Keith Uhlich

All of these beasties are "scary." Though they'd be much more so if they felt less like franchisable IP and more like fervent expressions of the ills of the eras on which the film aims to comment.

There's a tight, tense thriller in all this. Unfortunately, director Deon Taylor and screenwriter Peter A. Dowling stretch things out to a logy 104 minutes. Too often, the suspense dissipates between action scenes when it should be consistent and relentless, even in the quietest moments.

The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.

Polar is pure trash, but the generousness — and, in the final stretch, the poignancy — with which Mikkelsen approaches even the most lurid of the film's conceits at least pushes it toward the top of the garbage heap.

There are plenty of real-life anecdotes that Scott Cooper draws from Warren Zane’s 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, but they’re filtered through the hoariest of biopic clichés.

The crystal clarity of Russell Carpenter’s cinematography is often unnerving, as is the uncanny nature of Pandora’s computer-generated flora and fauna, which never truly seem alive and vital.

None of it adds up to much beyond painting the band, despite their often repellently bad behavior, in a flattering light.

Director Nick Rowland couldn't ask for a more magnetically tormented character to anchor his low-key-to-a-fault feature debut.

In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.

M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.

In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.

Earnest to a fault and soft-edged in its approach to faith (God is more in the margins here than he is a central, narrative-driving presence), yet direct and moving in some scene-by-scene specifics because of their basis in reality.

Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

Such a feature-length bludgeoning, even in the service of basic social and scientific literacy, is truly discomfiting.

Mostly laugh-free black comedy, which gathers an impressive cast - Marisa Tomei, Jennifer Connelly and Ciarán Hinds round out the ensemble - for bad sitcom-level shenanigans.

Brühl, meanwhile, is saddled with the unenviable task of being this hollow movie’s slow-dawning voice of reason: His climactic conversation with newspaper editor David Thewlis (never worse) is one of the most embarrassingly didactic Way We Live Now™ summations ever filmed.

It's just another franchise nonstarter to toss in the superstore superhero deal bin.

Weird for weirdness’s sake gets you only so far, however, and when Dupieux tries to connect all these strange goings-on to Dolph’s corporate-drone despondency, the movie takes a spurious turn toward rancid sentimentality. It seems that even a piece of dog excrement has feelings. Yuck.

Too-cutesy conceits such as Hitch's imagined conversations with serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) feebly attempt to ground the story in psychological terra firma, while horribly on-the-nose dialogue flatters those viewers who prefer to keep their sense of cinema history on fan-mag frivolous levels.

The voice work sounds more quick-paycheck than impassioned, and the animation rarely rises above video-game cut-scene quality. As revisionist holiday fables go, you're better off watching Aardman's delightful "Arthur Christmas" than this lump of coal.

Much cut-rate melodrama ensues, none of it particularly painful to watch, until a ridiculously redemptive finale negates almost all of the preceding dramatic tension and resurrects a cloying Richard Marx chestnut to boot.

Like Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy or Granik's Leave No Trace, this low-key drama focuses on a regional American woman trying to sustain herself through rough economic and emotional times. It's derivative of both films, but, for a little while at least, not disagreeably so.

Only "Slumdog Millionaire's" Dev Patel, as the bastard prince of the villainous Fire nation, truly gets jiggy with the fantasy. Everyone else stares off into green-screen space and waits for lunch to be called.

The trek to get there is sluggish at best, torturous at worst. March away, penguins. Far away.

Ceremony passes by quickly and painlessly, its annoyances easily forgotten. On the plus side, Thurman and Angarano do work up a sweet odd-pair chemistry.

Aside from a few witty Looney Tunes–esque sight gags, such as one hilarious image of a woolly mammoth being swallowed up by the tectonically shifting earth, the stereoscopic visuals are a busy, personality-free digital blur.

Even at its most affecting, Simon Killer rarely seems like more than a cinema-du-Gaspar-Noé simulacrum. The languorous long-takes, dissociative sound design and strobe-light scene transitions meant to mirror this emotional con artist’s skewed view of the world are anxiety-of-influence hand-me-downs through and through—viscera without vision.

Intrigue and eroticism abound, all of it watchable, none of it particularly exciting. And the misty widescreen photography lends the proceedings a funereal air of respectability that's like catnip to Oscar voters.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

The Rock deserves better than this ho-hum revenge picture.

Mostly, though, this Creek has run dry.

At least the Abrams-helmed Star Trek from 2009 had a pretzel-logic playfulness; the portentously subtitled Into Darkness is attempting like hell to be a Trek for our troubled times. The franchise has been thoroughly Christopher Nolan–ized.

There’s a marked sense of retreat in this tale that’s never explored--everyone goes out of the way to remember the past through rose-colored specs.

It goes off the rails early and often. You almost have to give it props for how resolutely batshit it is. Almost.

The film blows up a minor aspect of the New Wave to foolishly apocalyptic proportions, substituting gossip for gospel.

The Young Messiah is just, like, barely competent enough that the faith-based target audience won't feel entirely cheated.

The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact still mostly feels like a crutch or an affectation. It's as if Cordero and Croda are trying to goose the drama rather than unearth it, never entirely trusting that Felipe's life is interesting enough as is.

Bong is so concerned with whodunit that his creaky genre mechanics diminish Kim's determined performance.

It’s a shame that Toe to Toe adheres so stridently to Indiewood clichés.

Maybe Douglas Sirk could have made something profound out of the pseudo-ennobling horsepucky. As is, The Last Song is what the crinkle-nosed Southern belle in all of us would resoundingly deem “Trash! Trash! Trash!”

For those of us with a love of actorly indulgence, though, the film is a treasure trove, filled with enough molten-gold performances to gild a thousand Oscars.

What undoes the film is its rather rancid parent-child sentimentality (a Shyamalan staple, admittedly) and a charisma-free performance from the younger Smith that suggests the apple has fallen very far from the tree.

At least Mark Ping Bing Lee’s luscious cinematography distracts from the shallow storytelling. There are worse things than luxuriating in a two-hour Côte d’Azur travel ad.

The film doesn't come within spitting distance of vintage Landis, e.g., "Animal House" or "An American Werewolf in London." But at least it's not "The Stupids."

Shorn of its quintessentially American roots, a biting tale of adult extravagance becomes insubstantially tween-aged.

The razzle-dazzle can't distract from the monotonously overstuffed spy-film plot.

Unlike Carroll’s perversely idealized protagonist, Burton’s Alice is just another anachronistic feminist tearing down Victorian patriarchal norms. Even her—[shudder]—Avril Lavigne–blared theme song is a skin-deep grrrl-power accessory.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

Favreau's direction is so boulder-heavy-the action sequences, especially the climactic assault on the alien mothership, are an eye-and-ear-shattering mess-that the small moments of poetry...are lost amid too much digital sound and fury.

There’s little of the Church’s perspective in this doc, but you can’t really fault the filmmakers--Mormon leaders refused several overtures to participate. Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/86550/the-mormon-proposition-film-review#ixzz0r2j38wUF

Madden pads the film with shimmering images of Jaipur and its surroundings; a midmovie funeral sequence - 'cause somebody's got to kick the bucket! - even manages to be somewhat evocative and moving. The rest makes you long for senility to set in, but quick.

Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

People become mere punch lines: fleshy avatars for the gory grist.

Gleeson plays the role with the kind of full-bore commitment (every supercilious gesture precise and intelligently thought through) that makes you wish the movie better complemented his efforts.

It's "Centurion Deux" without the second-coming-of-Carpenter pretense, though you still wish the trashiness were more distinctive.

There is no depth or resonance to anything we see and hear-everything is as it seems, no more, no less, and the reactionary superficiality dulls the senses. General Orders No. 9 strains for elegiac profundity and ends up as bad, backward-looking poetry.

Zombie is still committed to showing how violence perverts all touched by it, yet his carnivalesque approach undercuts his empathy. He panders to the cheap seats whenever he’s not being scary.

Yet worst of all is the way the film ultimately reveals its humanistic setup as a lazy pretext to redeem Damon's big-business apologist through the healing power of nature. He's not the only one who should be put out to pasture.

As we work our way back to that cliff-hanger of an opening, it becomes clear that the movie is no acid critique, but a hollow endorsement of high living. Guess every generation gets its "Boiler Room."

The story's treacly all-souls-in-alignment outcome is never in doubt, but as Kasdan dogs go, this is light-years better than Dreamcatcher.

Reitman, who also cowrote the screenplay, feels the constant need to "deepen" his characters, granting them wants and motivations--especially during the moralistic third act--that are totally alien to how they're initially portrayed.

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness.

Good actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson show up to bust balls and bark expository dialogue with check-in-the-bank-yet? proficiency. Add in a couple of dully pro forma narrative twists to keep you awake in between shots of distractingly exotic South African scenery, and you've got a first-quarter Hollywood release par excellence. Meaning not.

Olin never wavers in her commitment. She's often extraordinary in individual moments.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's mostly whiffed docudrama makes the influential poem by Allen Ginsberg (Franco) seem dull, ordinary, pedestrian instead of pioneering.

Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.

Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

This was Italy's official submission for Best Foreign Film to the 2011 Academy Awards (a red flag more often than not), and, sure enough there's little here that rises above middlebrow.