Nick Schager

A film that assembles many of the author’s most memorable creations with noisy, tossed-off sloppiness.

Coogan's portrayal is heartfelt, but The Look of Love rarely exploits its star's comedic dexterity.

It's as unsubtle as a boot to the head, but its dour-and-campy lo-fi style is far preferable to the spastic flash of its big-budget genre compatriots.

Regardless of its capable performances and understated direction, and no matter that it was inspired by Sadwith’s own hunt for Salinger, Coming Through the Rye comes across as a cute conceit incapable of sustaining a substantial feature.

The main takeaway from this dreary dud, however, is that winning an Academy Award is no guarantee of continued big-screen success.

Splintered between thinly sketched focal points rather than actually plumbing the real fear, paranoia and elation that come from operating without a romantic partner, How to Be Single never transcends its most sitcom-y instincts.

Reset is so gorgeously shot that it almost distracts attention away from the sheer inertia of its material.

J.J. Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects.

Jem has less in common with its neon-drenched ‘80s source material than with the real-life Internet-to-red-carpet trajectory of Justin Bieber — a similarly generic teen idol with moves dully modeled on superior artistic predecessors.

Somewhere buried beneath Peters’ new-day-rising clichés and superficial celebration of electronica stars, there’s an intriguing documentary about Cuba’s transformation struggling to break free.

[Wheatley’s] chaos and madness is of a blandly cartoonish variety, neither serious enough to scare nor outlandish enough to elicit laughs.

Romantic comedy clichés are given a superficial East-meets-West (and vet-back-home) makeover in Amira & Sam, a love story whose likable stars can’t compensate for a story that tediously adheres to formula.

It’s a unique, associative blend of sounds and images that aims to convey details as well as underlying truths about Frank’s life. Unfortunately, it also often leaves one feeling aesthetically pummeled to the point of exhaustion.

Treading well-worn ground to diminishingly creepy returns is a bone-deep problem for Zombie’s latest, especially with regard to his characters.

Ripped from yesterday’s headlines, it’s as fast, flashy and superficial as the director’s prior efforts, and also as exaggerated.

It's not clear what Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale values more - endless preaching about ancestral spirits or gruesome CG decapitations.

The legendary star spends the majority of this misfire looking alternately bored and really bored—an emotion that viewers will find all-too-relatable.

Its formal lyricism offset by a script that’s intolerably clunky, it’s an affected portrait of euthanasia and friendship that gets lost in translation.

Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s comedy (based on Delaporte’s play) comes across as a poor man’s Carnage, with bitter resentments and cruel assumptions erupting from beneath its characters’ seemingly cheery, jovial façades.

The result is a film that eschews in-depth insight in favor of easily digestible who's-going-to-win suspense, a tack that's aided by Kargman's rather poignant (and visually graceful) evocation of pre-performance anxiety but ultimately leaves the material feeling deflated once the winners emerge.

Owen and Binoche's vigorous, battle-scarred performances, prop up Words and Pictures even when its plotting resorts to unbelievable devices.

Notwithstanding John Turturro's amusingly smug Italian F1 speedster and a few lighthearted jabs at Japanese TV and technology, Cars 2 generally remains stuck in neutral.

It’s quite a shortcoming when a documentary avoids so many elements of its own story that it proves less comprehensive and compelling than a Ryan Murphy drama.

They Call Us Monsters, alas, is so taken with its access to kids facing such legal circumstances that it forgets to form a compelling argument about them.

A second-act forest fire proves a handy metaphor for Tautou’s slowly burning rage at confinement. Yet while it seems thematically apt, it’s also wholly out of place in this static, emotionless saga, which is defined less by zealous feeling than by a dull, decorous air of respectability.

While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.

It has one thing to say, and it says it over and over again with a dismal lack of nuance.

[Hamm’s] charm—and a reunion with his 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey—can’t salvage a middling caper that’s critically low on comedic or criminal verve.

With access to only one side of its central conflict, and a scattershot approach that skims over key details and points of interest, this well-intentioned documentary leaves audiences feeling like they’re only getting part of a much larger story.

Omits as much as it reveals, fixating so doggedly on its subject that it fails to dig into the various pertinent questions and dilemmas raised by his tale.

The camera swoops and whooshes about but never generates any compelling energy — Chow's film proves endlessly manic but devoid of much mirth.

With a scuzzy style to match its sleazeball vision of spotlight desperation and depravity, this Tinseltown satire — led by voice work from Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt — revels in the foulness of 21st-century pop culture, albeit to a degree that’s ultimately both exhausting and redundant.

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.

For all its genre-bending cleverness and technical dexterity, Rango's overstuffed plot fails to consistently blend its brainy pretensions with its chase-and-slapstick family-film obligations. Like Dirt's H2O supply, laughs are scarce.

The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.

Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic.

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.

Whether to let go and follow your own path is a stock dilemma, and an implausibly hopeful conclusion winds up undercutting the realism of this immigrant song.

Nothing but a million little pieces from prior superhero series and the "Twilight" saga.

Pulling on the heartstrings with tug-of-war-grade might, it’s a carpe diem fable that elicits more exasperated eye rolls than tears or laughs.

No amount of marquee talent, however, can fully compensate for the inert melodrama peddled by this inspired-by-true-events film

Texas Killing Fields's mood is one of drowning in quicksand, though said atmosphere is the byproduct of both Ami Canaan Mann's often dreamy direction and an editorial structure that intermittently devolves into elliptical incongruity.

A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.

Funnier than its prior two predecessors, if gratingly awash in demographic-pandering late-'90s alt-rock hits ("Closing Time," "Freshman"), American Reunion flounders with its earnest melodrama.

For all its commotion, however, the film doesn’t drum up the madcap mania it seeks.

Coupled with a failure to comprehensively detail tactical patterns or the processes of transporting or fencing stolen goods, Smash & Grab’s inability to truly get underneath the surface of its subjects renders it merely a compelling true-life tale in need of better telling.

Regrettably, both the condemnation of capitalist avarice and violence and the sanctification of nature and youthful innocence are dramatized only in simplistic black-and-white terms.

Despite a premise that begets one of the strangest lovemaking scenes in recent memory—a quasi-incestuous gender-bending head-spinner—the film is too frequently the epitome of pretentiousness.

Since Mehran's embrace of hardline Islam is never dramatized or elaborated on in any insightful way.

Seemingly primed to deliver daffy thrills, The Accountant instead goes about its noble-killer business with all the excitement of an IRS audit.

[A] bland stab at genre hybridization, whose sole accomplishment is falling flat at everything it tries.

If not for its outsize IMAX presentation, this handsome nonfiction film would be little more than an uplifting episode of PBS's "Nature."

As a director, Estevez exhibits a bland visual sense, but he does manage to convey some of his scenic locations' multifaceted textures. Mostly, though, his dramatically inert, spiritually generic The Way seems like it was far more fun to shoot than it is to endure.

Short on genuine suspense and long on righteous anger, the film is bolstered by a sturdy performance by Darín that brings emotional nuance to an underwritten role.

Its scenario and criminals devoid of any representational depth, and without any substantial ideas underlying its carnage, the film ultimately just assumes the sadistically pragmatic POV of its one-dimensional thugs, pitilessly doling out brutality as a practical means to an end.

A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.

An ignominious tour-de-force for the esteemed headliner, who gets to indulge in just about every caricatured mannerism and colloquialism in the stale La Cosa Nostra cookbook.

The film elevates the story of Jackie Robinson to that of cornball legend rather than just honoring his legitimately uplifting, heroic saga by telling it straight.

A misguided wannabe-uplifting saga about grief, forgiveness, and keeping important memories alive.

Boasts an evocative sense of environment and the feel of working with one's hands, but otherwise rummages around in search of substance and subtlety.

Ultimately, though, they never cohere into something more than a moderately engaging for-fans-only tour diary.

The way the film hews to tiresome conventions is itself a buzzkill, but worse is its sheer lack of energy, as Pearlstein stages serious and/or heartfelt conversations that go on twice as long as necessary and treat the characters as more than the two-dimensional caricatures they actually are.

It’s a spectacular mess that’s shameless in its desire to entertain through sheer, misbegotten excess.

The director’s assured tracking shots follow Nazaret through one bustling, disorienting locale after another as he searches for help, family, and relief from his hardship. Yet like the film, they’re ultimately superficial gestures that maintain a detached perspective on their subject, incapable of penetrating his traumatized mind and tormented heart.

Director Declan Lowney's film operates from a conceit that affords only minor opportunities for true hilarity.

Nadine Labaki's film awkwardly hybridizes somber politizized drama with regional humor in the style of "Waking Ned Devine" and "Calendar Girls."

The story is a hopeless mess that from the outset seems to be missing key exposition that might help fill in some of its many gaps.

Engaging and enraging but also, alas, consistently superficial.

Victor Kanefsky's documentary nonetheless manages to be as cursory as it is intimate, skimming over so much of Cenedella's life and career that it imparts only a hazy impression of who he is and what he believes.

No mutation is necessary to clearly see that Marvel's "reboot" of their signature franchise is an unimaginative remake of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man.

Director Christian Carion’s first feature since 2009’s “Farewell” is bolstered by a sweeping Ennio Morricone score, yet his narrative is too episodic, and his characters too one-dimensional, to carry the weight of grand historical tragedy, resulting in a picturesque, middle-of-the-road effort.

Revisionist mythmaking of the most bland variety, the Jerry Bruckheimer produced King Arthur purports to tell the true tale of the ancient British hero and his valiant Knights of the Round Table by stripping away the magic, mystery, and majesty of the fable and replacing it with grim n' grimy realism.

As with its protagonist, Unknown boasts tantalizing issues buried deep beneath its frantic exterior, but little idea how to unlock or address them.

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

Dubbed “a documentary about a fairytale,” Manchevski’s film leaps around in time before eventually indulging in some magic realism, but it’s most compelling when simply fixating on Rashad, who makes Bikini at once wounded and tough, conniving and kind, desperate and volatile.

Rife with symbolic weight, the action is thematically jumbled, and worse, it takes so long establishing its scenario that it never develops a sense of urgency and madness.

An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.

Refusing to provide an accurate and trustworthy snapshot of what both these opposing factions are really about, the film comes across as a superficial exposé afraid of getting dirty.

An odyssey that—weird characterizations notwithstanding—is tiresomely unexceptional.

[Depp] proves that he remains one of cinema’s most magnetic presences—even if his latest project doesn’t do terribly much with him.

The doc is all talk and little action, with most of the first hour of this 75-minute pic focused on DiMaggio chatting about the good old days, as well as his stand-up plans and what tonal approach he should take — the nuances of crafting a set — rather than genuinely working toward those goals.

Live Cargo is one of the most evocatively shot debut films in recent memory, which is why its shabby storytelling is such a crushing disappointment.

Lipovsky and Stein elicit not a single solid performance from their cast, and their tale’s twists are illogical even by the material’s established guidelines.

An Egyptian feminist tale told with both affecting compassion and made-for-TV corniness.

This adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ children’s-lit novel offers up merely serviceable studio spectacle, minus any of Burton’s former malevolent mad-genius spirit.

It’s a promising premise fit for a thorny inquiry into personal and institutional priorities, and yet no sooner has Secret In Their Eyes laid its story’s groundwork than it goes off the rails

A documentary -- based in part on Jian Ping's autobiographical book of the same name -- whose poignancy is lessened by its awkward formal devices.

O'Nan and Weston's rapport is engagingly prickly but their "Shins meets Sesame Street" tunes have a tweeness also found in the director's music montages and lens flares. Only in its even-handed treatment of Alex's fundamentalist-Christian brother (Andrew McCarthy) does the film feel like something less than a corny cornucopia of manchildren-grow-up clichés.

Escape Fire winds up feeling like only one half of a larger argument.

Provides only some of his story, its up-close-and-personal view masking as much as it reveals.

Russell Crowe continues to prove that he’s better than the B-grade projects he’s now offered, but his convincing performance isn’t enough to elevate this surprise-free mystery.

With no twists or clues to keep things lively and volatile, one’s mind instinctively begins to ponder how things are being precisely timed, where the other actors are moving to in the background, and the many other behind-the-scenes logistical challenges inherent to such an endeavor.

No amount of narrative wackiness and star power can make [cabbages] or this Sundance Film Festival offering funny.

Nothing—including a game performance by Dev Patel—can prevent it from tumbling down a bottomless hole from which it can’t escape.

Ridiculousness played with a straight face, the film is endearing even if it's never quite hilarious.

The well-intentioned biopic is ungainly, overtly articulating everything it doesn’t need to yet failing to explain much of what starts out as unclear about the tale.

Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.

Swinton’s warm, unassuming direction generates an intimacy that does much to compensate for the overarching project’s wispiness — although even her clear affection for Berger can’t ultimately make “The Seasons in Quincy” more than a for-aficionados-only companion piece to his pre-existing paintings and writing.

Justin Timberlake can't elevate what amounts to relatively simplistic, formulaic material, but his headlining turn exhibits sufficient charisma and wit to make In Time a passably diverting action-packed waste of time.

Pusher faithfully mimics Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 Danish crime saga while missing its nasty, grungy spirit.

Like far too many modern horror films, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane flaunts its knowledge of classic genre fundamentals but fails to do anything very clever or surprising with them.

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

Fred Cavayé shoots his action with both vigorous propulsion and visual lucidity. Unfortunately, however, his story's revelations, all of which are related to a recent corporate bigwig's assassination, arrive at least two-to-three scenes after they've already become obvious.

The eventual appearance of creature fodder in the form of a crazy old coot who lives in the storage facility, as well as a sequel-promising closing note borrowed from innumerable predecessors, ultimately exposes Storage 24 as a monster from a familiar mother.

A tale whose creative inspiration seems to be Three’s Company—and that’s not a compliment.

Empathetic and yet ultimately too draggy to elicit much engagement with its paper-thin story, Elizabeth Blue proves at once well-intentioned and inert.

An unfocused mishmash that thrives only when it fixates on footage of actual bouts.

In its didactic narration and constant on-screen introductions, the film loses a good deal of the very silence and mystery it venerates.

Silly and slipshod, it’s not the role that will catapult the acclaimed actor back into the types of projects he deserves.

The real issue here is simply a dearth of novelty—an insurmountable shortcoming for a B-movie that should be able to drum up some thrills from its offspring-of-Nosferatu premise.

Affected and artificial to the point of aggravation, it’s an interminably draggy endeavor that gives the lie to its oft-spoken phrase, “Time flies.”

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

Despite spending nearly 15 years documenting this phenomenon, Lilien proves wholly uninterested in investigating his human subjects' habit of vigorously anthropomorphizing, and projecting their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and Daddy issues onto the striking hawk.

Crowe's visual framing and dramatic staging are as assured as his compelling lead performance. Yet as his story becomes weighed down by issues of cross-cultural understanding, forgiveness, and second chances...the film comes to feel like a slight, straightforward tale distended to tedious lengths.

Despite its wealth of urgent footage, including clips of raids on pimps’ homes and arrests of johns that expose the seedy masculine desire and domination driving the sex trade, Tricked doesn’t have anything new or particularly eye-opening to say about its subject.

Too timid to be either inspired or outrageously inept, Rio is merely a bird of a familiar feather.

Winds up turning itself into just a rote thriller about psychos learning that, appearance notwithstanding, every family has dysfunctional problems.

Art, politics, and craziness conspire to form a rather mechanical melodrama in Black Butterflies.

Yet Newell, he of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," is ill-suited to steward such sword-and-sandals adventure, his direction--while slightly eschewing modern genre practitioners’ penchant for slicing-and-dicing skirmishes into visual incoherence--is too pedestrian and partial to clumsy slow-mo effects to truly energize the story.

Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.

Were it not for the participation of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it would be an insufferable groaner rather than merely an inoffensive one.

Ultimately too busy fracturing his story’s focus and indulging in gimmicky textual graphics to really tap into either Hollywood’s or electronica’s magnetic appeal, Joseph’s debut proves to be a film with mood to spare but nothing much to say.

An excruciatingly literal affair, not to mention a repetitive one, spinning in circles to dizzying, and ever-diminishing, ends.

Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.

The sole thing it instigates is frustration over its lethargic unoriginality.

[Song’s] sophomore effort embraces a lighthearted rom-com template and then plays its material inaptly seriously—making it the cinematic equivalent of a sugary soda gone terribly flat.

If the proceedings prove far too familiar, director Caradog W. James delivers a few striking images... as well as a sinister cautionary-tale finale made all the more unsettling by its use of a sterling John Carpenter-style synthesizer score.

The best one can say about it is that it at least doesn’t feature a lovably cartoonish genocidal dictator.

All the while, Fisher and his kin's incessant, contentious bickering exposes the ongoing difficulty of reconciling with inherited trauma, though such squabbling's protracted prominence also, ultimately, suggests the need for a bit more editorial trimming.

A pandemic thriller infected with horror-film clichés, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero ditches the nasty allegory of Eli Roth’s original and Ti West’s studio-butchered first sequel for far duller, standard-issue conventions.

The intersection between drug-company profiteering and lobbying, and governmental and private-sector desires to protect people from deadly diseases, is navigated too cursorily by the documentary.

A pedestrian thriller that never generates a modicum of suspense.

Strives for stratospheric emotional heights and yet proves so self-seriously somber and saccharine that it plays like a leaden parody.

Arguably the most derivative offering the tired genre has yet to offer, borrowing elements from so many forebearers that it plays like a conventional pastiche.

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames.

Director Icíar Bollaín mixes Even the Rain's various storytelling modes with an obviousness that ultimately negates enlightening intellectual or emotional discovery.

Even the least violent passages of this follow-up are a tedious drag, courtesy of a story that asks nothing of its lead Charlize Theron and her underwhelming co-stars except endless, enervating moping.

As with its narrative, Wreck-It Ralph's themes don't develop by branching out in wild, unpredictable ways; instead, they simply become narrower and more monotonous.

Unfortunately, its tale is so slight and simple that it also fails to say anything particularly poignant about life.

Aiming for the stars, it proves a laborious affair that rarely gets off the ground.

Director Arcel handles the material with a stately grace that compensates for the story's predictable trajectory, though humdrum period detail and monotonous pacing too often leave the proceedings feeling only partially aroused.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

There's minor amusement in the suggestion that entrepreneurial criminality begins with a preference for Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal" over the Bible.

Though the film’s heart is in the right place, writer Timothy McNeil’s directorial debut (an adaptation of his play) hits so many familiar notes that it undercuts its compassionate lead performances, in the process rendering it merely a superficial tale of unlikely amour.

Mistaken-identity shenanigans and gooey romance are Monte Carlo's prime commodities.

With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled power of imagination while displaying absolutely none of its own.

Pasikowski isn’t interested in actual characters or narrative nuance; rather, the prime concern here is censuring Polish anti-Semitism, which, no matter how righteous an aim, eventually comes at the expense of engaging storytelling.

Terrifier 3 is a juvenile splatterfest with an ignorable plot, and its performances veer from the competent (LaVera and Thornton) to the inept (most everyone else).

This sixth chapter boasts not a single genuinely unnerving jolt—a consequence of tepid writing as well as the familiarity of Ghostface’s tactics, which have long since become their own genre clichés.

In a streaming landscape already saturated with takedowns of Big Pharma and its pill-popping perfidy, it’s a generic version of far more powerful originals.

A work of tremendous look-at-me energy: all prolonged close-ups and studied master shots of actors weeping, screaming, laughing, longing, and freaking out with sweaty, grimy intensity.

Lacks any sense of internal logic and is even lighter on surprising scares, dispensing only clichés that are as moldy as the haunted house in which his characters are confined.

While the star adequately acquits himself, Neil Jordan’s throwback noir is a cover song that knows all the notes but can’t capture its predecessor’s spirit.

Diaz and Foxx still got it, the film constantly screams. The evidence on display, however, suggests otherwise.

A franchise farewell so underwhelming, nary a tear will be shed over its passing.

Its comic touch almost as heavy-handed as its slow-motion-drenched action is dull, it seems primarily designed to answer the question, “How many movie stars can one fiasco squander?

Just a pale imitation of scarier bloodsuckers gone by.

Kids will undoubtedly chuckle at their familiar exploits; the rest will view the film as an excuse to take a nice air-conditioned nap.

The meager surprises it does contain aren’t particularly effective, considering that early clues suggest only one possible twist and the proceedings do little to mask it.

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

Block-headed from start to finish, it’s cinema in service of nothing more than IP exploitation.

The proceedings resemble an impromptu game of make-believe concocted by a kid playing with his or her toys—a situation that renders it both inane and lighthearted.

The Exorcist: Believer trots out Burstyn for continuity credibility and then treats her with stunning disrespect—the most brazen of many indications that the film is a soulless cash-in on an established name brand.

A corny and turgid saga that should bring to a close Sony’s live-action “Spider-Verse,” if not the faltering genre as a whole, it’s an unspectacular affair that melds Marvel, Tarzan, and John Wick to depressing and forgettable ends.

A subpar exorcism movie that’s all the more depressing for being directed by Lee Daniels, whose distinctive flair is only sporadically spied amidst its shopworn clichés.

With nothing lurking beneath his character’s brawny exterior, and even less to his up-and-down tale, Johnson proves merely an adequate contender in his bid for dramatic credibility.

This wannabe winsome fairy tale about confronting fears, atoning for sins, and forgiving oneself is a pile-up of preciousness.

Evil Dead Rises is confirmation that—like so many that have come before it—Raimi’s legendary horror saga has run out of steam, continuing onward only because its easy-to-market IP value remains relatively high.

Cheerfully dumb and dutifully formulaic, it’s “content” in the worst sense of the term.

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

An irrelevant B-team affair which further suggests that the MCU can’t survive, short- or long-term, without the active participation of its most famous characters.

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.

Aiming for ribald and risqué and coming up with only ruinous humorlessness, it may be the longest 84 minutes anyone will spend in a theater this year.

Even at a brisk 85 minutes, it’s a bigger slog than a day spent mowing the grass.

No Magic Mirror is needed to identify it as the lamest Mouse House re-do of them all.

Cartoonishly gory and drearily unoriginal and predictable, it’s a collection of tired devices and shout-outs that plays like training wheels slasher cinema.

Great racing sequences aside, it’s so clichéd and unadventurous that it makes its source material seem deep by comparison.

It’s not improbability that dooms this Al Pacino-headlined genre throwaway but a crushing lack of originality and a form that makes its clichés even harder to swallow.

Messy and mirthless, it resounds as the death knell for this interconnected cinematic enterprise’s current iteration.

Merely a cheeky pantomime rather than an actual adventure in which one might get swept up.

Operates in a single, precious sub-Kelly Reichardt register, its every second marked by studied images, sounds and performances.

An attempt at comedy that’s a genuine disaster.

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

The Electric State" is just about as derivative as a modern blockbuster can be, and worse is that it skates along from one cacophonous and jokey set piece to another as if on rails.

Duncan’s film is at once obvious and repetitive, ably depicting the in-depth study required to be a doctor and yet failing to convey anything that isn’t readily apparent–including the sheer unpleasantness of seeing deceased men and women carved up for scientific inquiry.

This misbegotten attempt at creating a new out-of-this-world Snyderverse is merely a knockoff dressed up in its director’s stylistic signatures.

Knox Goes Away isn’t the first (or fifth) genre effort to play with memory, although it might be the flattest.

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 preposterous, monotonous action saga primarily notable for boasting a miscast lead and advancing a less-than-tolerant geopolitical fantasy.

Rarely has a mainstream comedy boasting this much talent been so structurally amateurish, to the point that the film’s lack of humor seems a secondary problem to its more pressing storytelling incoherence.

Director Wes Ball’s adaptation of the second book in author James Dashner’s popular series is the exact opposite of its predecessor, presenting a sprawling adventure that, when not liberally cribbing from more illustrious sci-fi forefathers, spends plentiful time fleshing out the dull details of its oppressed-youth scenario.

Out of the Shadows’ barrels forward like such a rampaging beast that it decimates everything – plot, character, emotion, basic visual lucidity – in its wake.

Amidst this goofiness, Skrein proves a serviceable Statham replacement, capable of executing elaborate martial arts-inspired fight moves, glowering behind the wheel of his car, and generally acting like a cold, detached thug-for-hire who, deep down, has a heart of gold.

Characters scream, throw glasses, screw, and strip nude for the self-gratifying viewing pleasure of others, but Jayne Mansfield’s Car never musters up even the faintest trace of Tennessee Williams-style hothouse drama.

Moretz strikes a convincing empowered-badass pose but has no amount of charismatic fearsomeness can energize the illogical latter portions of The 5th Wave, which are driven by revelations about the aliens that, to put it bluntly, make no sense.

A film whose themes are as neatly laid out as its characters' behavior is preposterous.

Its first draft-grade script lacks the absurdity necessary to elicit laughs, or the depth that might make it moving. Caught between its competing urges, it merely squanders its accomplished leads Tessa Thompson and Melissa Leo in a listless purgatory.

Gervais’ tale is primarily consumed with middle-of-the-road squabbling between its headliners, whose yin-yang chemistry never results in more than a few chuckle-worthy bon mots.

On the basis of Madame Web, however, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is now completely lifeless—and in no need of resuscitation.

Noble intentions alone do not a great movie make, as evidenced by Po, whose heart is in the right place but whose drama is woefully lacking in momentum.

There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.

Queen to Play does slightly buck convention by depicting intellectual development (rather than lovey-dovey triumph) as the key to reshaping identity, as well as a form of class advancement and spiritual enlightenment. Such notions, however, are drowned out by deafeningly creaky conventions of cutesy self-discovery.

Would have no reason to exist if it didn’t constantly foreground the issue of race, and yet affords no pointed or amusing commentary on the subject.

The material comes across as too far-fetched to be taken seriously, and too bland to elicit laughs.

Whereas Bertino’s original was sleek, sinister and deft, this do-over is noisy, dull and dumb as a bag of rocks.

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

Even at a brisk 81 minutes, this indie can barely sustain its boozy comedic buzz.

Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone.

Director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) shows a flair for mythologizing via beautiful panoramas of upstate New York landscapes but less so, unfortunately, through his film's inert story and flat performances.

Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.

Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.

Despite some pleasant backstage-footage filler, however, 12-12-12 ultimately so truncates its artists' performances (each is given one song, and those are heavily edited) that the effect is like watching the original TV broadcast in fast-forward.

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

Monaghan radiates a winning measure of defiant resilience and dignity, even when she and her illustrious co-stars are reduced to mouthpieces for political sentiments (as in Common’s censure of ICE) — which is depressingly often.

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.

Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.

Whether hewing to the letter of Stoker’s source material or branching off in novel directions, this B-movie distends itself without purpose.

Switching genres in a futile effort to justify the series’ continued existence, this misbegotten creation is a leaden and aimless bit of cinematic malware—not to mention the most convoluted 2025 theatrical release to date.

Neither as scary nor as funny as its premise might be, The Pod Generation instead coasts along on a placid, self-satisfied wavelength.

Content to be merely cheerfully clichéd, it's an assembly-line kids' film that, unlike its daring protagonist, risks little, and thus reaps only modest rewards.

Given that the camera always seems to fall or get knocked into the perfect position to capture the craziness at hand, any vérité pretenses soon prove ridiculous. But it’s no more ridiculous than the plot, which incessantly wastes time trying to flesh out its characters, but barely bothers with building suspense.

Wholesome to the point of being dull.

Defined by "Three’s Company"–grade humor, this attempt at male-anxiety cringe-comedy is little more than a sitcom writ large that — courtesy of several awkward transitional fades to black — already feels constructed to accommodate commercial breaks.

Despite referring to the tribe as "my people," Routh is wholly miscast, yet his ill-fitting presence is part and parcel of the plotting's general illogicality.

Merely a paint-by-numbers condemnation of social intolerance. It's a slog of a sermon.

Unfortunately, mocking jibes and cutaways to Team America and Wonder Woman (among other movies and TV shows) establish a jokey attitude that weakens the overall case.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").

Mistakenly convinced that cuteness can compensate for a lack of basic believability, The Right Kind Of Wrong squanders its engaging leads and cheerful joviality with a plot of stupefying senselessness.

The Song of Sway Lake never finds a thematic center around which to pivot its action.

The film’s lack of seriousness isn’t the problem; rather, it’s that its jokey carnage is all caricatured poses devoid of original verve or legitimate wit.

The Sky Is Everywhere finds director Josephine Decker indulging in affectation overload in an effort to imbue her adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s young-adult novel with uplifting magic. Whereas individual moments might work on their own, however, the “Madeline’s Madeline” auteur’s latest never provides its romantic tale with room to breathe, so intent is it about operating with maximum whimsicality.

The film tackles its issues with a furrowed-brow solemnity that eventually spills into outright sluggishness.

It's somewhat surprising to find the filmmaker's sequel marked by such a lack of urgency. The action here seems dutiful, devoid of the indignation at criminal vileness that seethed below Outrage's surface.

A Yuletide misfire that lands like a lump of coal.

Rife with classic-cinema shoutouts, the film is a cutesy, toothless variation on "Mulholland Drive," one whose attempts to pay tribute to movie magic are ultimately undercut by stagey aesthetics and narrative theatricality.

Park's direction is sleek and assured, but lacking the dynamism that might help energize a film that—its title notwithstanding—comes off as dully old-school.

Most like-minded films spend approximately twenty minutes on the same material covered by the entirety of Come and Find Me — a fact that leaves this mystery from writer/director Zack Whedon (brother of Joss) feeling insufferably drawn out.

Any transformation feels like a device, and any modest hopefulness comes across as simply the unearned wishful thinking of the filmmaker.

The movie's infrequent martial-arts centerpieces deliver the feeblest of punches.

It's a saga whose clichéd corniness would be practically sinful if not for the mighty Gugino, who almost counteracts the material's pap with megawatt charm and steel-tough resolve - exemplified by a low-angled intro shot of the poised, strutting, tight-sweater-sexy actress.

Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.

As the seductive and conniving Angelica, Cruz is luminous, albeit not enough to compensate for Marshall shrouding virtually every major set piece in nighttime fogginess.

Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through this tepid buddy-cop action flick.

A prototypical example of talking, ceaselessly and crudely, at the audience.

The doc proves more concerned with promotion than analysis or inquiry, thereby making it a disingenuous non-fiction portrait: an inhibited look at an uninhibited event.

Writer-director Michael Mohan’s film plays like rehashed leftovers cooked up for young viewers who’ve never seen any of its superior inspirations.

The trouble is that Grovic's attempts to generate suspense by keeping character identities and motivations unknown leaves the proceedings feeling vague and slapdash.

More problematic than its lack of a compellingly laid-out time line is the film's habit of hopping between points of interest, so that every one of its chosen topics...is treated with a few catchy sound bites.

Conspiracies are everywhere in Poolman, although the greatest mystery might be how anyone involved was attracted to this tidal wave of dire kookiness.

Carano’s badass-beauty charm notwithstanding, it’s a grim, formulaic saga in desperate need of some genuine B-movie fury and flair.

Any grown-up’s desire for such material will be swiftly neutered by [the film], which despite boasting the participation of genuinely funny people like Will Ferrell, Jaime Foxx, Isla Fisher, and Randall Park is a mirthless mutt of a movie.

The repeated sight of people watching video monitors or communicating with others via laptops becomes a stilted, gimmicky affectation, and there are only so many times you can watch a camera panning and zooming over still photos before your tolerance for the Ken Burns effect reaches its limit.

So little occurs, and so little seems to be at stake, that the action takes on the quality of a tossed-off, not-especially-melodic country-music ditty.

Brody does his sturdiest work in years as the morally compromised Porter, and Strahovski makes for a fittingly seductive temptress with ambiguous motives. Manhattan Night's pedestrian style and affected atmosphere, however, make it a routine descent into the black heart of a city and its shady inhabitants.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

There’s plenty of preposterousness to be found in this sequel, which barely revs to life when indulging in automotive mayhem and outright stalls every time its human characters open their mouths.

So determined to avoid satisfying fans that it’s borderline antagonistic, as actively hostile to genre conventions as its protagonist is to the world at large.

The Offering leaves few horror devices unused.

Suffice it to say, life's too short for such self-indulgent glibness.

Tin-eared, corny attempt at fairy-tale interpretation.

Class, gender and ethnic issues get pushed to the sidelines in favor of rote who-will-win suspense; all that finger-crossing and Lucky Charms flavoring, however, doesn't keep Jig from being just another in a long line of nonfiction soft-shoe routines.

There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.

John Whitesell's extraordinarily witless movie operates as a checklist for cultural and racial clichés.

The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.

Carolla's stilted screen presence and groan-worthy zingers neuter any humor from Bruce's needy quest to return to the spotlight.

Despite the usual end-of-world crisis and Mount Olympus MVP characters, there’s no sense that anything’s truly at stake; rather, it feels as if the filmmakers are coasting on the fumes of teen-angst fantasy and making up their fairy-tale rules (Cyclopes are fireproof!) as they go along.

A late-act tragedy drenched in bloodlust slow-mo epitomizes the film's poseur bleakness, with its treatise on individual and institutional amorality sabotaged by broad-stroke characterizations and a knotty narrative too reliant on twin modern-day horror tropes: preposterous decision-making and lousy cell phone service.

A visually striking but shoddily written and crushingly derivative amalgam of assorted genre forefathers.

While following a typical rom-com pattern isn’t inherently unpleasant, the movie’s wink-wink insinuations that it’s going to take things in a novel direction, followed by its embrace of the very clichés it’s poked fun at, makes it feel disingenuous and stale.

Heart of Stone plays like reheated leftovers, its flavor familiar but diluted.

The photogenic cast's looks far exceed their featureless performances, and any mood of sunshiny malevolence is undercut by too many studied directorial compositions.

A dog in wolf's clothing, Lionsgate's drab, anthropomorphic animal saga does little more than reconfirm the preeminence of Pixar.