Ed Gonzalez

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.

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.

The film squanders the promise of its scrutiny into how people recalibrate their sense of morality in times of crisis.

Does Katie Holmes's hubby get script-doctoring rights even on her own film projects? That would explain why Troy Nixey's inane Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, at times suggests an anti-Rx PSA.

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.

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.

Unlike David Lynch, Ivan Kavanagh isn't interested in catching ideas like fish, of linking the degradation of film to the degradation of consciousness.

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.

The purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on "The Omen."

A sniveling diatribe from a great director beginning to resemble someone's senile grandfather.

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.

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 proves that the zombie narrative is still capable of subversion, but does so with the laziest, Lifetime-grade intimations of social relevance.

Olivier Assayas’s knack for fostering insight through irony is nowhere to be found in the film.