Eric Henderson

Cross of Iron would almost seem a proper mea culpa by Peckinpah for his controversial career, and the pre-Dogville closing credit sequence featuring a risible, anti-patriotic photo slideshow reveals a director still capable of new and inventive provocation tactics.

The clothing may be couture, but Funny Face’s plot is strictly wash, rinse, repeat.

Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film.

Much like with Neighbors 2, Mike and Dave’s obvious ace in the hole is its commitment to gender parity.

The Bad Seed might not have the lurid veneer of Oedipal conflict that turned The Good Son into a supreme guilty pleasure, but it’s got more false-façade performances than you could ever hope for.

It feels less like an cautionary adventure movie or the classy Hollywood equivalent of a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and much more like a disaster epic.

When the trademark Shyamalan twist finally arrives, it doesn't synthesize anything other than the director's devotion to his signature gimmick.

Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.

Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.

The film, meekly directed far across the soundstage by former actor Paul Henreid, is a potboiler filled with oh-so-convenient plot twists and purely incidental characterizations.

Death Race is a maladroit but exuberantly gamey mix of social commentary and blue-collar goofiness.

This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film’s revival came about when it developed a cult following.

It presses the case that the complexity of the human condition distracts us from the pure dignity of a noble act.

An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.

The makers of this rescued-footage documentary ultimately understand the power of its subjects' personalities.

Its dedication to the transgressive power of frivolity remains the franchise's greatest weapon.

Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.

Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.

It's a boldly attempted strike against the monolithic corporatization of fan service, and arguably one of the few films that defines dystopia as nothing less than a marketplace of trademarked, cross-promotional intellectual property. In other words, our here and now.

Has the time come to ask if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction?

The major saving grace of The Hills Have Eyes is that it’s better acted than probably any other film from Craven’s early period. Because of his emotionally bare nature, Robert Houston’s achingly implosive terror is more complex than your average male lead in a horror film.

With Travis Mathews's help, James Franco's persona forms a kind of symmetry: 1980's dubious homophobia against 2013's risible homophilia.

More often than not, the movie only glancingly burrows beneath America’s attitudes toward rural evangelism that surfaced concurrently with the advent of the Moral Majority.

Malcolm D. Lee's film at least it goes down easy. Easy like a Sunday-morning hangover.

Thor: Ragnarok is the flamboyantly roller-disco entry in an already uncomplicatedly cartoonish side franchise.

As dumb as Tag is on the surface, it offers amity, emotional support, awkward tears, the specter of death, and the spectacle of ass-punching slapstick all rolled up in one somehow cohesive collection of all-good spare parts.

Tom Cruise's participation transmutes, as it always does, everything around him, turning the movie's series of false starts, dead ends, and hard lessons into a working metaphor for his own career.

There are only clichés in this rise-and-fall material, with the sole distinctive wrinkle being the weight given to the rise versus the fall.

Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.

If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.

Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.

The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.

The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.

Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery.

Novelty and Melissa McCarthy’s comedic chops only carry Life of the Party to midterms, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s a star vehicle without any engine.

To hose down the white elephant in the room right off the bat, yes, it falls into place as a coming-of-age spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.

To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.

Unfortunately, the haphazard, showy cross-cutting between Laine’s to-the-camera narration and the flashbacks (sometimes to scenes he couldn’t possibly recollect) do little to hide the fact that Romero, like his aimless protagonist, seemingly couldn’t care less.

Silent Night, Deadly Night brought the idea to new levels of cold sleaziness.

It has the core of a genuine crowd-pleaser, but unfortunately something bigger and more all-consuming keeps getting into its head.

Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”

Marshall arguably intends for societal 20/20 hindsight to provide the bulk of perspective throughout.

No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?

It's a buzzkill to enter the world of Minions primed for a tidal wave of gibberish-talking lemmings to tear the roof off, only to see them once again led astray by the ordinariness of human affairs.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

Martin Scorsese's keyed-up, irreverent tone frequently fails to distinguish itself from the grunting arias sung by the oily paragons of commerce his film evidently intended to deflate.

A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns’ tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.

Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.

The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.

The choreography, the performances, the set decoration, the dialogue, everything about Hello, Dolly! is played directly to the back row of the theater, which would be fine on the stage, but on anamorphic widescreen close-ups tends to be more frightening than mirthful.

It's a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson's sly intuition.

Any potential subtext of Munro Leaf's children's book has been bleached out in the marketplace-oriented Ferdinand.

Once the money shots of Darren Aronofsky's version recede, it becomes ever more clear that his intention is to tackle the capriciousness of Old Testament logic. And, ultimately, to assent to it.

Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio’s 1950s output.

Unabashedly lefty sentiment colors the whole film.

Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.

Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film I’ve ever seen with a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which I expected a tumbleweed to flit across the deck.

It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.

Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.

The Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.

As if trying to put quotation marks around its disposability, 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter uses a perpetually underwhelmed narrator to undercut its central love story, surrounded by polo antics and swimwear fashionistas.

There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.

Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.

It’s Lifetime. It’s camp. It’s seriously confused, and it should speak directly to drag queens in straight relationships everywhere.

Despite some satisfyingly gut-busting moments, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue retains a very British stiff upper lip.

This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.

This was hot stuff in the mid-’50s, but beneath the sleazy coating covering the film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness.

If there isn’t a single element in the entire film that’s not derivative of the studio’s then-recent past, you can’t blame them for sticking with what worked best—business models-cum-creative habits conditioned by horsewhip die hard, if at all.

It cashes in on trendy retroism instead of utilizing the perspective of, to borrow from Joni Mitchell, seeing clowns from both sides now.

With an enviable, well-stocked cast of character thespians and a carefully dilapidated motel set, Eaten Alive is all ingredients, no recipe.

Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Storks doesn't take many cues from Pixar's tear-jerking playbook.

Beyond the forthright identity politics and titillating theatrical misdemeanors, one still comes away wondering about the things that remain concealed.

Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.

There's much more plot floating around during the sequel, all leading up to a climax at the "KEN Conference" that suffers in comparison to Silicon Valley's mockery of the same milieu.

Far from seeming like a strategic element created to define Lady Gaga's reinvention, the documentary instead feels like a natural outgrowth of it.

There's something to be said for a summer movie that offers up Chris Colfer as an unapologetic misogynist hairdresser.

The expansion has the unintended and unfortunate effect of doing exactly the same thing to Alexander he accused his family of doing in the first place: marginalizing him.

Keanu is declawed by design, but it's hard not to wonder what the cat could've dragged in.

The film transcends the déjà vu of its borrowed trappings but ironically sacrifices all momentum in favor of a long series of physical tests.

A Little Golden Book version of drastically simplified socialism accompanied with a healthy dose of warmongering bravado.

A bald rehash of Jaws, only with the Moby Dick elements played up even further, Orca isn’t a cheap thrill (producer Dino Di Laurentiis was also the man behind the idiotic-but-exhilarating King Kong remake), but it sure does seem like it’s in a rush to finish.

At its best, Poltergeist III recalls that surreal mix of DIY ingenuity and narrative ineptitude that mark some of Lucio Fulci’s lesser efforts. At its worst, well, it’s just another soulless, hacky-tacky horror sequel.

Sloppy and haphazard where it should be calculatedly chaotic, it can't ever seem to settle on an appropriate tone.

And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.

If Ice Age: Collision Course gleefully fails at being a history lesson, at least it offers an energetic recess from reality.

Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.

No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.

Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.

In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.

That this retrograde "straight talk" somehow managed to emerge on screen as a reasonably genial ensemble comedy speaks to the strength of its performers.

The film is sstrictly a high-tech spin on one of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Monogamy, Passengers seems to suggest, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.

It doesn't take long to realize that Ridley Scott's adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.

Oliver & Company is as out-of-touch as anything the studio ever made.

It risks offense by putting a typically Adam Sandler-ian twist on a tired familial trope, though such risks can often be the only thing enlivening forced franchise installments like this one.

Kevin Costner scowls and darts around the dubious thin line between "racism" and un-sugarcoated "truthfulness" that only anti-P.C. wingnuts actually believe exists.

The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.

The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.