Inkoo Kang

Phoenix’s transformation from a scotch-soaked pile of tweed into a homicidally self-righteous ubermensch is fun to watch, but Allen too frequently loses sight of the story he’s telling.

The mystery is solidly structured, but the answers it gradually yields are silly at best and lazy and offensive at worst.

Silicon Valley is built on various inequalities, and, frustratingly, CodeGirl isn’t interested enough in delving into those issues — or the girls determined to overcome them.

At best, The Green Inferno is a reliable shock and disgust-delivery system. At worst — and it certainly veers toward the worst — it’s a racially reprehensible work that exploits one of the world’s most powerless peoples. And no number of movie-geek references to “Cannibal Holocaust” is going to change that.

Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.

First-time Spanish director Jorge Dorado aims for Hitchcock and misses by a mile with Anna.

Unfortunately, it's just when Jessabelle looks like it might transcend its haunted-house trappings that the Southern Gothic clichés rear their tortured, screaming heads.

The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.

The writer-director never finds a coherent point of view (or a way out of Strindberg’s three-wall play structure), and Miss Julie ends up merely a whirlwind of moods without a center, as changeable and as random as a TV flipping channels.

LaBeouf and Wood don't clang, but they don't quite click, either. That's not enough for the film to persuade us of its message, that love is worth any sacrifice.

Desiccated by its pretensions, it's freeze-dried melodrama.

The self-serious meditations on fate and responsibility — as well as the uneven but ever-charged flare-ups between Izzy and whoever she’s talking to — recall exercises in an acting class. By the end, we understand her motivations and recent biography, but precious little about who she is as a person.

While the narrative spins in place, Kyle Killen's script throws out one uninspired gambit after another to extend the film to feature length, eventually climaxing with dual endings, both contrived.

Any one-man crusade is likely to fail, but a rom-com character's war against sincerity is doomed from the start.

A rapidly wearying comedy that mistakes crudeness with humor.

A movie so lifeless you’d have more fun guessing the Netflix niche group that the production is supposed to satisfy.

The apocalypse is no fun for anyone, but the dreariest possible scenario probably entails being stuck in a house without a functioning toilet and with nine of the dullest people left alive.

The fatal flaw of "John Doe" is its focus on ideas, rather than people.

Beyond this general outline, plot and character development are afterthoughts, or maybe never-thoughts.

The bloodletting is blandly demure and the identity of the malefactor telegraphed too early.

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

First-time feature writer Sofia Alvarez’s attempt to shrink Han’s lengthy, largely internal, and culturally specific story into a 97-minute movie is, simply put, a botch job. Stilted and scattered and strangely cold in its cinematography, it’s a handsomely shot whole lotta nothin’.

Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

This character study in rom-com's clothes is ambitiously formula-averse, but too shaggy and unfocused to be satisfying.

The invitingly loud Melendez posits herself as both a victimized failure and a triumphantly persevering pioneer, and though one can certainly be both, the film doesn't say anything new or meaningful about the industry she's been dying to join for the last two decades.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

The gratingly underdeveloped plot has all the dramatic effect of a toddler with her hands behind her back chirping, "Guess what I've got?" for more than an hour.