Glenn Kenny

The scenic cinematography by Ben Nott is often beautiful, which distracts, at times, from the fact that the storyline is both convoluted in the most gratuitous way possible and that it’s enacted in the most unengaging way imaginable.

Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.

Upon taking in the gorgeousness — and it is really something; the production design of this movie, by Luca Tranchino, is exceptional (as is Daniel Aranyó’s cinematography, which shines when he’s shooting in the natural world) —Lillie observes, “It’s like being inside God’s thoughts.”

The details of the story, as they unfold, do not correspond with any dimension of reality. Character development is nonexistent. The sluggish rhythms, the awkward cuts, the unlovely cinematography cohere into what seems like the enactment of a pointless dream.

It took me a while to realize she actually IS Shania Twain, because I initially thought “What does Shania Twain need this kind of low-rent enterprise for?” Maybe she really wanted to meet Travolta.

To get at the heart of what’s wrong with The Face of an Angel all you need to do is consider the professional stones it takes to adapt the Amanda Knox case into yet another movie about the existential/amorous crises of a white male filmmaker. (And then have the nerve to dedicate the results to the memory of the murder-victim in the real-life case!)

As the movie wears on, one suspects that the writer Luke Del Tredici and the director Jonathan Watson aren’t crafting an indictment of toxic masculinity, but an invitation to take some sadistic enjoyment in it, without consequences.

Director Julie Taymor's gargantuan all-Beatles-songs musical is that rarest of animals, the perfect disaster that fulfills expectations by defying them.

In Profile, the images mix real documentary footage with fictional social media and news organization posts. And meaning is elemental—a simplistic rush meant to induce viewer panic. While also being incredibly on-the-nose.

Willfully over determined and perversely stylized.

The movie’s prefab on-screen graphics are just one reason “Worst to First” has such a limp tone overall.

The earnestness brings the movie from mildly irritating pastiche status to actively awful, and that is all she wrote.

One could watch Honey Boy musing that it must be nice to have someone finance a movie of your 12-step qualification. That assessment is actually too generous.

This is not a terribly plot-driven movie; indeed, at two hours and twenty minutes it’s rather a ramble.

Such a muddle right off the bat.

Harris and Murray are such reliably engaging screen presences that they provide a few glimmers of entertainment, provided you’re able to set aside the movie’s practically all-encompassing repulsiveness.

This ostensibly edgy comedy didn't wring a single laugh out of me until maybe fifteen minutes before the finale.

Feature-length failures as abject as this one are almost frightening, in part because one worries about what kind of a snit the director will be working out if/when he gets a second shot.

Once the mercenaries start tooling around wearing actual Ku Klux Klan outfits, the pretenses to allegory have gone out the window. And yes, it is salutary to see guys with pointy hoods getting blown away by righteous African-American avengers. But the cinematic cost of getting there was not, for this viewer, worth it.

The movie is pedantic, humorless, dry — all of the things that, as it happens, “The Searchers” is not.

As revisionist as it might aspire to be, Never Grow Old is rife with clichés, Cusack’s philosophical villain one of the most conspicuous.

The all-live action section of this movie is lit and shot almost exactly like an episode of “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”

One of the problems with this My Cousin Rachel is that it’s hard to come up with any issue or reason relative to its creation, I’m afraid.

The expectation that a female-written, female-directed effort would yield something refreshingly different is scotched within the first few minutes.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

I like cheap exploitation as much as the next guy, but not when it tries to disguise itself with transparently insincere humanist indie trappings.

The movie’s flabbiness, its unfocused flopping from scene to scene, its disinclination to provide any individual scene with any dimension beyond its immediate impact, practically vitiates the entire theme of Dickie’s ostensible mentorship of Tony Soprano.

It’s an unfortunately apt demonstration of what can befall a clever filmmaker who gets too clever.

Until its climax, which clearly seeks to be congratulated on its restraint, Dark Night is not much more than an arty bore.

Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.

Genre homage or not, trashy, assault-coddling sexism is a turn off — and worse. Perhaps the “roman porno” reboot project should have rebooted its sexual politics before calling “action!”

The bad news is that, as movies go, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising barely qualifies as one.

Lichtenstein's putative switcheroo on the Vagina Dentata trope is to play it as some kind of token of female empowerment, but it's pretty clear that the writer/director didn't think things through on any counts, contenting himself that the putative outrageousness of the concept could see him through.

Band of Robbers just plain doesn’t work, to the extent that I’m almost regretful that the attempted schoolroom bans on Twain’s work weren’t more effective over the years, as they might have spared me watching it.

Where The Wall excels is in the creation of an extra-untantalizing desert atmosphere. The dust is practically inhalable, the sunlight glaring, and the characters grow ever more sand-gritted with each mishap.

From my perspective, the film's anti-Semitism is implicit rather than programmatic, and, in the film's current form, a little sneaky.

It certainly doesn’t help that Tobias and Elin are entirely banal characters with nothing to define them but their loss.

Its climactic highway shootout, and much else in the picture, is rendered in the best Paul Greengrass manner that Hollywood money can buy. But where Greengrass pictures aim to keep one on the edge of one's seat throughout, the tension here, such as it is, is designed to stoke audience bloodlust. If that's your kind of thing, The Kingdom certainly satisfies.

It’s a lazy, vulgar celebration of White Male American Dumbness—one that only put an African American in the cast to camouflage just how much of a celebration of White Male American Dumbness it is.

Little Accidents is quietly earnest, handsomely produced, and too dramatically inert and dogged by the commonplace to make much of an impact beyond conveying the dreariness (as opposed to the dread) of life in a coal-mining town.

Mr. Chan is in his early 60s, and he doesn’t deliver the action pizazz here that he used to. Nor, frankly, does he summon enough gravitas to be persuasive in the role of a grief-maddened father. For what it’s worth, Mr. Brosnan, as Quon’s nemesis, sells the angry-all-the-time requirement for his character.

The movie’s main feature is a group of long-take, moving-camera action scenes that I guess might have been more engaging had the characters on the run and in battle been figures you wanted to spend any time with. They’re not.

The clichéd story line pursues turgidity with a relentless determination.

The movie goes for grin-and-cringe-inducing, and instead achieves “excruciating.”

A derivative, irritating thriller.

This is part of the movie’s problem. Aside from it being another how-I-made-out-in-an-“exotic”-locale narrative. The film means for us to delight in Jay’s flouting of conventions.

Making good absurdist cinema is a lot tougher than good absurdist cinema makes it look. This movie, a stab at absurdism that results in a swampy wallow in affectation, testifies to this fact with sad eloquence.

Over the next 90-plus minutes, the canines drop as many F-bombs as Pacino did in “Scarface.” Then there are the scatological jokes, each one more outlandish than the last, none bearing the slightest tinge of wit or joy.

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling Sympathy for the Devil godawful.

One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.

Blame is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it’s overdetermined and often overplayed.

Smushes together “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (the novel, that is), “True Believer,” and “Eyes Wide Shut,” only it does so without being nearly as good as any of the aforementioned.

Weinstein Co. honchos Bob and Harvey are chasing some of the old "Pulp Fiction" magic--and failing not only miserably, but kind of disgustingly.

The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.

Eventually, the fact that the characters are all aware of the multiple clichés they’re uttering — an exchange between Brian and a young editor (Olivia Thirlby) is particularly excruciating in this respect — doesn’t redeem or excuse the clichés.

What Moby leaves out of his account is as revealing as the tales of homelessness and addiction he puts in.

For the most part, Murphy is pitching somewhere between "American Beauty" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"; indeed, the characters Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow play in Scissors are, in a sense, inversions of their roles in Beauty and Tenenbaums, respectively.

The Neon Demon is hot garbage that dares you to call it offensive. In addition, it’s offensive.

Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.

If this mess is what they ended up with after erring with the best intentions, I feel bad for them. If this is actually the end result they were going for, I’d be inclined to use the legal system myself, to file an injunction against them ever getting near a soundstage again.

So hackneyed, tired, labored and overstuffed with contempt not only for all of its targets but also its own self that one gets the feeling that the talented Mr. McDonagh has gone mad with rage. Possibly during dealings with the American film industry.

This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.

One thing is certain: for all the strain the movie exerts, it never comes close to touching the hem of the writers it purports to depict. And it leaves the mystical and erotic dimensions of their lives and works far outside of its belabored vision.

The reason for all this dull-to-offensive story stuff is, of course, the dancing, which has its moments but overall seems so calculated to impress that it loses all other reason for being.

Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.

This is a perhaps even more misbegotten remake than the Farrelly Brothers' update of "The Heartbreak Kid."

Django is for the most part everything Reinhardt’s music was not: listless, glum and meandering.

Kirkby does keep up a jaunty pace. But he also seems preoccupied with impressing his inner hipster, as with an attitude toward race that dares you to call it cavalier. And his again edgy music choices.

The heretofore nothing-but-delightful Simon Pegg stumbles in the long-anticipated feature film directorial debut of -- ta-da! -- David Schwimmer, who takes the sow's ear of a script given him by Pegg and Michael Ian Black and deep-fries it into a burnt pork rind of a movie.

As for me, watching this overripe, ignorant parading of Hollywood privilege an hubris put me in mind of a different song--Neil Young's "Revolution Blues." Specifically the bit about Laurel Canyon being filled with famous stars . . .

Aside from race jokes, Ted 2 offers a nearly staggering number of weed jokes, a couple of which are mildly funny, or at least funnier than the rape jokes.

Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”

It’s a challenge to keep action coherent and build suspense in the submerged environment simulated in “Underwater,” but Eubank doesn’t meet it, instead falling back on stale shocks that are not credibly buttressed by swelling bass effects on the soundtrack.

It is earnest and tortured and pointless, in a very self-serious suffer-for/with-art fashion.

While I rather doubt that co-writer/director Yuval Adler pitched his new picture as “'Death and the Maiden' meets ‘Leave it to Beaver,’” that sure is what he ended up with, conceptually at least.

In a movie year in which I’ve had to see both “Clown” and “Trash Fire,” the bar for worst of year is pretty low. I suppose that Pet, for me at least, completes a trifecta of sorts.

Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.

Aside from a rock-solid performance by Thomas Jane as the grizzled cop, Crown Vic, which is named after the Ford model car that is the default of the LAPD black-and-white, has very little to offer the discriminating moviegoer.

Whatever investigation it’s attempting, the movie is leaden in its pacing — the first 15 minutes feel like an hour — and its constricted shooting style, practically all hand-held almost close-ups, is transparent in its contrivance of realism.

Paltrow, whose previous directorial feature was the somewhat more apt 2007 showbiz romcom “The Good Night,” is an attentive student of cinema, as his mini-homages to the likes of Antonioni and Lucas in this story testify. But his story is a veritable nothingburger, here and there recalling notes from the likes of “Giant” and “There Will Be Blood,” but never really connecting on levels emotional or intellectual.

The movie, directed by Robin Pront from a script by Pront and Jeroen Perceval (who’s also one of the film’s lead actors), is well-crafted up to a point. But the end to which it is crafted is utterly useless.

Turgid even in its brightness, overwritten in a way that does nothing to camoflauge its first-draft quality, jaw-droppingly overacted by all but one of its central cast members; it’s a Woody Allen disaster that elicits both a cocked head and a dropped jaw.

While I might actually go out and buy the soundtrack album, the last thing I’m gonna say about the movie is friends shouldn’t let friends pay money to see We Are Your Friends.

The potential for real offense is palpable, but Bruce Almighty never gets there; the script is too lazy and incoherent--truly effective blasphemy takes brains and rigor.

In the end, the wafer-thin story amounts to the same nihilistic slop that Phillips served up in the first “Joker,” albeit remixed, genre-wise.

Remarkably pointless movie.

And while I understand the anger that animates Awbrey’s script, anger doesn’t excuse its overall weak argumentation, not to mention its rampant plot holes.

The writer-director Zack Whedon toggles his plot between “Out of the Past” and “Three Days of the Condor” with highly mixed results before letting loose with a hilariously unconvincing climactic reveal.

Noisome, fragmented mess of a movie, the fourth film based on Jack Finney's novel "The Body Snatchers" and the worst of them all.

Well, if there’s one positive thing to say about Brimstone, it’s that it doesn’t lack for lunatic ambition.

This is a whiffed effort at an all too familiar subgenre: the ostensibly dark, searing human drama undercut by the fact that all the humans in it are boorish idiots.

The problem is the material itself, with its trite observations and shockingly flat writing.

You know what might make an intriguing, revealing movie? The story of how, over 30 years after its debut, a relatively innocent arcade game starring a giant ape and other oversize beasts underwent a corporate transmogrification and became a turgid, logy sci-fi/action blockbuster.

A plot twist saves (that might not be the word for it) Don’t Tell a Soul from being absolutely oppressive, merely by injecting a scintilla of “what happens next” appeal — and letting the always-interesting Wilson stretch a bit.

Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.

As bad movies go, The Jacket belongs to a relatively rare but extremely intriguing/irritating genus.

It’s violence for cowardly voyeurs who want to make the people who annoy them just shut up in a way that’s silent, sterile, and thoroughly humiliating to the victim.

Kidnap isn’t schlock, it’s garbage.