Ed Gonzalez

The film is a muddle of clichés and unremarkable action sequences that bleed together into a cacophony.

Despite its fascinating subject matter, Total Eclipse is both unflattering and loveless. Holland seems to care very little for the way Rimbaud and Verlaine’s crass relationship was channeled into words. Worse than DiCaprio’s accent are his and Thewlis’s ludicrous sex scenes.

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.

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.

The story, more a tangle of violent, symbolic gestures, regards economic exploitation with fetishistic, impossibly overdetermined abandon.

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.

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.

The film is at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state's rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.

The title alone invites you to cuss at this smug film, and you may do so the second you catch a whiff of the portentous first shot: a Wes Anderson put-on.

Every incident in the film is a time-bidding maneuver, completely and unimaginatively untethered from logic.

The film cartoonishly admonishing Big Oil while hypocritically fetishizing the gas-guzzling appetite of a cute and cuddly machine-creature hybrid.

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.

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

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.

Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.

The action-movie pyrotechnics succeed only at reinforcing Simon West's macho bona fides and condescendingly forcing Jason Statham back into his wheelhouse.

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.

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.

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.

By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.

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.

Even by Argento standards, Fulci’s film is nonsensical to the point of distraction.

When Dominion isn’t suffocating itself with world-building, much of it frustratingly untapped, it’s wholly given over to corny fan service.