Inkoo Kang

A rapidly wearying comedy that mistakes crudeness with humor.

Aloft is simply adrift.

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

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.

A rancid comedy fueled by male entitlement and uxoricidal rage.

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’.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

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

Alternately claustrophobic and epic compositions can’t make up for the myriad story lines (including one frustrating red herring) and pacing issues that periodically lose sight of the stakes at hand.

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

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.

In the end, the only transgression The Misandrists really commits is self-satisfied solipsism.

Emma Stone couldn't be more charming, but her on-screen romance with Colin Firth couldn't be more contrived or ickiliy age-inappropriate.

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

A day can be mind-numbingly dull or fate-alteringly momentous. Person to Person expresses this duh statement with scarcely more wisdom, nuance, or emotional pull.

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 commitment of its all-star cast — which includes Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Wilde, Olivia Cooke, and Samuel L. Jackson — can’t divert from the fact that its quills droop and sag, where they haven’t fallen off altogether. Behold the other North American flightless turkey.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.

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.

Ambo's argument is frayed by her arbitrary recommendations of meditation as a panacea for unrelated psychological difficulties. Even more baffling, the director neglects to define this culturally and geographically variable practice with any exactitude.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

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.

I Feel Pretty is an honest-to-God fiasco. Virtually every single aspect of this rigidly unfunny comedy is botched, from the characters to the plot, the themes to the core message.

It's a supernatural epic that never feels quite colossal or consequential enough, as well as an utter waste of Dwayne Johnson‘s unique dopey-flirty charm.

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?