Marya E. Gates

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

A weak script and boring performances make the Netflix fantasy film Damsel a real slog, torpedoing its attempt to be a subversive spin on classic adventure tales. Any sense of wonder or magic is diluted by cheap-looking CGI and its overly repetitive action sequences.

Like the worst kind of voyeuristic, heterosexual swingers, the film dabbles in non-monogamy and same-sex attraction solely as a means to heteronormative ends.

The whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.