Kevin Jagernauth

No one wants to be the sober person at a party where everybody is high, but that’s often what “The Marijuana Conspiracy” feels like.

The most Crisis will give you is the empty gift of occupying two, completely uneventful hours of your life.

The filmmakers’ inability or unwillingness to actually engage with the discourse it builds Echo Boomers around leaves the film feeling both artificial and hysterical.

The Audition is a harsh, and often cheap, picture that offers a fragmented view of a family diseased by the pursuit of perfection, who yet enable the behavior to continue at the ongoing cost of their happiness.

For all of the delightfully deranged places Primal could’ve gone, it stays drearily buttoned up.

The film’s half-hearted politics — which do make a statement, regardless of intent — are perhaps less egregious than a movie that’s simply going through the motions for the bulk of its running time.

Lords Of Chaos is more interested in the spectacle than the substance behind the true story, and that kind of phoniness likely wouldn’t even get the film or Åkerlund invited into The Black Circle.

With no unique viewpoint on the story of its own, it’s perplexing why Papillon went in front of cameras at all.

Earnestly aiming to land with the weight of an Important Film married with Big Ideas, the more Submergence tries and strains to find connections to contemporary issues, the more those beats ring hollow. “Submergence” not only leaves the talent involved underwater, but the audience also longs for anything of significance to cling to.

With some films, you can tell where one or two things went wrong — perhaps a decision in script, or a performance that’s off base — but The Snowman is the rare movie where for every choice, there was a better way to go.

Brad’s Status rarely affords its titular character an opportunity to have a real conversation with anyone else his own age, so the movie becomes a monologue from someone you quickly realize you don’t really want to get to know anyway.

Perhaps the array of characters read better on the page, but it all feels slight in execution, particularly when half of the running time is spent on Tommy’s past and what unfolded between himself and Shelley. Combine all that with a particularly lackluster sense of urgency and pacing, and you have film that offers few reasons for investment.

‘Jane Doe’ never aspires beyond the ordinary, and more crucially even fails to meet that modest standard. Lifeless and lackluster, ‘Jane Doe’ never draws blood.

My Blind Brother is mirthless, though Kroll and Slate have a delightfully easy charm that occasionally rises above the tedium.

Didactic yet generic, The Promise endeavors to educate about a period of recent history that is still unacknowledged by the Turkish government, but curiously manages to be anonymous in form nonetheless.

Walter Hill’s legacy of pushing the edges of genre conventions made the prospect of (Re)Assignment, at least on paper, potentially dangerous. But the filmmaker’s touch is completely lost here, and the only danger the film winds up posing is to the time spent by those who choose to watch it.

It would be too easy to say The Magnificent Seven isn’t magnificent. It’s definitely not, but the film has an even more egregious quality: it’s uninspired. There’s no risk, no real attempts to subvert expectations, and no desire to truly give the audience something, if not entirely new, then at least surprising.

Falls flat on its face thanks to a severe lack of self-awareness and an air of dramatic self-importance.

Tedious and painfully miscalculated, Dirty Grandpa is never as filthy or funny as it thinks it is.

Working at cross-purposes, Colonia tries to have it both ways, wanting to be a shocking true story drama and a riveting piece of moviemaking. But it’s not intelligent enough to accumulate any emotional payoff, and it’s too generic and unsophisticated in its execution to work purely as popcorn entertainment.

The entire film seems cloaked with a general vibe of “good enough.” Embarrassingly cheap CGI effects, poor ADR, and slipshod, jarring editing are the technical failures that compound with the creative ones to indicate a movie that’s not just miscalculated, but seemingly committed to putting together, at its best, a deliverable product and nothing more.

The film’s attempted cathartic payoff is inauthentic and unearned, and it’s a shame considering that Gyllenhaal once again gives a committed turn.

When the script isn't working, Evans turns towards the soundtrack and leans on indie rock when he can (and when the low-budget picture can afford it) to attempt to do some of the emotional lifting.

In turning his back on the familiar tropes of blockbuster comic book movies, Trank doesn't have a clear new identity for Fantastic Four to distinguish itself with, and the result is a movie rich with possibilities, but trapped in the basic structure of a superhero movie, with no idea of how to wholly circumvent traditional expectations.

Carelessly crass, and yet enthusiastically performed, the film does at least offer the curious spectacle of witnessing strings of jokes energetically thud in a movie that's not worth the commute to your nearest multiplex.

Manufactured and manicured to appeal to the teenage fans of Green's book, Paper Towns is so polished and edgeless, that even Margo herself would look at the finished product, and question its authenticity.

Self/less is brain/less entertainment, but if there’s any consolation, the impression it leaves is so fleeting that you can soon replace it with better movie memories.

Earning the opposite of its intended effect, United Passions makes you believe we have yet to witness the true depths of FIFA's ego and arrogance.