Mark Hanson

The Carpenter’s Son fails to even offer decent frights, unless one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes particularly scary.

Mostly notable for its distracting resemblance to Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II, Chapter 2 suggests for a while a needlessly extended epilogue to the first film.

Like any number of Exorcist wannabes, David Midell’s film is a special kind of hell.

In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.

Given that Mel Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of the film’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation.

The film resembles less a realistic peek into the modern slavery of immigrants in America as it does grist for the torture porn mill.

The film proceeds as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references, and tepid fan service.

This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.

The film’s status as a corporate entertainment product (among the film’s producers is the Winklevoss twins) also presents an internal discord in and of itself, particularly with the script incessantly preaching financial equality for all.

The film is nothing but a chintzy promotional tool for Celine Dion.

If only everyone else had followed John Travolta’s lead, then the film might have lived up to its title.

Any ambiguity over the veracity of the story’s events is quickly jettisoned to adhere to the demands of the leaden slasher-film plotting.

With The Whale, Darren Aronofsky brings a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.

William Brent Bell’s film proves that not every horror concept has the potential to be franchised.

The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.

The primacy that it places on its dopamine drip of dread undercuts whatever genuine commitment it might have toward mental illness and trauma.

Throughout, Efron seems almost determined to wipe away the last vestiges of his youthful looks.

Fresh is pitched as a kind of genre corrective, except its tone-deaf cheekiness only results in a feeling of dreary regression.

As a peek into the relationship between sports, media and capitalism, National Champions feels like a beginner’s playbook.

Dangerous betrays the promise of its title by playing things extremely safe.

In Antlers, the big bad is never supposed to be as scary as society’s collective wrongdoing.

The film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.

Dune ends up feeling like an extended prologue for what one can only hope will be a sequel that will clarify its parables and paradoxes.

In spite of the film’s strikingly lived-in sense of place, the script’s melodramatic storytelling works against that verisimilitude.

Randall Emmett’s directorial debut is virtually indistinguishable from the scores of cheap VOD action thrillers that he’s produced to date.

The shadow of Risky Business looms large, and distractingly, over Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s film.

Symptomatic of the Marvel-ization of modern action cinema, the film seems to exist mostly as an advertisement for future product.

Timur Bekmambetov’s Screenlife film is more fluff piece than hard-hitting news story.