Eric Henderson

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

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.

Ultimately the film is, like the Faux News programming it caricatures at face value, a deck-stacking simulation of a dialogue it isn't even remotely interested in opening.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

Look, fun is fun, and there’s plenty of the kitschy brand to be had from the riot of late-‘60s production design and lurid plot developments.

The net effect is a shapeless would-be diversion in which things just happen independently, a string of effects missing any cause.

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

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

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.

Critters 2: The Main Course offers a heaping helping of everything that’s missing from the first film: a reasonably intelligent and witty script, a supple and unchained playfulness, and an anarchic mélange of diverse genre riffs.

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.

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.

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

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

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