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.