Nick Allen

Blockbuster movies are often as loud and action-based as The Tomorrow War, but they’re rarely as diverse in tone or so delightfully wild when it comes to in-your-face entertainment.

Gout’s entry should be a victory lap for this relatively often dumb and dirty treatise on all that’s wrong with America, especially one that has become so powerful with multiple box office hits. Instead, it displays all that makes these movies a failed experiment in blockbuster exploitation.

Here, [Ruben] lets loose with many of the goofy, creepy impulses that make him such a welcome voice in crowd-pleasing horror, creating a giddy spirit with his long roster of future household names.

Italian Studies is a striking mix of open-hearted storytelling and atmospheric filmmaking, with an overall confidence from Leon and Kirby that’s more pronounced than the script’s slippery nature.

Awake is not even smart enough to play a little dumb, and so even the silliest, most gratuitous parts involving very cranky humans turning into killing machines are anticlimatic and frankly boring. The apocalypse has rarely been this abysmal.

These thrilling sequences give the film plenty of adrenaline at its beginning and end, and play like a nod from a still-evolving Krasinski: he’s embracing “enjoy your ride” filmmaking, even if that can encourage a viewer’s passivity. Here’s hoping that “Part III” leaves more room for what got people talking in the first place.

There turns out to be no actual book in Spiral: From the Book of Saw, but it does define what makes an intricately bad movie, with flaws that can sometimes be earnest, unintentionally hilarious, or disappointing.

The Disciple is a great example of when filmmaking and acting styles complement each other, and it’s that bond that feels to be a significant part of what makes Tamhane’s film so special, so resonant.

Vampire stories can be so rote that it’s noticeable when the rules are even slightly changed, and that's when Boys from County Hell shows a little spark. But this is more the clear case of a horror movie that forgets to have fun.

Chasing Ghosts has a great idea in showcasing as much of Traylor’s work as possible, and next to the creations of other Black artists, but its talking head presentation is fairly didactic.

There’s a largely automatic nature to this informative documentary; much of what unfolds here is depressingly prototypical.

Bad Trip knows how to stir things up, and its funniest scenes often involve real people getting in the mix, tested by the brilliant skills of André, Howery, and Haddish.

For all that goes into making a movie—the prolific Dupieux wrote, directed, shot, and edited this one as with his previous films—the impulsive, scattered storytelling here almost feels like an unrewarding and contrarian statement to such hard labor.

My Zoe dares to lead with its feelings, and that fearlessness provides a striking spectacle itself.

Shook, about an influencer being tormented by a mysterious caller, takes the bait on making a movie about such social media vanity, but its touch-and-go terror hardly offers commentary or cleverness.

Bliss is far more kooky and tedious than it is good, and it's so confusing that even the movie's sense of humor is a question mark.

A Glitch in the Matrix is so much about conveying its big idea that it misses the smaller parts—it oddly seems limited in its overall mission, documenting this mix of philosophy, sci-fi, and religion without helping us understand its believers.

The culture clash here between "goddamn hipster freaks" and people of the woods is more complicated here, and the way it unfolds is brutal and shocking without being depraved itself.

A superficial force eats at this movie from the inside, including the way that it’s a brawny script with nil visual grit, and a style that mostly announces itself with sporadic neo-noir lighting.

In spite of the available chemistry and charisma from Hathaway and Ejiofor, Locked Down proves to be a bewildering mess, in part because of choices made in how to tell a story that mixes two-hander drama with a heist.

Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud is the type of genre movie that makes many of its bizarre choices just for the sake of seeing if it can all work. But whether you find the film to be ambitious, or just some stunt screenwriting, it's intriguing to watch an audacious filmmaker try to keep midnight-ready movies unpredictable, even if that means a sincere but silly mash-up of WWII dogfights, gremlin chaos, and feminism in action such as this.

Every bit of this movie yearns to be on the same proverbial shelf as something like Bay “Transformers” or Anderson’s “Resident Evil” films, but it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own space. An alien planet shouldn’t look this rote; same goes with the life-or-death action that happens on it.

This is an inspirational movie in the broadest sense. You have to squint a lot to see the true story within it, but it's there.

The cuteness of Godmothered is a winning one overall, especially in how it uses a playful sense of humor and good heart to find its own way to Happily Ever After.

The bad news, I’m sorry to say, is that The Christmas Chronicles 2 doesn’t contribute much that's worthwhile to the first movie's blueprint, and focuses on mildly amusing indulgences — more elf-centric shenanigans, more Santa mythology, more roller coaster sleigh rides.

The documentary vigorously investigates — and subsequently calls out — his integrity as an artist, an associate, and even as a gang member.