Eric Kohn

The movie makes up for uneven dialogue and pacing issues through sheer horrific imagery.

Pretty and discardable in equal measures, the movie illustrates ingredients of the filmmaker's appeal while falling short of assembling them into a coherent whole.

If the genre elements sustain the work as a whole, the plot suffers from the meandering quality that frequently plagues late period Allen work. Still, the filmmaking finds its groove in individual moments.

6 Years offers little in the way of new material. Yet Fidell, working with executive producers Mark and Jay Duplass, effectively broadens her range by borrowing the sibling directors' improvisatory style and ceding control to her two leads, whose heartbreaking performances imbue this familiar Austin-set narrative with a fiery edge.

With emerging rebel leader Rey (Daisy Ridley) providing a sturdy emotional foundation, and billions of Disney dollars fueling an obviously stunning array of special effects, Rise of Skywalker doesn’t squander every opportunity to dial up the thrilling nature of the epic at hand, but all that razzle-dazzle can’t obscure a hollow core.

The script lacks bite, save some wry meta-commentary on the movie’s existence (including a passing reference to “horror transmedia”). Nevertheless, Susco follows the well-worn path of using the horror/thriller genre to explore the eerie ambiguities of modern times.

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

Sutton’s tricky balance of B-movie caricatures and gloomy expressionism doesn’t always match up, but that very discordance speaks to the potency of its themes.

The movie has few tricks on offer but above all, delivers a solid reminder of Penn’s filmmaking talent, and welcome evidence that it runs in the family.

The movie's uneven tone and ridiculous twists never quite gel, but Knock, Knock is so eager to please that it's hard not roll with the absurd depravity on display — which has been the essence of Roth's appeal from the outset.

A loud, visually assaultive assemblage of genre tropes as technically accomplished as it is difficult to watch, "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears" has plenty to impress while simultaneously offering so little.

Cafe de Flore constantly hovers on the brink on some revelation it never quite arrives at.

Alternately mortified and charmed by the unhinged lifestyle, the film goofily celebrates the idea of a societal escape before drowning its idealism in a puddle of half-formed jokes.

So long as “Billy Lynn” remains focused on his ambiguous mindset, it remains an engaging, somewhat theatrical character study. But Lee’s ongoing need to complicate his approach yields a movie trapped between conventional narrative tropes and questionable attempts to deliver something that registers on a more visceral level.

As ghost stories go, this one's done just well enough to provide reminders of how it has been done better.

The elegance of Francis Lawrence’s direction, cinematographer Jo Willems’ measured camerawork, and James Newton Howard’s ominous score adheres to a familiar set of beats, but it’s the rare big Hollywood mood piece and mostly satisfying on those terms.

Green wisely cedes control to his actors, with Bullock as the main engine pulling the material along. But neither his direction, nor any of the formidable performances, can do much to alleviate the bumpy road of Peter Straughan's screenplay.

Sheil is an ideal vessel for the film's inquisitive style.

Love Is Strange is a sophisticated take on contemporary urbanity infused with romantic ideals and the tragedy of their dissolution.

Eastwood remains a deeply purposeful filmmaker, and The 15:17 to Paris clearly has a plan — it builds to a riveting showdown, with a unique kind of payoff enhanced by the authenticity of its design. It’s a fascinating gamble even when it doesn’t hold together.

Those who adore the original, however, will feel like they’ve been revisited by an old friend, or perhaps the dirty uncle, whose jokes are a bit frayed but still pointed enough. Produced at a time when big, brash studio comedies rarely crack the zeitgeist, Coming 2 America works far better than the market standard, in part because it does right by its roots.

A bonafide family drama, proof that the noir has humanistic roots. It left me feeling thankful for persistent movie traditions.

The movie subtly examines whether people accustomed to a precise way of life can deal with cataclysmic change; by extension, it implies similar questions about Schwarzenegger's career as he heads toward his seventies, and makes a solid case that more new directions await.

As exercises in pulp go, this one yields a solid workout.

Whenever Lee ventures away from the outrageous particulars of the plot, "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" transforms into a stylish means of exploring contemporary struggles in urban black America by depicting it as a ballet of navigating personal and practical conflicts alike.

Exodus: Gods and Kings illustrates a typical contradiction of commercial entertainment: By playing it safe, the movie fails to enrich the material, and never captures the energy that has made its narrative so captivating for millennia.

It's hard to believe that The Devil's Double doesn't intend to be a put-on. Despite a real-life basis of its plot, Lee Tamahori's fierce depiction of hedonistic Saddaam Hussein spawn Uday Hussein relegates the character to a farcical cartoon.

One of those late-summer releases that’s just good enough to make you wish it were better, The Spy Who Dumped Me aims to please every step of the way, but it never earns the nearly two-hour running time.

Smothered by its lighthearted approach, The Monuments Men attempts to make a grand statement about the valiance of dying for the sake of art, but fails to create it.

Expert craftsmanship can't rescue Triple 9 from the constant feeling of a pulpy remix.

Although not exemplary, Janie Jones at least manages to give its tired scenario a sense of legitimacy.

There's a certain elegant simplicity to the movie's execution that maintains a spirit of familiarity but also keeps the material afloat.

While it’s less than the sum of its parts, those parts know how to deliver.

The Fallen Kingdom is at its worst when attempting topicality (the testosterone-fueled Wheatley refers to one of our heroes as a “nasty woman”) or when beefing up its crass plot.

While always an amusingly twisted ride, The Neon Demon is marred by pensive stares and monotone monologues about superficial desires that drag on, and on. Fortunately, Refn treasures shock value over all else, and his movie delivers on that promise with a depraved third act.

It’s a gorgeous, romantic drama that earns its emotional resonance without venturing beyond the most familiar beats.

Love plays out like the fragmented outline for a more engaging movie. But the one found here lacks substance both on the level of story and graphic reveals.

Desierto throws subtlety to the wind, but not without purpose.

Directors Daniel Junge and Kief Davidson at least manage to cast a broad enough net to put the great big celebration in context: Legos are hotter than ever, and this new documentary effectively tells you why.

Ultimately, Robbins’ domineering character is so well-calculated that it appears Berlinger couldn’t peer beyond the curtain even if he tried. That fascinating dilemma makes the movie worth watching even though it presents an incomplete picture.

Skyscraper plays out like a metaphor for diminishing returns — Johnson keeps climbing, higher and higher, until there’s nowhere left to go but down.

It’s a stupid movie with deep ambitions, energized by that trippy neon palette, and the occasional hot beat.

The movie is a visual investigation into the roots of sexual liberation in societies steeped in repression. Watching it from start to finish is a means of engaging with the inquiry at its center.

Like the poster, Meet Monica Velour is engaging to a point, but leaves much to be desired.

Happy New Year provides a rare glimpse into the darker ramifications of war that rarely take center stage in the national dialogue. This struggle has nothing to do with political motives or tactical movements, but rather the battle to retain sanity against impossible odds.

Just as the frequent cutaways from sexual activity tone down the titillation, Lovelace never garners the energy to construct a fully involving melodrama, rarely rising above Lifetime movie standards. Given the material, the irony here is that the filmmakers play it too safe.

It never crystallizes into a singular experience, and instead collapses in a rush of well-intentioned innovations.

Emmerich takes the story at face value and delivers a film unlike any of his others. That is to say, a boring one.

Contextualized by the documentary, the movie amounts to an enticing narrative experiment even when it doesn't quite hold together.

Unfortunately, while Julianne Moore and Ellen Page go great lengths to make the central romance convince, Nyswaner's undercooked script and Peter Sollett's direction have the opposite effect, reducing Freeheld to a tired formula.

As a fleeting essay on sexual biases, it encourages a thoughtful debate, but leaves too many questions dangling to solidify into much beyond a dashed experiment.

The problem with Outside Satan is that the filmmaker has remained faithful to expectations without enlivening them. It's a curious exercise unworthy of his expertise, but then he may realize as much.

Mitchell transforms Neil Gaiman’s sci-fi short story into a vibrant, edgy and at times outright goofy statement on tough antiestablishment rebels and freewheeling hippy vibes, suggesting that they’re not really all that that different.

Racer and the Jailbird speeds along at an engaging clip, but never overcomes the fundamental simplicity of its plot.

Dumont regards history as a focal point for national identity, finding France’s leadership rooted in dry pontification and meandering religious fervor. He gives us a complex world so keen on taking itself seriously that it becomes parody, leaving only Joan’s stone-faced expression to point to a higher truth.

Even as the story drifts off, Night Eats the World derives its power from a beguiling, provocative implication: It’s hard to confront a hostile world, but gathering the courage to do so doesn’t make the job any easier.

Boundaries breaks no fresh ground and sags into conventional story beats on autopilot, but it’s rewarding enough to hang with these characters and roll with their mudslinging.

There are flashes of subtle resentment to Williams’ performance that register as some of her best work in ages, so it’s unfortunate that the movie’s calculated assemblage of sentimental beats dominate the show.

My Salinger Year often trips on the self-serious nature of its premise, and struggles with an antiquated quality out of sync with its timeline, as if trapped between the character’s genuine experiences and her idealized vision of a literary world that doesn’t really exist.

Ellen Barkin puts on a bold, candid performance in Cam Archer's Shit Year, but the enigmatic movie is composed of too many fragments to sustain her efforts.

A supremely dense coming-of-age drama steeped in weighty blather at the expense of emotional validity.

The movie's potential blossoms whenever it toys with the allegorical ingredients head-on. DeMonaco's script plays like a devious Brothers Grimm tale told through the filter of Occupy Wall Street.

Even as the screenplay (which Clowes adapted) contains much of the source material’s pitch-black humor, it also falls short of realizing its subtle vision of an angry recluse learning to make peace with his surroundings.

The ideas don’t cut that deep, but like its psychic protagonist, this movie knows exactly what its audience wants.

An uneven, intermittently thoughtful but largely preachy overview of WikiLeaks' rising influence that has less of an issue determining Assange's character than it does with telling a compelling story.

The younger Mann goes through the motions of a gritty murder mystery with plenty of technical proficiency but only a modicum of soul. The Mann touch is not only in the DNA of the director but in her movie, which inadvertently makes the case that atmosphere is more hereditary than innovation.

V/H/S 2 smartly contextualizes its nightmarish cavalcade of violence by acknowledging the luxury of enjoying it from a distance.

With Shaye’s performance as its anchor, the movie is often a perceptive character study, at least until it’s hijacked by the same bland trickery that so often fogs up horror movies with more to offer.

Eventually suffers from a lack of new ideas beyond its initial premise that finds the two brothers inadvertently swapping roles. Once that happens, the movie takes one bland twist after another.

Gerwig singlehanded carries this blithe, generally forgettable story.

Tom Hanks' appearances come across like scene changes between unfunny sketches on 'Saturday Night Live.'

They Remain, the new thriller from director Philip Gelatt (“The Bleeding House”) hews closely to some predictable beats, but it’s an engrossing exercise in boiling familiar ingredients down to pure, unbridled creepiness.

The long take pulls you into the realism of the moment, heightening any sense of unease already established by the story. In Silent House, directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau ("Open Water") exploit the hell out of that uneasiness and keep pushing its limits.

Like Stephen Walker's delicate nonfiction portrait "Young@Heart," it's a genuine heart-tugger about senior citizens rediscovering their youth by singing pop music; like Craig Brewer's crowdpleasing "Hustle & Flow," it sympathizes with a struggling rap artist without glossing over his flaws.

The Tomorrow Man suggests "Take Shelter" by way of "It’s Complicated," an unseemly combination that never quite gels. But the actors work overtime to mine substance from the material, and Jones gives them plenty of room to rescue this curious movie from complete oblivion.

At their worst, Affleck’s roles are stern and lifeless without soul, pretty sculptures with nothing inside. It was only a matter of time before he made a movie that embodied that lesser side of his career.

It's been so long since Lee made such a thoroughly amusing work that fans should have no problem excusing its messiness. But make no mistake... Oldboy is all over the place, sometimes playing like a subdued melodrama and elsewhere erupting into flamboyance and gore.

Dupieux's utterly zany slice of narrative subversion transcends that singularly goofy premise to create one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time.

As Last Vegas glides along, satisfying expectations while always aiming low, it makes peace with being inoffensively mediocre. Like Vegas itself, the story goes down easy, but its appeal is hard to remember once you leave it behind.

[Dolan's] crafted the semblance of a substantial movie that never quite gets where it was supposed to go.

Undoubtedly one of the weirder, narratively sophisticated adult dramas released by a major studio this year, The Counselor is also just enjoyable enough to hint at the unrealized potential of the main talent behind its creation.

It's painful to watch Red Hook Summer stumble, because the man behind it has tried so hard to get his groove back. However, it's energizing in the fleeting moments when he does just that.

Child’s Play at once repudiates Mancini’s franchise by attempting to make it bigger and bolder while falling back on ingredients we’ve seen before, and seen better. While it sets out to skewer the algorithms that could destroy the world, the remake hews to a mechanical formula — and winds up a product of the same tendencies it’s trying to indict.

Lockout consists of disciplined action pastiche, but much of its thundering engine borrows from better movies.

Anne Hathaway's faux British accent might be the first obvious conceit in One Day, but not its most cumbersome. That distinction belongs to the eponymous structure, a claustrophobic device that follows a pair of best friends over the course of a 22-year period, but only on many versions of July 15th.

The innumerable change-ups in The Perfect Host only pretend to take the plot in new directions. In reality, each new twist is perfectly derivative, which leads to a host of problems.

The 2020 Call of the Wild isn’t all-out atrocity so much as a question mark, a formulaic adventure story spruced up with cutting-edge technology in search of a purpose.

This tame exercise never quite jives and sometimes just bombs with one-note melodrama, but always maintains Thornton's conviction about the material.

What emerges is the definition of a mixed blessing: a film of (often literal) peaks and troughs, scattering occasional moments of grace.

Catechism sometimes feels intentionally obscure, much like Rohal's last movie. It's essentially a hilariously brazen lark, which is reason enough to embrace it.

Wirkola, who’s best known for his two “Dead Snow” zombie movies, struggles to tackle a more serious-minded tone this time around.

Before I Disappear features several moments of genuine emotion in an otherwise underwhelming plot involving the main character coming out of his shell. It's a heartfelt journey, but we've seen it before, without the excess distractions.

Black Rock never reinvents the rules, but it understands them just well enough to make its bloodless stabs at ingenuity stand out.

Winslet delivers her most powerful, emotionally resonant performance in more than a decade.

Broken Tower feels stationary, repeating the same motifs and attitudes ad infinitum until the credits finally roll.

If "Extremely Loud" came out in the weeks or months following 9/11, more audiences (and critics) might find an excuse to appreciate the way its soul-searching protagonist works through his grief. Ten years later, his struggle actually feels outrageously old-fashioned.

Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson from Kelly Marcel's screenplay, the considerable talent behind the camera and a modicum of considerable performances yield a few undeniable guilty pleasures, but most viewers will be seeking a safe word to escape this two-hour-plus mess of half-baked excess.

Predominantly a failure of tone, Horns has plenty of admirable traits and yet dooms itself from the outset. It's an admirable conceit stuffed into far less subtle material.

Statham remains an appealing summer movie fixture, but sharks deserve better than this.

No surprises here, folks; just half-hearted punchlines and unadventurous sentimentality readymade for marketplace consumption.

The scariest aspect of The Boy is the extent to which Macneill makes it possible to sympathize with the troubled protagonist — even as its haunting final shot hints at the horrors yet to come.

The mystical allure of this long-awaited "lesbian werewolf movie" turns out to have more value than the real thing.

The resulting 119-minute pileup of showdowns and one-liners is an undeniably tighter, more engaging experience. It’s also a tired, conventional attempt to play by the rules, with “hold for laughs” moments shoehorned between rapid-fire action — a begrudging concession that the Marvel formula works, and a shameless attempt to replicate it.

Lee Daniels' The Paperboy is a rare case of serious commitment to outright silliness.

Whereas "The Apostle" was a passionate effort for Duvall that he spent years pulling together, Wild Horses feels more like a vanity project that eschews polished storytelling for half-baked conceits.

In A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane loads up enough zaniness to make for a generally enjoyable mashup, particularly because the genial plot affords him a solid backdrop.

Rather than focusing on a cataclysmic showdown between pop culture's most famous men in tights, Zack Snyder's flashy, cacophonous follow-up to 2013's "Man of Steel" is basically one long teaser for the next installment.

There's nothing slick or entertaining about the crumbling existence of Pomes' unsalvageable antiheroes.

The movie is constantly at war with attempts to provide an honest portrayal, almost as if its subject were reaching beyond the grave to steer any negativity back in the direction of a hagiography.

Fortunately, you don’t need to wish for better versions of the movie experience Wish Upon calls to mind; they exist, and deserve repeat viewings far more than Wish Upon deserves one.

An overlong blend of kid-friendly “Game of Thrones” warfare and standard-issue metaphors of intolerance, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds plenty of ways to build on the original premise, but few that resonate any better than the last flamboyant ride.

As a statement about the fixed nature of cinematic tropes, Redemption provides a compelling supplement to Statham's current stardom.

Braff hasn't made another generational statement, but rather a regurgitation of tropes that got old a long time ago.

None of the pretty imagery or impassioned lovemaking can break free of a mopey old formula that sits on every scene with the same schematic quality that makes its weary setting so familiar from the start.

The action scenes in Machine Gun Preacher work fine on their own, but they cheapen a work that attempts to command great importance.

The premise begs to provoke contentious debate around privacy laws in an age of boundless innovation, but it can’t seem to find steady footing in that dialogue, in part because it lacks a substantial means of asking the right questions.

Dealin' With Idiots is powered by a cast of terrific character actors.

While indisputably beautiful and affecting in parts, "Snow Flower" is dominated by tame dramatic ingredients that never fully gel.

While never as dynamically involving as Christopher Nolan's "Inception," for which longtime Nolan director of photography Pfister justifiably won an Oscar, Transcendence still grapples with provocative existential concepts in similarly thoughtful terms.

Burnt deals less with the food itself than the way it drives Adam to the brink of insanity. Yet it falls short of generating any real urgency surrounding that situation.

A bad movie by any culture’s standards, The Great Wall mostly goes to show that if the future of the business lies with Hollywood -China alliances, it doesn’t bode well for either side.

Rather than making his own movie, Gosling has composed a messy love letter to countless others.

The House That Jack Built is an often-horrifying, sadistic dive into a psychotic internal monologue, with intellectual detours about the nature of art in the world today, and puts considerable effort into stimulating discomfort at key moments. If you meet the work on those terms, or at least accept the challenge of wrestling with impeccable filmmaking that dances across moral barriers, it’s also possibly brilliant.

Pattinson portrays the monotonous Georges Duroy in two equally dry modes: scowls and smirks.

The movie stumbles through its shaggy comedy aesthetic with mixed results.

After 85 minutes of mediocrity, The Week Of finally lands on one inspired bit, and then there’s another half hour to go.

Melissa McCarthy is hilarious in every scene of The Boss, but the movie rarely keeps up with her.

In its revelations of Salinger's flaws, the documentary capably strips away the fanaticism associated with his books to create the impression of a human being.

Aftershock has no earth-shattering revelations to make its mayhem stand out in the wreckage.

Set in a single location with a cast of five, the movie offers a lesson in minimalist drama, unfolding as a sharply acted mood piece that never crescendos, but hums along with wise observations and first-rate performances.

Unfortunately, the unbridled shock value isn't matched by a similar investment in other ingredients that might have made this low rent B-movie worthwhile.

Men in Black: International, which launches Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth into a bland variation on the same “MiB” routine, lacks the energy or ambition to make its intergalactic stakes into anything more than baffling cash grab. This misconceived attempt to inject a tired franchise with new life ends up as little more than an empty vessel.

Once again, the screenplay (by Johnny Rosenthal and Shauna Cross) goes out of its way to put terrible lines in its characters’ mouths and dares viewers to laugh. However, it’s gotten harder to take this form of jarring lowbrow humor, especially when it serves no purpose beyond shock value.

The whole thing is a fairly yawn-a-rific affair until the vengeful prologue establishes a wicked role reversal, hinting at the better movie that filmmakers more interested in storytelling would have made.

The Ward succeeds mainly as a checklist that keeps it consistent with Carpenter's nearly forty years of work. It has none of the smart genre appeal that put him on the map, instead resembling a desperate knock-off by someone with far less talent. Carpenter either lost his groove or the will to use it.

Whether Girl Most Likely intentionally satirizes its upending of conventions or suffers from a half-assed screenplay, the resulting hodgepodge at least livens up a clichéd premise.

Men, Women and Children is so married to the idea of humanity's insignificance that it presents support for that argument with its very existence.

Despite some clumsy moments, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 handily revives the first movie's appeal.

Chun treats the material with a sophistication that brings its pulpy scenario down to earth. Not even Bryan Cranston with a cheap Slavic accent can stop him.

The Search lacks the the credible emotions of the original and never assembles a convincing reason for its existence.

Having laid out the scenario, Brandt drags it through the motions of a tired procedural.

The movie is like one thin satiric lark inexplicably slowed down to the point of lethargy.

W.E. is less outright bad than underwhelming; if the director were unknown, it would hardly deserve notice. Like her first film, the 2008 "Filth and Wisdom," it suffers from countless storytelling flaws.

Easy on the eyes, intermittently amusing and never downright awful.

Instead of commenting on the vapidity of the film industry, Paul Schrader's miscast, poorly executed and utterly soulless drama is an example of the failing art form it seeks to indict. Though it has real ideas, Schrader and his team never manage to put them into action.

Neither goofy enough for camp status nor lackluster enough for extreme derision, Son of No One is just mediocre enough to be an easy target.

A lazily plotted and largely generic thriller.

Art History is essentially Swanberg's version of "Zach and Miri Make a Porno," and, within the larger context of his career, just as inconsequential.

Mute is ludicrous, but within the confines of its referential logic, also pretty cool.

The whole thing is a flimsy parody of an easy target-at best infectious and at worst gratingly incoherent, but uniformly original.

Cheesy without being self-aware, hobbled by rampant transphobia that the screenplay’s too dumb to address, this inane burst of campy stupidity can’t get beyond the sheer absurdity of its very existence.

Perry’s self-produced soap opera scribble is the kind of hilarious so-bad-it’s-good romp in which the man behind the curtain invites his viewers to roll their eyes.

Beers' screenplay manages to sustain the outrageous scenario with a string of jokes that don't take the underlying goofiness for granted. Instead, the writer-director builds on its crass foundations with constant inspired one-liners.

A barrage of screwing with interludes does not yield a cohesive movie. Watching Sexual Chronicles of a French Family, the one-note idea grows increasingly evident, as does its absence of fresh ideas.

Flatly directed by Stephen Herek from a screenplay by S.J. Roth, the movie seems to be at peace with its mediocrity. As a vehicle for WWE champ Paul "Triple H" Levesque, it's haplessly stuck on cruise control.

Somewhere in this material is the potential for tense exploration of private desires afflicting people enmeshed in extreme psychological disarray, but this sleepy drama never approaches the sophistication (or pulpy fun) that would allow it to succeed on that mission.

Even as it makes the facile Palin-for-president case, fence-sitters will find themselves non-plussed and existing Palin haters won't budge.

Passion simultaneously parodies its plot while elevating it to a strangely involving exercise in cinematic drama. The filmmaker has either lost control of the material or maintains the same calculation of his protagonists. But the entertainment value associated with that uncertainty is the essence of his career.

While at times too over-the-top and operatic for its own good, those same flawed ingredients echo the rough edges that define the movie's iconic subject.

It takes some ambitious swings and works on its own terms in fits and starts, all while not really working at all. Like the T.S. Eliot poems that inspired it, Cats is an elaborate lark.

While its bleak assessment of American intelligence operatives imbues the story with some modicum of topicality, the specifics never keep pace. The movie becomes a bland action-drama lacking the sophistication to deal with its weightier themes. As a promising endeavor hacked to pieces, the movie's fate mirrors its anti-hero's own failed ambition.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the 2019 version of Hellboy is busy to an exhausting degree, overloaded with apocalyptic fears, and seemingly endless in its pileup of twists. But it’s hard to read much into a movie less invested in shrewd observations than in stuffing as much lore as possible into 120 minutes.

It’s intermittently funny, mopey, and tense, sometimes totally off-base but certainly ambitious in its approach.

It’s intermittently engaging as a B-movie, but so often strives for something more that it never finds a satisfying tone.

A shocking misfire that nevertheless demonstrates the sheer confidence in his storytelling that Dolan has cultivated over a decade of movies. It’s the only possible explanation for this baffling ensemble piece, a campy (if at times inspired) burst of melodrama and ludicrous scenarios caving into each other in a spectacular mash of half-baked ideas.

The Divide manages to transcend its numerous flaws while indulging them: No matter where it falters, the underlying purpose stays put.

It’s an unabashed freewheeling mess of CGI explosions, fast-talking strategies and shiny metal monstrosities clashing in epic battles. And it’s actually kind of fun, in an infuriating sort of way, to watch the most ridiculous Hollywood movie of the year do its thing.

On the surface, Last Blood may be a mess of B-movie contrivances, but like its world-weary namesake, it’s also a timely window into the vanity of violent solutions, and why brutality is only viable when fighting for a lost cause.

Killing Season is like the Saturday morning cartoon version of a terrible movie: still bad, but at least colorful enough to go down easy.

Rings never solidifies into one of kind movie, cramming a handful of possibilities into its bloated running time.

Though ultimately unsuccessful, it valiant reaches for a funky, wild critique of hedonistic sluggards wandering through society with no clear direction. But more than anything else, it delivers Keanu in his element.

Wakefield's by-the-numbers approach to didactic storytelling relies on tons of random factoids positioned out of context to drive home his agenda.

Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot points as though filling in some I-Spy Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches.

Not even Matthew McConaughey can sustain the mushy, amateurish story, which digs itself a deeper hole as it moves along. The established talents of both director and star only serve to magnify the many wrong moves that this stunning misfire takes.

Whether or not you adore “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Million Dollar Baby” — or even the “Almighty” franchise, for crying out loud — the Freeman spark that elevated those movies is nowhere to be found, and Freeman minus the Freeman factor is just a lost cause.

The reality is that Passion Play has a few good ideas that simply don't hold together. More of a miscalculation than an outright dud, it takes the form of a wildly surreal western fantasy, something that Chilean madman Alejandro Jodorowsky ("El Topo") could have executed with more rigorous invention.

Even when The Tax Collector finds a steadier purpose as a taut revenge thriller, it’s mostly just a slog of vulgar threats and violent outbursts, trading substance for anger until the credits bring some measure of peace.

By exploring a narrow scenario from one chapter of Kelly's life, Grace of Monaco plays like fragments of an uncompleted biopic that's been art directed within an inch of its life.

Like the original, the most shocking aspect comes from the revelation that Six can actually tell a story.

Even without its mopey, painfully on-the-nose dialogue and ponderous story, The Last Face sets itself up for failure with its premise, and Penn's apparent inability to recognize it as such. It's his worst movie.

The Tiniest Place calls to mind Patricio Guzmán's brilliant "Nostalgia for the Light," which focuses on the remnants of Chilean atrocities strewn about the Atacama Desert. Huezo, however, relies more on irony, juxtaposing the wartime setting with storybook images, acknowledging her distance from the events in question.

Think "Death of a Salesman" with demons.

With Smith's memories as the subject, Fetzer constructs a compelling cinematic experiment that turns the actor's monologue into a feature-length movie, and the result holds as much appeal as the solitary member of the cast.

The drama, as it were, tends to blur together — baby penguins dodge watchful birds of prey, the dad wanders for ages before finding food — but Jacquet has ample footage to ensure the material sustains a hypnotic quality.

While Muhi develops a remarkable window into its main character’s predicament, it doesn’t push beyond the limitations of its classically cinema verite approach, and the assemblage of scenes from the hospital and beyond fall short of crystallizing into a complete analysis of Muhi’s situation.

Stephanie showcases the best and worst of that cheap model: It encourges an innovative and economical storytelling approach, but the scrappy production values obscure the stronger moments.