Monica Castillo

What Hawley has delivered is a garden variety bad movie, proving the TV wunderkind of “Fargo” and “Legion” was not quite ready for the big screen.

The Garden Left Behind works best as a message movie, not for the community it’s set in but for everyone else.

Reminders of Him is so preoccupied with tragedy that the romance becomes secondary. Now, after our third Hoover adaptation, it feels like we’re getting love with diminishing returns. There’s less to enjoy, even if the movie is almost two hours long.

Unlike previous iterations of music stars struggling to make it to the spotlight, “Clika” lacks the electricity and the excitement of watching a performer bring the house down.

The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.

Dreamland is a half-remembered nightmare. It’s full of incomprehensible flashes of striking imagery, most of which won’t make sense in the morning. But in the moment you’re watching Dreamland, you’ll feel the restlessness of its messy story, the fitful starts-and-stops of its erratic editing and the leaden quality of its action sequences, which has all the grace of someone who took a Benadryl pill too early.

If Susie Searches wanted to critique the true-crime podcast trend, it could have done so more directly. For now, we have a movie at odds with itself and its main character.

While the strange and unusual world of Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb has ample enough unsettling energy thanks to Philip Lozano’s ominous cinematography, it fails to reach its scary ambitions. Jump scares feel less jumpy, and the twists are predictable.

The best preachers always know how to tell a story and tie it back to a Biblical lesson, but director Sean McNamara has less than a youth pastor’s grasp on his main character’s crisis of faith.

It’s a movie that’s confrontational and awkward from the start, distancing its viewer with an acerbic perspective and characters that trade more thorny verbal jabs and slaps than anything resembling warm affection.

Although it resembles the far sleekier “Ready or Not,” Timothy Woodward Jr.'s actioner Til Death Do Us Part never gets near that level of competence. Instead, screenwriters Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor keep their audience in the dark, any semblance of world-building or storytelling be damned.

Foe stumbles rather spectacularly by leaning more on melodrama than logic and choosing cliche over originality. Aside from rehashing tropes and offering some laughably bad moments, the film accomplishes little.

Some moments are sweeter than others, but overall, this cookie cutter rom-com has nothing more or less than what its subgenre demands.

Dragged down by over-explanatory dialogue and tired narrative tropes, Protector brings nothing new to the table–except maybe for a confounding 11th hour twist that I won’t spoil that defies reasoning and frankly, good taste. If anyone needs rescuing, it’s Jovovich from this movie.

We could all use a little distraction these days, and there are worse ways to spend the time than in the company of an engrossing erotic thriller. Unfortunately, “Pretty Thing” isn’t one of them. Between stilted conversations, murky cinematography, and the story’s intimate partner violence, the film is distracting in an unpleasant way.

As with the many trend pieces complaining about millennials spending too much money on avocado toast over home mortgages, Echo Boomers gets a lot wrong about the generation it wants to discuss. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened more.

Daniel H. Birman’s Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is what happens when a crime documentary loses sight of its focus.

Dear David is branded content—uninspired and hollow to a fault—and perhaps that’s even more disturbing than a five-year-old internet ghost story.

For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.

Not all tearful screaming sessions translate well from the page to the screen, and this is an excruciating example of overkill.

Our characters here are not so much stuck in a time loop, as they are in a very lazy movie filled with cliches and middle school-level humor, and which starts over half-way through the events for no reason. The joke is on anyone who mistakes this movie for entertainment.

Ultimately, “Azrael” lacks the energy or chills to terrify viewers.

For a movie all about passion and the need to express yourself artistically, it is the most halfhearted "you got served" to hit theaters this year.

The jokes are thin, the computer animation is wanting and the inane plot is a series of set pieces strung together.

Fontaine, also the writer and director here, aims high and crashes spectacularly, unable to keep the Jenga tower of a story together — or from being uninteresting.

Overblown caricatures and stale jokes about “don’t you know who I am?!” and going to see his wife’s shaman feel about as empty as a finished cup of coffee, and unfortunately, this movie has nothing else to offer for a refill.

It is another advocacy film without answers, pretending that the mere act of bringing awareness to a problem solves it.

There’s almost nothing to savor from this movie past its initial premise, and, like a funeral that drags on in the summer heat, takes far too long to get to its inevitable conclusion.