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.