Ed Gonzalez

One hundred and six minutes is entirely too short a time span for Sheridan to cover Christy's entire life, but the performances are so profound they successfully fill in any and all gaps.

Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.

Miyazaki celebrates individualism and nature’s simple, untainted beauties, subsequently pondering the transcendent power of communication between the “inside” and the “outside.”

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

Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.

It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were off-screen lovers at the time, the film’s infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film.

The film’s brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang’s acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences, like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall; he hopes you will notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness.

It could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life ever put on screen.

Call it what you will (documentary, mockumentary, self-fulfilling prophecy), Close-Up is still the definitive film-on-film commentary.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.

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

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.

I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.

Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.

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

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.

Deep Red is a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts.

The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.

In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.

Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.

Radiating a startling intensity, the film demands to be reckoned with.

Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.

Many of the film’s pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to successfully subvert the Nazis.

There’s a moral “quality” to the bloodshed that you won’t find in your average Hollywood action film.

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.

The film exudes a sense of fleetingness; however static these lives may be, Tian's narrative perfectly evokes a changing season.

Every set piece brings to mind an Epcot Center attraction built from borrowed parts, geared toward reinforcing the young audience's belief that adults just don't understand them.

Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.

Just as the film’s gorgeous backdrops suggest characters trapped in suspended animation, the many colorful balls of light that frequently circle their heads hauntingly convey the filmmakers’ idea of fate and love locked in a cosmic struggle.

A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.

Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wu xia should be…and then som

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

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.

Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.

In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.

Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production.

Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.

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

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

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.

It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.

Less a sincerely kooky elegy to lost time than a slightly off-kilter acting out of familiar rom-com bona fides about commitment-phobes missing out on life.

Blowup daringly suggests that an image without politics isn’t an image at all.

Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.

R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.

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.

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

The poetic, referential succession of near-still images that opens the film so immaculately distills Melancholia's moody narrative and themes that it makes the two-hours-plus that follow seem impossibly redundant.

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

Widely regarded as Ousmane Sembène’s finest achievement, Xala is a cutting morality tale that equally blames the corruption of Senegal’s sociopolitical environment on Euro-centricity and African auto-destruction.

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.

Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.

Today, hardcore fans have a way of trivializing the film’s moral significance, some calling it a mere “masterpiece of shock cinema.” This is to seriously underplay the film’s blistering humanity and the audacious aesthetic and philosophical lengths to which Browning goes to challenge the way we define beauty and abnormality.

Though set in Mexico and ripe with authentic details from daily life, Él is less a portrait of machismo gone awry than it is a brutal and absurd glimpse at one man’s runaway paranoia.

It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

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.

Its only claim to uniqueness becomes running the standard zombie narrative through a Hallmark-card filter.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.

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.

Underground is a unique blend of lowbrow slapstick and sophisticated war commentary, earning it well-deserved comparisons to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be and Not To Be (possibly the funniest movie ever made) and the films of Abbott and Costello.

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

Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =

With The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro pulls an Amenábar by dishing out sophisticated war commentary with bone-chilling dread.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

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

For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.

The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.

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

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

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.

A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.

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 never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly coherent argument about the legacy of trauma.

Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).

At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.

Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.

Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.

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.

In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.

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.

Inspired by an outline by Ray Bradbury and modified for the screen by Harry Essex, It Came From Outer Space remains the granddaddy of the ’50s atomic-scare pictures.

Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.

Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that’s expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.

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.

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.

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.

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.

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.

Structurally and thematically, Dario Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails is an improvement over The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, even if the film’s non-linear convolutions of plot may purposefully distract. Set against a backdrop of genetic research and espionage, Argento’s formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness is on fierce display.

A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.

Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.

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.

Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.

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.

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

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.

Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.

The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.

Polanski brilliantly evokes an evil society’s almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.

The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.

The film doesn’t lock on a target long enough for it to work up a head of steam as satire about the art world and how it thrives on nepotism, let alone one about the frustrations of the immigration process.

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.

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

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

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.

This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.

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.

A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.

The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.

As its second half begins to focus more on Lucy’s dating dilemma, and how she’s forced to confront her firmly established beliefs and rules about dating, the film hews increasingly close to the narrative expectations of the traditional rom-com.

One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.

Haneke's admonishments are disturbing only in the sense that they're never self-critical, and while watching one of his films, there's always a sense that he thinks he's above his characters, his audience, and scrutiny.

Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.

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.

Dario Argento undervalues his material, but his set pieces are glorious enough that the film’s plot contrivances can be forgiven.

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.

Oshii’s attention to detail is ravishing and his distractions of time and space evoke what it must be like to be trapped within the confines of M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water.” Pity then that Innocence is so impenetrable, both aesthetically and philosophically.

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."

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

Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.

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.

It’s the ultimate Vietnam allegory, except there’s no room for peace here, just war.

Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.

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.

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

The film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.

Maelström earns its haunting, unpredictable ending, never exaggerating Evian’s moral dilemma. Still, without non-stop techno or the existential overtones of a Kieślowski morality tale, Maelström is just another Winter Sleepers.

Yesterday, Solondz blocking the screen meant something, even if it was just his own petulance. Today, a blurred sign only signifies his capitulation to peer pressure.

In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.

It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.

The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.

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

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.

The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.

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

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

Ali‘s narrative laxness comes at the fault of boxing time (a good one-third of the film’s three-hour time span is spent inside the ring). You say: But Mann knows how to direct a fight. But I say: So what?

The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.

Had we been allowed to truly sit with the characters’ prejudices, then The Damned might have earned the desperation with which it strains for contemporary resonance.

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.

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

One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.

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.

Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.

Trauma is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento’s excesses of gore.

A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.

It often plays like a toothless PR video designed to rehabilitate the Catholic Church's reputation in the wake of its global pedophilia scandal.

Though it's as schematic in construction as Incendies, the film doesn't grind along to a ponderous plot; it's unnerving abstraction of its subject matter more daringly relays Villeneuve's view of the human cost of gender warfare.

The plot, geared as much for comedy as horror, is wound with efficient build-up, and its revolving-door atmosphere is consistent enough to paper over some iffy acting, baggy dialogue, and more than a few minutes of wasted real estate.

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

Remarkably dull Hud more or less plays out as a home-on-the-range knock-off of Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Rebel Without a Cause.

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.

This sexy, often funny comedy about AIDS is missing one important thing: a crucial sense of danger.

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.

Unjustifiably compared to the original film upon its release, Schrader’s Cat People is more of an erotic reinvention of the Bodeen story. Though Schrader keeps the Fangoria crowd at bay with a series of grisly tableaus, he remains less concerned with the body-horrific than he does with the rituals of sex—mandatory and otherwise.

Cheap effects and gratuitous displays of nudity only heighten the film’s delirious demeanor.

The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.

There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.

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.

These fantastical He-Man epics were common in the early ’80s (Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and The Beastmaster were all variations of the same theme), and while Clash of the Titans remains one of the genre’s homelier entries, there’s no faulting a film this lovingly and aptly arcane.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Hotel Artemis quickly reveals its future setting as an empty pretext for a banally convoluted and sentimentalized show of emotional rehabilitation.

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

Powaqqatsi is every bit as viscerally engaging though less provocative than its predecessor.

Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.

The whole of Phenomena is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often terrifying and exhilarating.

Since Bart's bloodlust is never matched in tenor by his righteousness, the story remains rife with unfulfilled moral inquiry.

As feminist fantasy, the film is non-committal, and as a reimagining of the fairy tale, it's at best expensive-looking without seeming wantonly so.

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.

The collection of clever quips on parade here are both tiresome and predictable.

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.

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 tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The doc's caginess is a weakness that results from an inherently nostalgic sense of reverie.

Forbes’s direction is uncluttered and makes excellent use of the long shot, and though the film threatens to run out of steam at each and every turn, it never runs out of ideas.

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.

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.

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.

The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.

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.

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

No Man’s Land mostly suggests a performance of allyship on the filmmakers’ part.

The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.

Scott’s film scarcely has its pulse on the encroaching conservatism of the nation. In the end, it’s just a shallow lesbian fantasy so aggressively spit and polished as to suggest a 96-minute White Diamonds commercial. Of course, that’s not to say that it isn’t fun.

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.

This window into the world of youthful competition almost entirely disposes of social awareness in favor of routine drama.

Gaspar Noé's lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker's delayed adulthood.

Every shot is painstakingly thought out, but less emphasis is placed on the human face than on the surfaces that reflect it and the objects that obscure it, and the overall effect is close to that of fetish art.

The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.

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.

If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.

Every short exudes a commercially slick anonymity that effectively flattens any potential excitement.

The filmmakers, for better and for worse, stay out of the actresses' way, as Freeheld's artistry is so unadorned that the performances somehow feel more naked as a result.

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

The film's inconsistent, largely bankrupt style is second to how hard and tackily it leans on the horror of child abuse to goose audiences.

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.

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."

At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.

The film's relentless turning of its characters' experience into platitudes and homilies is served for our too-easy consumption.

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.

Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps.

There are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them.

Throughout, Helen Hunt obsequiously tends to her character's evolution as a parent through a flagrant indulgence of sitcom-ish scenarios.

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.

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

Hany Abu-Assad’s film is notable for the way it fixates on its characters’ rush toward survival, homing in on the intimacy that they achieve without ever suggesting that there’s any actual romance in their future.

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

Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.

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

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

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.

The sheer amount of people and incident indifferently presented throughout this film suggests only an obligation to quota-filling.

Throughout, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that feel nothing short of moth-eaten.

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

The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.

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

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.

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

The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it’s as if it’s been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.

The film evokes nothing more strongly than a live-action adaptation of a Crate and Barrel catalog.

The film busts a fierce move but never relishes the unique cultural essence that its gentrifying baddie threatens to snuff out.

In Brad Peyton's San Andreas, the biggest earthquake in recorded history is less natural disaster than divorce negotiation process.

The Drake Doremus film all comes down, simplistically and repeatedly, to “feelings make us feel alive.”

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.

The film is the cinematic equivalent of watching a Rubik's Cube noisily solve itself for 90 minutes.

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.