently ridiculous, mostly because its ethnic white noise is really just an excuse for Robin Williams—as a postmodern blabbermouthed genie who grants Aladdin three wishes—to put on the most elaborate, narcissistic circus act in the history of cinema.

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.

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