Nathan Rabin

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

Fury lives up to its title with its great ferocity, but at a certain point, it begins to feel like a macho fantasy.

St. Vincent is even sappier and more committed to yanking heartstrings and manipulating emotions than Hyde Park On Hudson or The Monuments Men, and ultimately even more precious and treacly.

The film’s aversion toward clichés and hitting expected beats lends it a rare, welcome edge of danger.

The film’s appeal is largely dependent on Cage; Left Behind is a batshit-crazy Cage cult classic of a radically new stripe.

Time Is Illmatic is a documentary worthy of its subject. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a strong, substantive look at an album whose greatness was apparent immediately, but that’s still grown in stature since its release.

Like earlier Dante classics The Gremlins and The Burbs, The Hole marries the fantastical, the horrific, and the mundane, but in this case, the fantastical isn’t that fantastic, the horrific isn’t scary, and the mundane is way too mundane. All the elements are here, they just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.

Dolphin Tale 2 makes audiences wade through endless oceans of tedium for those scattered, fleeting moments of grace.

The Skeleton Twins has a pair of terrific, sharply etched lead performances, a polished, autumnal look, and some affecting moments where its protagonists bond. But to borrow a water-based metaphor from the film’s overflowing stock of them, The Skeleton Twins just lies there, cold and clammy, like a dead fish.

As Christian knock-offs of secular films go, The Remaining is surprisingly respectable. At the risk of crazily overrating the film, The Remaining has to qualify as one of the most stirringly adequate, totally acceptable explicitly Christian horror movies ever made.

The film’s constant nods to the artificiality of its narrative highlight its precious, cloying phoniness rather than subvert it.

Despite the abbreviated ending, No No: A Dockumentary is nevertheless a compelling, deeply moving, fun look at the highs and lows of a bygone era.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

Kink sometimes feels like a promotional film not just for the website it empathetically chronicles, but also for the sex-positive ethos it embodies. But it’s also unexpectedly convincing, and at times even moving in its paradoxical conception of liberation through degradation, and empowerment through submission.

The film lets audiences be third parties in Coogan and Brydon’s dinner conversation. For lovers of words, comedy, and conversation, that’s an awfully hard proposition to pass up.

Let’s Be Cops takes its premise in the dullest, most predictable direction imaginable, as a wacky mismatched-buddy-cop movie pitched to the lowest common denominator.

The exuberant dance sequences have long been the series’ saving grace, but even those are starting to feel redundant and interchangeable.

Nothing is surprising about The Hundred-Foot Journey. It’s a film that telegraphs all its beats and character arcs, executes them adequately but without passion or personality, then congratulates itself on a job done.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

Title aside, what distinguishes The Fluffy Movie from a standard stand-up special is its willingness, even eagerness, to dive into some seriously heavy shit. It’s funny, to be sure, but also unexpectedly substantive.

The Kill Team tells a compelling story, but the 79-minute runtime leaves that story feeling incomplete.

A Most Wanted Man is a cold film that examines its characters from a clinical distance, but its iciness gives way to raw emotion in a powerful final sequence.

Gondry’s latest demands a high tolerance for whimsy, and will undoubtedly prove anathema to his skeptics. Yet for those willing to abandon logic, suspend disbelief, and give themselves over to Gondry’s crazy, deeply immersive world of play, the result is a wildly inventive head film that’s mood-altering and mind-expanding in its own right.

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

Swanberg isn’t doing anything new with Happy Christmas, but sticking to the same non-formula formula this time around yields unprecedentedly inspired results.

Cannon is a big believer in the power of repetition. He apparently nurses a strong belief that if a gag isn’t funny the first time around, it will somehow become hilarious the eighth or ninth time it’s repeated.

A crowd-pleasing, proudly working-class celebration of large women, old women, broke women, and women who love women, Tammy isn’t just consistently funny and unexpectedly touching and tender, it’s also genuinely subversive.