Ed Gonzalez

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

While the drones are still cuter than Ewoks, Lowell remains a cloying representation of a ‘70s acid freak shoving his save-the-trees mantra down your throat.

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.

The savagery here is rooted in retrograde myths that might have been easier to stomach had the cannibalism been positioned as a fantastical unleashing of retribution.

Martin Campbell, though a capable director of action (Hal's training session with the Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced Kilowog is proof of that), doesn't have a poet's instincts.

In lieu of advancing a view of the dead's dominion that doesn't abide by the law of "just becauses," Chapter 3 is often content to wink at the ways the first two films spooked audiences.

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

Like the film that constrains him, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, perhaps James Franco understands his performance as something that will one day evolve into something far greater.

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.

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.

Dope is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles.

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.

For a spell, the film gets by on its unpretentious flair for atmosphere, even its disconcerting nonsensicality.

The film comes undone in its clumsy attempts to transform its story into a parable of economic distress.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Seriously, watching Angela (and to a lesser extent Ricky) being targeted throughout the film is like watching a group of shrill brats shooting rocks at a baby bird—if it wasn’t so obvious that everyone’s non-stop cruelty was in service of some big-reveal, or if the performances weren’t so damn preening, the film would be completely intolerable.

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.

The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.

One comes to resent the film for how it thrills to the possibility of a father hurting his children.

Though the film is light on anthropomorphization, its aesthetic is nothing if not infantile.

Marc Forster regards the real-life Childers's evolution from heroin-addicted, wife-beating (implied), gun-toting oblivion to born-again do-gooderism with motorized aloofness.