Justin Clark

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.

While there’s plenty to be said about Abigail’s impressively over-the-top scarlet mean streak, the hellride that the filmmakers take us on is all the more effective for the character groundwork laid prior.

Monkey Man is in no rush to get where it’s going and Dev Patel puts a lot of trust in his audience to stick with him to see where it arrives.

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.

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.

In the end, this sub-Sorkin-esque political potboiler sidelines Chisholm's most meaningful community work to the fact that she tried and failed to run for president.

At its best, Damsel suggests a dark fantasy riff on Neil Marshall’s The Descent.

The film is a good time, and it doesn’t exactly betray any of Kung Fu Panda’s strengths, but it also exhibits the telltale signs of a series struggling to justify its existence.

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

It’s the balance of comedy and existential drama that truly elevates Thelma.

The film proves itself incapable of or unwilling to follow through on its ideas to an ultimate conclusion.

There’s considerable emotional truth on display throughout Benjamin Ree’s documentary.

The things that elevate Chiwetel Ejiofor’s film are those that elevated Rob Peace’s life overall.

The film is in such a rush to get to the bloodshed, deception, and panic that most of the fertile ground of its premise goes unexplored.

The film does keep the smirking undercurrent of the first half present in the more serious second, but, slowly but surely, it starts asking big questions about the nature of God, what measure of divinity lies in us all, and the value of basic humanity and grace in a world where God’s intervention isn’t a given.

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

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.

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.

The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful.

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

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

The overarching plot of the film is pretty boilerplate, but the fine details count for a lot.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a film that feels ripped right out of a high school art-class notebook, and sounds like a Twitch stream.