Ed Gonzalez

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.