Marya E. Gates

Unfortunately [Lopez's] hampered by a character that is simultaneously overwritten and underwritten, while trapped in a film that never gives any of its characters room for the type of nuance a performance at that register requires.

It’s an overly calibrated hodge-podge of better movies with absolutely no original thought of its own, populated by stock characters, and brought to life with uninspired filmmaking.

Despite claiming otherwise in its marketing, this doc still wants to uphold her as the rock n’ roll goddess of the headlines rather than as a person on her own terms.

Run Rabbit Run does nothing to transcend its influences, finds nothing insightful to say about the various familial relationships its fails to explore, traps its talented cast in unmemorable characters, and — worst of all for a horror film — contains no scenes that are truly chilling and or any imagery that will stick in the viewer’s mind once the film is over.

The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next.

In order to do this subject—and these women—justice, there is a need for a clear-eyed reckoning. Unfortunately, “Brainwashed” does not deliver that, instead favoring disingenuous rhetoric and often patently false information to serve its predetermined narrative.

The whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.

Though millions of Jewish people were imprisoned and killed in concentration camps during this time, this misguided drama, written by Ilya Tsofin, isn’t interested in the truth of their stories. Instead, it’s a contrived triumph of the human spirit-style narrative where the Jewish character at the center is rendered a cipher for suffering while his Nazi tormentors are unconsciously humanized.

It’s all just really bizarre, limp copies of better films.

The nostalgia of Ponsoldt's film is curdled and rotten underneath its summery sheen.

That this catastrophe is director Wanuri Kahiu’s follow-up after her sublime debut “Rafiki” makes it all the more disappointing. Where that film has rich characterization, this has generalities. Where that film has vibrant cinematography, this has dreadful, bland compositions. Where that film has a detailed sense of place, this film has a disjointed, geographically murky portrait of L.A. and what appears to be a sponsored by SXSW and Whataburger view of Texas.

Common Ground is a well-meaning PSA that waters down the complex history, practices, and systems of American industrial agriculture into something palatable for audiences looking to feel good about the bleak future of this dying planet without actually having to do any hard learning, thinking, or direct action.

Overlong at a mere 87 minutes, there's nothing timeless or elegant about this flop entirely composed of elements derived from much better films.

Unfortunately, memorable moments are few and far between here, and those are mostly spoiled by the film’s trailer.

Like its lazy title, Murder Mystery 2 settles for the lowest version of itself.

Ultimately, “La Dolce Villa” is about as authentic an Italian experience as a night at the Olive Garden.

Ultimately, To Catch a Killer blames all of the gruesome violence it depicts on the perpetrator’s mental health and offers only a surface-level exploration of the system that failed him.

Mafia Mamma lives in the uncanny valley between incompetent and unwatchable.

What drew this cast to this film? One that boils its characters down to cardboard copies of real people whose only aim in life is traditional heterosexual, Christian, nuclear family units without any defying characteristics beyond their roles within those units.

The People We Hate at the Wedding is a career nadir for this cast, an asinine, poorly executed-excuse for a comedy. A little advice? Save yourselves and just RSVP no to this disaster.

The film proves to be just another retread of “spooky” Catholic-themed horror tropes without adding any insight or originality to the subgenre.

Imagine a J-horror plot involving a child possessed by a swamp demon told through the aesthetics of the screenlife found footage subgenre, and you can pretty much imagine how writer-director Pablo Absento‘s new film, “Bloat,” will play out.

Frankly, the musical, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and book by Steven Levenson, itself is where the fault lies. There were few redeemable qualities to begin with, and Chbosky’s dreary, washed-out direction adds nothing to its already bleak, vapid existence.

Like a magpie, it takes bits and pieces from better films and cobbles it together with some paper-thin characters into something that is a movie in definition only.

Philip Noyce is a natural choice for this kind of film. He’s great with actresses in peril and at keeping tension ramped up to eleven. But using the collective trauma of a generation of parents and children as the backdrop for a real-time thriller, whose lives have proven time and again to matter less than the right to own an AK-47, remains unconscionably distasteful.

Incoherently directed, thematically muddled, and poorly acted, writer/director/producer/star Livia De Paolis’ drama The Lost Girls should have stayed on the page.

The unfortunate misfire What Comes Around, from director Amy Redford and screenwriter Scott Organ, is what happens when filmmakers lack tact and land squarely in the realm of exploitation.

While the script from John Gatins, who wrote "Flight," is mostly decent (there is some laughable dialogue peppered throughout), Dean Israelite's direction is so fussy, frenetic, and disjointed that it renders moot any charm the story may have once contained.