Gregory Nussen

Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.

The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.

The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.

The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.

The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.

Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.

With Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt is less interested in showing Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) as "normal," as he is in accentuating Hitler's right-hand man as a charming charlatan. But this intentionality is miscalculated, and the film, bloated as it is with jarring tonal changes and thickly laid-on sentimentality, tilts so far into humanizing Nazis that it seems, at times, to apologize for the behavior of the high command.

Sykes brings what she can to the proceedings, but there's only so much she can do to make Undercard even slightly distinctive.

Bigelow's film, disconnected as it is from the very people this type of situation would actually harm, is a futile salute towards hope, which unfairly assumes powerful people's positive intentions, underscored here by largely cookie-cutter characters and a lack of complexity.

Scream 7 injects nostalgia and self-referentiality like a weak drug, a stash of weed purchased so long ago it has gone so stale it crumbles to the touch.

Petsch and Scipio are both extremely attractive and breezy performers, but, the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.

Nearly everything Ritchson and James do in the name of comedy is forced and untethered from reality. Then again, so is the movie, so at least it's consistent.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Peas and Carrots is amateur on almost every front, and whatever it has to say about finding one's proper role in society is hidden inside some utterly confounding plot devices.

None of it works. I'll cut to the quick: The Moment is an unmitigated disaster.

The chamber drama of a rich family in collapse is only successful as much as the context within which it exists, and, because that context is as slippery as it is, Anniversary just feels toothless.

In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.

There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.

Unlike the comedy, Ungar does know how to shoot action decently well, and it's in those scenes when the film momentarily comes alive.

In the end, Waltzing with Brando will leave you with more questions about the man than you probably had going into it, which would be interesting enough if Fishman leaned harder into the murky waters of this particular celebrity's mythology. But, like the land upon which Judge tries to build an island escape, the film is in a constant state of drowning under its own ambition.

The revelations of the film, once they come, are admittedly disturbing. But the route to get there is paved with blandness and awkward acting.

Perhaps the lesson of the film is that regret is a waste of emotional bandwidth, but regret is easy to feel when the story is a fumbled as this.

The twist is sufficiently tragic, but it is also mawkish. The structure is misguided.

Bull Run is so devoid of substance that much of it is taped together with ironic usage of stock photos and archival footage, as if to constantly point at the vapidity of its own enterprise.

Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.

It's rare that a film is this devoid of characterization, rarer still that a serial killer horror is this lacking in tension.

The only thing Harlin has done here is to remove the element of surprise. Without that, the film is nothing, nothing at all.

The film is woeful from top to bottom.