Ed Gonzalez

In the end, more than just the machine remains an enigma.

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

Though visionary, David Robert Mitchell's film abounds in undigested ideas and dubious sexual politics.

The lusterless camerawork keys itself almost empathetically to the drab reality of the film's spaces, settled and unsettled alike, but it can't enliven the hackneyed plot.

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.

The film ends up cheapening its sense of empathy in its final mad rush to subject audiences to every incarnation of the jump scare imaginable.

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.

To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film's thematic meat.

Given the liberties the film takes, it's surprising that it refuses to penetrate Alan Turing's carnality and allow Benedict Cumberbatch to truly wrestle with the torment of the man's sexuality.

For a story so unconventional, it's executed without director Alexandre Aja's typical commitment to anarchic awe.

Irony is a popular pose struck throughout these shorts, which are less revealing of the existentialist despair that death often rouses than they are of their makers' prejudices.

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.

This is a Hollywood-delivered chronicle of the immigrant experience that earns its justification through good will and tact.

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

There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

The Dardennes believe in human value and social order being rooted in a sense of solidarity, a staggering consciousness of community that brims with a sensitivity to place, movement, and emotion.

David's perversity as a character is mostly disarming for how it illuminates the sadness with which a foe can so readily be confused for a savior.

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.

Meticulous in its adherence to conventional narrative inducement, this biopic only offers a sanded-down and embossed vision of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde's 30-year marriage.

Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.

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

The film predictably alternates in scaring its characters by tapping into their deepest fears and having them rub shoulders with the relics of a past that insists on being undisturbed.

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.

It keeps us at a remove that becomes telling of the filmmaker's reticence to explore whatever feelings of isolation and yearning may inform his main character's grisly compulsion.

DeMonaco may doubly, sometimes triply, underline the story's governing theme of social power and how it's exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate.

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.

The constant foregrounding of so much well-executed incident only works to shortchange the heroes' yearnings and anxieties.

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.

Richard Linklater's film is an experiment in time, and one that's attentive to the audience's sense of empathy.

Bobcat Goldthwait exposes the characteristic male pursuit of power to which females are often made subservient.

The titular signal refers to the Nomad hacker's taunts, though it may as well point to the film's nature as a self-styled calling card.

The result is an alternately gripping and dully meandering patchwork of these soldiers' stay in the Korengal that pointedly shuns big-picture philosophizing.

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.

While Jim Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not--and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.

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.

That it half succeeds, in spite of its cloying self-seriousness, means that it's at best a convincing copycat of a definitive expression of ego and influence in art.

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

If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.

Charlie Paul isn't content to let his stock footage and interviewees lead for him, driven as he is to "make something out of a frame of mind," though to needlessly busy effect.

The literalizing of Ivan Locke's hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.

Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.

Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.

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.

The film is dizzyingly creepy in its refracting of horrors through the cascading windows of computer programs we've come to understand more intimately than our own selves.

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.

Eugenio Mira thrills in watching his main character attempt to worm his way out of a most unusual hostage situation, synching his indulgences of style to the pianist's wily physical maneuvering.

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."

A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.

In its stripped-down realism and blistering fixation on its main character's grappling with life and mortality, the film is kin to Roberto Rossellini's collaborations with Ingrid Bergman.

The film is beholden to a strange internal logic that gives primacy not to its protagonist's suffering, but to its maker's thirst for fun.

Abdellatif Kechiche reveals through his sense of composition, and collaboration with his remarkable actresses, a sensitivity to emotional nuance that's striking.

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.

Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.

Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education.

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.

Una Noche tugged at my heartstrings, but the film's almost phantasmagoric fixation on sex can feel crass and dehumanizing.

Matthias Hoene allows the cockney swears to flow as deliriously as the truly convincing blood splatter, offering a few unexpected gut-busters along the way.

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.

Though The Conjuring claims to be based on a true story, in truth it's based on every horror film that's come before it.

Guillermo del Toro doesn't rise above the obligations of staging a film of this sort as a multi-level video game, a stylish but programmatic ride toward an inevitable final boss battle.

Its stance toward every dipshit slasher and creature-horror flick that's come before it never feels less than casually hostile.

Its audio-visual overload testifies to a group of filmmakers' belief that some films are made to be remade.

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.

Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.

Opting for inspiration over insight, Venus and Serena is a starry-eyed pop documentary that cannot transcend its scattershot, for-fans-only filmmaking.

Xan Cassavetes cops to nothing more significant than being more keen on Vampyros Lesbos than anyone else from her clan of famous cinephiles.

Carlos Reygadas's latest, an almost impossibly intellectual film, keeps us at a remove that's as striking as that which separates its main character from the lower classes.

Passion is a serpentine, gorgeously orchestrated gathering of all of De Palma's pet themes and conceits, a symphony of giddy terror where people perpetually hide behind masks, both literal and figurative.

Throughout To the Wonder, the new and old are incessantly twinned, blurred into a package that suggests an experimental dance piece.

The film's weird mix of dollhouse dread and fashion-magazine chic can be fetching, but it's nothing if not vacuous, a series of disjointed, improvisatory riffs that recall the brazen aesthetic overload of Amer.

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.

Benjamín Ávila structures the film as a series of precious moments, remembrances of a difficult year when the politics of patria and family got in the way of his puppy love.

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.

The film, still only clearing its throat, hints at a wellspring of emotional riches to come.

Despite its flaws, the film is at least a consistent vision, attesting through both its story and animation to the rabbi's right to be different while also striving for human solidarity.

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.

This spirited enough yarn is sincere and heartening in its belief that our devotion to these youthful myths is healthy for our sense of wonderment.

The states get higher with every breadcrumb Luis Tosar's creep lays down, and the film derives sometimes remarkable corkscrew tension from watching him being backed into a corner.

Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds.

Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.

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

More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.

This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.