Jaime N. Christley

The movie, like a day at Disney World, pulls the viewer through an incessant, nigh-claustrophobic landscape of surrealism and fun. Resistance is futile; the sugar is the medicine.

A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.

Seen today, Wings impresses mostly with its enormous scale—its appearance of having been made with obscene amounts of money.

Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.

This is the most disturbing spin on the invasion premise, because it still permits the simple, classical predator/parasite interpretation, but, at the same time, makes the infiltration total, because the snatchers don’t just take your body, your memories, your brains—they take you. All of you.

David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.

The Cabin in the Woods, regardless of its many genealogical links to prior Whedon creations, is an ideal Hollywood film in the Age of Pixar: spectacle for spectacle's sake, but infiltrated by intelligent commentary and an atmosphere of generosity and inclusion.

One successful set piece in 135 minutes, and it involves very little running, no parkour, and no genetically enhanced superheroes from clandestine government projects.

This mostly no-nonsense, floor-by-floor ass-kicking panorama is admirably humble.

While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.

It's only natural that Abel Ferrara's vision of the end of the world should take corporeal form as a quasi-autobiographical hangout movie.

What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.

One may feel dissatisfied by the 11th-hour turn toward lyrical fatalism, and mildly insulted by the presumptuous attitude it seems to choose as it sends us on our way.

The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.

As funny and batshit insane as the movie often is, the fact that 22 Jump Street knows it's a tiresome sequel doesn't save it from being a tiresome sequel, even as Lord and Miller struggle to conceal the bitter pill of convention in the sweet tapioca pudding of wall-to-wall jokes.

Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.

The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.

Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey’s mugging.

While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.

What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.

The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"

There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.

It's all very "found footage," Impolex by way of Discovery's The Colony, only with a lot more in the way of familiar consumer products.

It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.

Caters almost exclusively to the remedial, Duplo Blocks demographic, leaving parents and guardians bored to distraction.

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.

It's the rare film that should not introduce new story elements or characters past its first act. In Darkness, a garbage movie applying for unlimited credit on the most meager collateral, is that film.