Nick Schager

Straining for both timeliness and throwback thrills, it’s an alien affair that never delivers the grand payoffs it teases.

A familiar stew that’s as scattershot as ever, and engineered to appeal to teens who can’t get enough jokes about sex, race, and movies they’ve already seen.

Simplistic, scattershot, and—worst of all—unfunny, it’s a social commentary-laced crime comedy of insufferable proportions.

Despite looking great, it comes off as a humdrum knockoff of yesterday’s fashion.

Aside from a couple of vicious set pieces, however, this genre effort’s gimmickry results in derivative cornball melodrama. It would have benefited greatly from speaking louder while carrying a big stick.

All “Thriller," no infamy, presenting an uplifting, crowd-pleasing version of events that, for all its expert impersonations, is simply the palatable half of this sordid tale.

A deep dive into a pool of pretentiousness whose absurdity mounts with each new quasi-supernatural—and heavily symbolic—development.

[Its] sketchiness is second only to its inside-baseball humorlessness.

A Frankenstein-ian cine-monster that both reinvents and pays homage with all the clumsiness and unsightliness of its fabled creature.

A fleetingly recognizable tale of love, desire, obsession, regret, bitterness, and ire that, at every turn, plays as florid, horny, juvenile fanfiction.

Just a pale imitation of scarier bloodsuckers gone by.

There’s not much to latch onto here except the faint flickers of the better film this one, with more care and attention to detail, might have been.

An irredeemably obvious and one-note affair that says everything in its first 10 minutes and spends the remainder of its time vainly trying to drum up humor from a wan Weekend at Bernie’s-esque scenario.

May have things to say, but doesn’t have a clue how to say them.

Designed in every way to make one bleary eyed, it’s the new year’s dreariest, and goofiest, film.

A typical provincial British tale about everyday Englishmen and women banding together to accomplish a controversial task against long odds, it’s akin to a warm glass of milk.

Yanking unashamedly at the heartstrings, however, it’s a manipulative and uneven tune that strains to elicit the sniffles it so hungrily seeks.

To a greater extent than its franchise mates, Avatar: Fire and Ash is drunk on its own extravagance, unaware that it’s offering up nothing new that might justify its absurd Sturm und Drang.

The charismatic Pfeiffer deserves much, much better than this soggy stocking stuffer.

Largely faithful but unwilling to pick a funny or nasty lane, it’s the most impersonal film of its writer/director’s career, and a revolutionary thriller that too often falls back on establishment conventions.

Its most impressive feat, however, is finding a way to somehow be even duller than its predecessors.

Undone by storytelling that, however well-intentioned, coats its real-life tale in a corny Hollywood sheen.

Save for a single sterling jolt, his compendium of clichés is a case study in knowing a genre’s tricks but doing absolutely nothing of interest with them.

A thriller in name only, it has all the grace and cunning of an anvil to the head.

While its humor often sticks, its mayhem fails to land.

Mistakenly assumes that the woe-is-me routines of the rich and famous are the stuff of great drama.

Affords Julia Roberts with her best part in years as a professor whose role in a burgeoning scandal threatens to expose her deep, dark (related) secrets. She’s not enough, however, to make this wannabe-conversation starter coherent, much less insightful.

It builds to revelations that speak emphatically to social shallowness, pressures and prejudices—even if, in the end, its bombshells resonate as less surprising than inevitable.