Michael Nordine

Far better as a family drama than as a gangster picture, the film's muddled attempt at marrying the two distracts from its emotional center.

Too by-the-numbers for the emotional impact to resonate as long as it could and should have.

It's easy to get lost in the natural beauty of Vermont, and Mosher (who worked on the film with several students as part of a Marlboro College program) clearly takes joy in doing so. The liveliest counterpart to that striking landscape isn't Dern, but rather Jessica Hecht as his wayward daughter, who hits all the grace notes the rest of the film tends to miss.

The filmmaker isn't as nimble as he is ambitious, though, and you'll feel all 148 minutes of Brimstone's runtime — just maybe not in the way Koolhoven wants you to.

Rob Zombie can do better than 31. For proof, just watch any other Rob Zombie movie.

“Who asked for this?” is the question such projects invoke, and Lindsey Anderson Beer’s film never comes up with a satisfying answer.

That all the good things--and there are several--Red Lights has going for it are ultimately in service of an ending that might even make M. Night Shyamalan cringe represents one of the year's biggest missed opportunities.

It's the kind of movie you'd find in someone's VHS collection, decide to watch based on the box art and title, and end up switching out for "The House of the Devil" instead.

The whole affair feels, quite simply, icky in a way that superior projects like “Zodiac” and “Memories of Murder” never do; to his movie’s detriment, Akin seems more interested in merely depicting what happened than taking a stab at why.

A generous reading suggests that its vaguely feminist subtext is intentional rather than a happy accident, and to some extent it may well be, but for the most part Hell Fest simply adheres to long-established genre tropes.

An extended riff on marital infidelity, this is the rare omnibus film that isn't just a mixed bag -- it very nearly succeeds at being uniformly bad.

The plot is that most dreadful of mixes: both laughably silly and needlessly complicated.

No one in the movie rises above the level of a stock character, so over-the-top in their familiar jokes as to barely even register as satire.

Those who favor gore above all else will be at home amid the blood and guts, but others should heed the obvious warning invited by the title: don't watch it.

By far the highest concentration of actual humor comes during the blooper reel over the end credits; free of the script’s saccharine constraints, the performers immediately demonstrate their chops.

Every line of dialogue that follows from this tired premise is like an echo of one from a better movie.

Two second-act revelations alter its tired dynamic for the better, but those changes are undone by cheap scares and a climactic revelation that's more ho-hum than horrifying.

Returning director Tim Story lays out the narrative wares with all the subtlety of a neon sign on the Strip, not that the screenplay from Keith Merryman and David A. Newman (who also co-wrote the first one) gives him much to work with.

As difficult as it can be to tell what’s real and what’s not here, it’s even more difficult to care: “Coma” seems to have poured out of Bonello stream-of-consciousness style, and analyzing it is about as rewarding as trying to make sense of the half-remembered dream your friend won’t stop talking about.

The gradual revelation that there's more to Daisy than meets the eye is no great surprise, but it does at least negate — too late! — some of the more troubling subtext.

Worse than the latent silliness of such a premise is how little the filmmakers ultimately do with the world of narrative possibilities it presents; in attempting to show the universality of love, The Beauty Inside succeeds in showing the opposite.

Roth amplifies that exploitation flick's least interesting components (gore, cruelty) at the expense of all others.

Co-writer/director Jonathan English ups the viscera and nudity at the expense of a compelling narrative, which was hardly the original’s strong suit (if indeed it had one) anyway.

So far removed from any original signal — there are several direct references to Titanic, so it's timely, too — this nuance-free affair registers as little more than noise.

The main enticement is getting to see Cage go full bore. And he does, gesticulating wildly and assuming an unplaceable accent, but as the only combustible element in this otherwise lackadaisical film, his energy ends up bouncing around with nowhere to go.

Practically every scene is a cliché, every line of dialogue an echo of a better one you’ve already heard in a better film.

Most of the film's major happenings are either illogical or, much more damningly, not especially thrilling.

Mild schadenfreude aside, however, the film inspires almost no feeling at all — even the Friday the 13th movies bother giving the bad guy a backstory.