Mark Hanson

Whatever satire of white elite society is intended by The Forgiven has been blunted by monotony.

For a while, the work on the part of the performers is nuanced enough to distract us from the film’s implausibilities.

In the end, Edgar Wright isn’t particularly interested in taking aim at all that is dark in the zealotry that shapes a culture.

The real Jeffrey Manchester may in fact have been polite, but Derek Cianfrance’s film doesn’t convince you that it needed to be as well.

By the time the film comes to the end of its brisk runtime, it feels like nothing much has actually happened, despite all the narrative convolutions.

Dashcam is nothing if not consistent, as it’s every bit the empty provocation as the troll at its center.

Quentin Dupieux’s latest endlessly draws out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect.

It’s disappointing to see a film with such a weird premise as Nightbitch ease into an orthodox storytelling mode.

Henry Selick’s flair for phantasmagorical sights is on full display, though Wendell & Wild’s excessively CGI-enhanced look is a far cry from the grounded tactility of much of his prior work.

Censor unfortunately pulls back from its social interrogation just when it’s working up a head of steam.

Some of the period action set pieces are spirited in their staging, while the film doesn’t lack for gruesome and elaborate kill sequences, which is almost enough to distract from the screenplay’s patchiness and insipid characterizations.

Johannes Roberts’s prequel ultimately remains buried by its indifference to unchecked corporate power.

Despite the retro vérité aesthetic that Benny Safdie employs to give Mark Kerr’s story a stylish new coat of paint, all that his version ultimately does is whip up a feeling of déjà vu.

Paul Greengrass employs a peripatetic restlessness to the material, and while that brings an often thrilling sense of verisimilitude to the film, the cliché-stuffed screenplay too often plays against the intended solemnity of the project.

The unoriginality of Presence’s story eventually calls out the POV conceit as a one-note gimmick, especially when the tension is dialed up in the film’s second half.

The film circles a thorny premise, which makes it all the more disappointing that it results in a conventional clinch.

As an exploration of the misogyny that drove Bundy’s crimes, Amber Sealey’s film mostly falls short of its potential.

If Infested had given us a little more reason to invest in its human specimens than in the blunt mechanics of its genre trappings, then maybe some of the commentary would have clung to us like the webs do to the spiders’ victims.

Regrettably, the one star of Anaconda that gets the shortest shrift is the most important one: the snake.