Ed Gonzalez

Kitsch sprung from the lame imagination of adults who probably wish their tweeners lived their lives like Judy Blume characters.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It conveys life experience to such a sentimentalized degree that the world comes to resemble only the sham of a Norman Rockwell painting.

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.

What with the film's cotton-candy mise en the scene, rhyming goblins (“Mortal world turned to ice/Here be goblin paradise”), sexless pixies and elementary light/dark metaphors that reference the order of its universe, Legend is a gothic fairy tale brought to life.

Like the show, this boring, lazy, clumsily staged, overly lit, unnecessarily 3D-ed contraption even culminates with some half-hearted moral hectoring-in this case, the togetherness of the Smurfs works to validate heteronormative values.

Most contracts are negotiated with John Hancocks, but in She Hate Me, deals are sealed with hot lesbian action. Spike, get a clue.

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

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

Like its predecessor, the film is content to dumbly relish in the inanity of Mike's rampage.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.

It’s rather amazing how far the film is able to coast on its uniquely fascinating premise, even if it isn’t much of a stretch for its director: Campillo co-authored Laurent Cantet’s incredible Time Out, a different kind of zombie film about the deadening effects of too much work on the human psyche, and They Came Back is almost as impressive in its concern with the existential relationship between the physical and non-physical world.

Roman Liubyi’s documentary is nothing if not self-consciously obsessed with its own making.

When It Melts is a film that lives and dies on the games that it plays with audiences.