Emily Yoshida

Levin’s dialogue is relentless. Every line and retort is a punch line, and every punch line more or less amounts to Lindsey and Frank telling each other how much they stink.

It gallops along quickly enough to keep us entertained, but not so quickly that we can’t see the seams of its creaky American Hero setup.

I’ll give Flower props — in an age when so many teen movies are grasping so desperately for message-y topicality, it does the impossible, and manages to be about nothing at all.

I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.

It’s bright and fun and doesn’t look like any climactic fight of a superhero movie in recent memory.

This is a low-stakes, no-frills, point-A-to-point-B crime thriller, taking inspiration from every parent’s worst nightmare, and pretty much nothing else.

The fundamental ironic juxtaposition — ultraviolence meets corporate banality — is a bludgeon that never feels fresh no matter how many times it’s driven into our aching skulls.

Like all good YA fantasy, it’s rooted in earnest adolescent anxieties, and dresses them up with the same level of earnestness.

As it cliff dives, unprompted, into reheated cocaine-nightmare territory done better by any number of 1990s ’70s nostalgia films before it, it not only ceases to be fun, but stops pretending it has any vision for where its lead characters should go.

A deeply silly midsummer lark that makes up for the fact that it’s about nothing by being incredibly entertaining.

I don’t hold Larsson’s novels in enough esteem to mind a theoretical sanding down of them into B-movie popcorn fare, but this isn’t the way to do it.

As a psychological not-quite thriller, it’s consistently entertaining; as a visual exercise, it’s more adventurous than most would be.

Like Teddy, there’s a lot of sophomoric silliness Night School feels obligated to perform. But there’s a heap of good intentions behind it, and enough big laughs to make us want to forgive it in the end.

By shifting its perspective and updating its anxieties, Overboard is a decent-to-great model for a rom-com renaissance, the kind of film that sends one out on a high note great enough to blur many of the blemishes that have come before.

A Bad Moms Christmas is a film about women trapped in a bleakly infantilizing suburban hellscape with horrible lighting, whose only idea about how to subvert their situation is to scream and push people and hit each other in the crotch.

King Arthur is guilty of many blockbuster sins critics have taken it upon themselves to call out over the last decade. And yet, seeing a version of them this derivative and dumb, with neither CGI grandeur nor a sense of fun on its side, is like a splash of cold water in the face, a reminder of how bad things can be when nobody cares.

Welcome to Marwen is a totally confounding movie. None of this is because of Hogancamp’s actual story, which remains rich and wild and full of pathos, nor Carell’s performance, which is subtle and wounded and resists all mawkish special-man tics it could have lapsed into. But the frame of a Robert Zemeckis–directed Inspirational True Story and the syrupy Alan Silvestri score that blankets it are just too many layers of abstraction over a story that already contains multitudes.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

Watching Jigsaw go about his torture business is about as interesting as watching a child burn ants — a dumb and ugly waste of energy, resources and time.

There’s nothing grounding enough here; everything — the sets, the costumes, the performances — seems to drift off in a CGI haze. As a contender for cherished childhood mythology, its methods are cheap. And as a mere child distractor, it seems awfully expensive.

The Darkest Minds is just too foggy to make out much of anything in.

There are a lot of half-complete ideas among the sisters’ jumble of imagery, but trying to tie them together is a fitfully enjoyable, if ultimately fruitless experience.

Its own pointlessness may keep The Dirt from feeling like an actual affront to humanity, but that doesn't make it very good, either.

All Eyez on Me is rarely more than a faithful adaptation of the rapper’s Wikipedia entry, so fixated on name-checking every footnote of Shakur’s public life that there is no space to explore the experience of the man himself.

American Hangman, a bar thought experiment turned into a film every bit as simple and bad-taste-leaving as that would imply, only has use for humans as sock puppets.

With jump scares and cornball demon faces lurking around every corner, the more ambient (and important) existential despair of Aokigahara is lost.

A half-baked tragic love story so desperately engineered to tear-jerk that it ceases to resemble anything human.

A thoroughly incoherent movie salad.

It does not suffice to call The Book of Henry bad; it’s nonfunctional, so poorly conceived from the ground up as to slip out of the grasp of the usual standards one applies to narrative film. It might be admirable if it wasn’t such torture to watch.

All these performers are given decent setups, but the script loses interest in anything that starts to look like a comedic through line.

This is a toxic, not at all benign film.

Peppermint has no surprises up its sleeve, and casting Jennifer Garner as the put-upon housewife turned gun-toting vigilante doesn’t change that. If anything, changing one element of the formula does more to expose its dullness than the same movie starring Liam Neeson.

Bright turns out to be more interested in its mythrilpunk world-building than any kind of social commentary, which is a good thing, because while it is so-so at the former (the plot holes in this thing), it is clearly out of its depth with the latter.

The Transformers movies are a favorite object of critical scorn, and narratively, The Last Knight remains barely coherent. But it’s more fun than "Age of Extinction," though both movies are so drunk on money and effects they accidentally go weird.

Replicas is chock-full of histrionic what-ifs that seem to hyperventilate so hard in their delivery that they don’t have enough oxygen to actually blow anyone’s mind. It would be the stuff of future cult screenings if it wasn’t so boring and muddled.

It is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children.

What Herce and his crew have accomplished is an invaluable feat of cinematic empathy and vision.