Eric Henderson

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

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

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

At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.

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.

The sense that they don’t make mass entertainments like this anymore is palpable.

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.

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

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

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.

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

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the true Tower of Babel, the movie star who with each film gets closer to God and whose films always come tumbling down around him.

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.

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

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.

Unlike 2014’s Godzilla, which benefited from director Gareth Edwards’s patience with the Jaws-style slow burn, RAMPAGE is all noise without crescendo.

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.

Father Figures, which finished shooting more than two years ago before spending endless months without a release date, is both meandering and bloated, suggesting the Frankensteinian result of brutal test screenings.

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

Since “humbug” is already spoken for by Ebenezer Scrooge, “opportunistic” would be the most apt word for The Man Who Invented Christmas.

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

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

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

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

It's no surprise that Nick Broomfield finds little use for the moments of unabashed triumphalism in Houston's life, as he's doggedly fixated on the humiliating swan dive.

Right from the very beginning of Rob’s cruel cycle that sees him repeatedly returning to the floor of that elevator every time the church bells at his wedding begin to ring, Naked besmirches the reasons that Groundhog Day's Möbius-strip construction worked.

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

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

The only wish that ends up satisfyingly granted is, in Wish Upon's final and utterly predictable tableau, the audience's.

The film's plot crux isn't romantic fatalism, but 2017's cutest manifestation of trendy gaslighting.

The truly depressing thing about a thriller as undercoocked as Unforgettable is its failure to fly on dark fantasy.

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.

Life, an incredibly square and familiar studio product, baits and switches on two disappointing propositions, moving swiftly from something expectedly cliché to something dismayingly derivative.

Every Republican regime gets the ludicrous devious-baby saga it deserves.

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.

David Frankel's film argues that the power of miracles can be manufactured by those who can fund them.

The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.

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

The Pinkberry solipsism of this particular franchise all but requires our heroine persist as a lovelorn martyr for her audience’s benefit.

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

The film is unrepentantly cynical when it comes to the global business of warmongering, but proves unsurprisingly earnest when it comes to the lure of the American dream.

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

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

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

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

It punks its impressionable audience into believing a lie, then punishes them for their foolishness.

The Angry Birds Movie is a lot of things, but none of them true to the app's appeal.

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

A pop sonata of stand-up comedy routines layered with, if not vitality, then at least honest energy.

The incongruity between Melissa McCarthy's eagerness as a performer and her character's total lack of compassion makes the film somehow both restless and tedious.

As far as shameless excuses to rehash crowd-pleasing gags from the first film go, it doesn't particularly go about its duties cynically.

It's an episode of Without a Trace: Jerusalem presented with all the panache of a Trinity Broadcasting Network TV special.

Most Nicholas Sparks adaptations say, in cinematic terms, nothing so complicated as "roses are red." This one just points to a garden and shrugs.

The sense that children’s attitudes toward rampant militarization are being gradually normalized is the film's objectionable given.

Like any serving of junk food, it seems engineered to give you that initial rush of satisfaction, but leaves you in a dead zone where the only thing you want is more of the same.

Though Will Ferrell has made a career out of his own debasement, the film quickly becomes too cruel to generate laughter for anyone who would empathize with him.

In the film, Alvin and the Chipmunks proudly align themselves not with Dr. Demento, but with Kidz Bop.

Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.

Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.

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

The flick is an artless, puerile shadow of the likes of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Cornetto trilogy.

It only serves to validate George Clooney's devotion to showmanship as Hollywood's current reigning poster boy for blue-state morality.

It's the screenwriting equivalent of Ryan Adams sucking the pop vitality out of Taylor Swift's deliriously produced tunes.

Whatever drugs director Joe Wright may or may not have been on when he wrestled Pan to the ground, pulverizing the material into a quivering mound of monkey-bread dough, you can trust that they were synthetic. Not a single emotional moment in this entire origin story for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and Neverland feels organic.

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.

Nancy Meyers is unquestionably committed to her auteurist signature of giving her female protagonists their cake and letting them eat it too.

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.

It adds more grist for the mill to the notion that studios don't hit the big red "reboot" button in any other state than a panic.

Father doesn't just know best, he's the only one whose knowledge or lack thereof means anything at all.

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.

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

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.

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

It hits its Red State beats so hard that its target audience likely won't notice they're being not only condescended to, but insulted outright.

If ever there was a movie equivalent of dad bod, Entourage is it.

George Miller orchestrates the rubber-burning pandemonium with the illicit smirk of someone who knows he's giving us exactly what we want.

The only thing that could've made Sofia Vergara's misguided contribution grislier would have been to fellate a Chiquita banana.

There's little doubt where Cormac McCarthy-bashing Sparks's allegiances lie. The Longest Ride is truly no country for old ambiguity.

Home's exposition is a mess of forced zaniness, which leaves the rest of the film with a Swiss-cheese foundation.

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

The whole point of Vince Vaughn's cinematic existence is that he's a paragon for reformed chauvinism. He's an irrepressible but highly tamable id. Not so here.

The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.

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

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.

2014: Annie's America makes director John Huston's elephantine, synthetically charismatic 1982 adaptation look like a Minnelliesque model of focus and concision.

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

If your answer to the question "When are rape jokes funny?" is anything aside from "never," the good news is that you may still find a lot to hoot over throughout the film.

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.

The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.

Even permitting that the movie's setup counts almost by default as one of Nicholas Sparks's more complicated scenarios, that makes his failure to draw up compelling, flawed, human characters all the more conspicuous.

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.

You can't help but be impressed by how much it represents a natural, even defensive evolutionary step on its creator's part.

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.

Roger Donaldson embellishes an already overly plotty scenario with hollowly attractive genre superfluities.

Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.

Just as Michael Douglas doesn't have it in his guts to make Oren a real son of a bitch (a grandpa Gekko), Diane Keaton's jangled neurotic tics lack any dramatic import.

It's not even made clear whether the machines can feel pain. But after sitting through Fire & Rescue, interminable even at a lean 83 minutes, I sincerely hope they do.