Justin Clark

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

Scarlett Johansson’s direction keeps things simple and intimate in a way that Tory Kamen’s overambitious screenplay doesn’t.

Once it turns into a home-invasion thriller, the film becomes more sadistic than hilarious.

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

The film is a slow-burning tale of very real traumas suffered by a woman far out of her element and forced to process a tragedy on top of it all.

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.

Even as the film revels in violent, necrophiliac delights, the dialogue keeps everything grounded with its humor.

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.

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.

Mortal Kombat II is done waiting around. It’s ravenous to get down to bloody business.

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.

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?

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.

The film hits its plot milestones as fast as humanly possible, cohesion or depth be damned.

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

The film leaves you wishing that the aspirational way the sport is presented in real life had been read for filth.

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 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.

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

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

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

There's nothing behind its contemptible eyes, no spine to house the fading diode that once contained a soul.

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.