Mark Hanson

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.

The film feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate society’s fervent need to make pariahs out of people for their past mistakes.

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

Once you get past the faux-provocation of the film’s title, it’s difficult to tell what ideologies the filmmakers are trying to skewer.

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.

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

The film lacks for the methodically escalating stakes that makes the best examples of the genre so entertaining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The film is a disastrous amalgamation of modern-day tech-savvy thrills and Clancy’s conservative expressions of patriotism.

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