Kenji Fujishima

The end-credits sequence shows up the rest of the film as the broad and incoherent live-action cartoon that it is.

Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.

In Sing, musical theater is simply an excuse for the filmmakers to deliver an animated version of American Idol.

It lobs a grenade at slasher-movie sadism by making us care about the characters as more than just body-bag fodder.

Worse than offering no especially fresh angles on its cliched material, however, are the trite characterizations of the two lead female characters.

Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.

Less explored in all the ensuing back-patting is the question of whether Cameron is, in fact, sincerely interested in learning more about the world around him or whether this mission is merely intended to stroke his own ego.

All the film has to show for its efforts are tired platitudes about the value of altruism and living each day as it if were the last.

By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.

A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.

One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film's pained beating heart.

Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.

The question of why one should actually work up any emotional investment in what happens to these people is never really answered, much less asked in the first place.

It aims for John Waters-style transgression without evincing half of Waters’s wit and affection for eccentric lifestyles.

There's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head.

The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.

Slight though it may be, Lace Crater's mix of Andrew Bujalski–style naturalism and Roman Polanski–style body horror is at least off-kilter enough to keep one absorbed throughout.

One need go no further than the film's first segment to grasp how little interest the latest entry in the anthology series has in generating chills from the lo-fi.

The Gerard Johnson film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all.

Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.

As informative, revealing, and occasionally poignant as some of the unearthed revelations are, the doc is ultimately hampered by a level of self-congratulation that nearly undoes its effectiveness as an activist polemic.

Its greater focus on disreputable genre thrills comes at the expense of making coherent points about class inequalities, political exploitation, or man's inhumanity.

Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.

The sense of a film school student doing movie karaoke with his influences is evident throughout Dreamland.

All the narrative hopscotching is little more than a superficial ploy to gussy up a clichéd redemption tale.

Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.

Paisley and McGuinness's intellectual back and forth is rendered so compellingly that one wishes the filmmakers didn’t feel a need to resort to a surfeit of momentum-killing plot contrivances.

While its desire to question absolutes is admirable, there’s a hollowness at the film’s core that prevents it from having a more pointed impact beyond surface provocation.