John Semley

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.

For faithful and faithless alike, The Shack may seem stupid, laughable, blasphemous, poorly acted and totally banal. And yet there are probably worse things then being told it’s righteous to forgive and that love is good.

What enlivens My Scientology is Theroux himself: watching him stumble from one idea to the next, interact with intense actors pulling their best Tom Cruise grins, butt heads with Rathbun, bicker with church insiders and throw their own idiotic lingo back in their faces.

Pretty much everything about Rings is incoherent. And the most incoherent thing of all is the film’s arrival a decade and a half after Verbinski’s original remake (if such a term even makes sense).

It may not have the easy, feel-good family flick sheen to win over the box office, but it’s clever and compassionate enough to pay down a few big-ticket karmic debts.

Film, not film, whatever it is, Cameraperson plays like a study not only of cinema itself, but a warm, welcome reminder that there is (ideally) an intelligence, and maybe even a bit of grace, behind the moving images that wedge themselves in our memory; that they are the handiwork of a living, thinking, feeling, sneezing human being, someone who is both camera and person.

Office Christmas Party is a hopeless muddle. A joyless, laughless – that’s right, not even one laugh – affair that proves how indulgent and (worse) boring ensemble comedies such as this become when the ensemble has next to no natural chemistry and even less of a script to riff off of.

Willie may not have a heart of gold. But he’s got a heart of bloody, barely thumping meat, same as the rest of us. And in this bitter season of unceasing, frostbitten darkness, it’s heart enough.

I won’t presume to understand what passes for popular taste. But seeing an audience in the tens of thousands lose their mind for Hart’s jokes about hating his family and the hypothetical perils of dating a woman with only one shoulder, I can’t help but feel skeptical.

Regrettably, the film’s place-setting opening lays the scene for a different, more exciting film that never really unfolds.

The problem with the Purge films is they feel like they’re made for people who would actually take part in the purge.

It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker who could invest the lives of straight, middle-class, norm-y, aggressively bro-y, immaculately groomed college sports jocks with a sense of vital anarchy and resounding humanity.

More manipulative, maudlin trash from the Disney-Pixar content farm.

The Peanuts Movie is a sloppy mash-up of disconnected vignettes and rehashed jokes, all lazily reverse-engineered from the premise that a Peanuts movie is a thing that people will like and will happily pay to see.

It’s the kind of film that can’t even bother to commit to its own cynicism, which makes it the most deeply cynical kind of film there is.

The performances, the writing, the direction, Segel’s D.F.W. impression, everything is just fine. But The End of the Tour is disgraceful. It feels like it’s towing out the real Wallace’s ghost to perform some soppy parody of himself.

The nature of this fantasy is boringly feel-good and aspirational.

It’s not about the world catching up to understand poor, lonesome Hiccup. It’s about Hiccup catching up to the expectations of the world on his own.