Justin Clark

It’s neither naughty or nice, and in Santa’s book, that likely means it just ends up getting nothing this Christmas.

The film is paced in such a languid, dreamy way that it’s hard to get a grasp on how each scene connects to the larger themes or the larger mystery until fairly late.

Even a banal life can have a musicality and life to it, but once it leaves high school, Plastic’s portrait of adult life comes off as a monotone drone.

The Scargiver feels like a loosely threaded series of grand ideas and sincere emotional beats that require so much more connective tissue to thread together into an actual narrative worth investing in.

Blue Beetle plays out with all the revelry of a contractual obligation, hitting every note of the hero’s journey with no variation, murky action sequences, and little in the way of imagination, despite the titular object itself granting Jaime the ability to manifest anything that he imagines.

There are protracted moments of humor, fright, and pathos in Frozen Empire, but as it’s all so scattershot and disconnected, the film ends up being defined by its lack of conviction when it comes to exploring its ideas to the fullest.

The most charitable read on John Krasinski’s IF is that using your imagination shouldn’t be bound by traditional story structure, so why should a film about unfettered imagination need the same?

M. Night Shyamalan’s stylish thriller is schizophrenic in more ways than one.

For a story that so prizes how far its heroine will go, Moana spends so much of this sequel stuck in a rut.

As heartwarming as this story remains at its core, it’s hard to shake that you already know how it will play out.

By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has absolutely no idea what kind of ride it wants to be.

Jam-packed with his familiar brand of vulgar yet verbose stoner humor and free-flowing riffs on movies—especially his own—the vibes are certainly off the charts in Kevin Smith’s film.

The film is a mélange of tired normcore horror tropes indistinguishable from any film in the Conjuring universe.

If you’re looking for flash and snark, Boy Kills World has them in spades, but it’s too punch-drunk on its own juvenile grandiosity to bother offering even a whiff of substance.

The horror here proves as much a dead end as the main characters’ relationship.

Next Goal Wins feels like five different films, all of them failing to coalesce in an effective way because every 30 seconds the script thinks it has to crack wise.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.

The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.

In grappling with the implications of its story, Folie à Deux’s every attempt at showcasing cleverness, verve, or engagement is held cruelly underwater by staid direction, shoddy emotional plotting, a gleeful sense of cruelty, and a grave nihilism that makes Zack Snyder’s work seem like a season of Bluey.

Christophe Gans’s film does away with all the psychosexual nuance of Silent Hill 2.

There are versions of this premise relevant to a modern world, but the film’s point of view on the state of race relations feels stuck somewhere around 1954.

Ryan Prows’s film comes across as just straight-up exploitative.