Nick Schager

Crave is nothing but empty movie-shout-out posturing.

Hardboiled noir play-acting doesn't get more sluggish than in this leaden tale that blurs the line between reality and delusion in a way that's less intriguing than simply confusing.

A few decent one-liners notwithstanding, the movie comes off as willfully uninspired.

A tiresome film that itself knows nothing but other rom-com plots.

While it may make the City of Light look beautiful, ultimately, this insufferable indie auteur's navel-gazer is just another faux-kinky vanity project in which its creator's neuroses are placed on an undeserved pedestal.

Without an amusing instinct in its cowboy-hatted head, this painfully protracted, puerile effort meanders about the Old West as if it were making up its nonsense on the fly. The result is a torturous genre joke that marks a new low not only for the star, but for the art of cinematic comedy.

It's a sloppy, tossed-off collection of parodic gags of vampire flicks and gratuitous pop-cultural references (oh, there will be pointless Lady Gaga gags!) that are below bottom-of-the-barrel.

Laced with white-savior undertones this vaguely “The Blind Side”-esque sports drama doesn’t bother investigating (if it recognizes them at all), Overcomer offers nothing in the way of nuance — even its title is awkward — and, also, no respite from its religious propagandizing.

All's Faire in Love's lackluster compositions and absence of rhythm are a perfect match for writer-director Scott Marshall's script (co-written with R.A. White and Jeffrey Ray Wine), which operates according to a Revenge of the Nerds-style us-versus-them template almost as stagnant as Ricci's phoned-in turn.

With horror altogether absent and a plot drowning in insipid convolutions, it's a film whose early warning to Heather should be heeded: "Don't go to Silent Hill."

Some of the chintziest and most uninspired exploitation cinema this side of Sharknado.

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.

The Offering leaves few horror devices unused.

As if written by a robot whose frame of reference wasn't human reality but merely fairy-tale romantic comedies, Love, Wedding, Marriage strips genre tropes down to their scrawny, brittle bones.

From the outset, Streitfeld hopscotches back and forth over her tale's 24 hours with a self-conscious aesthetic affectation (overlapping imagery, shifting camera speeds, elliptical edits) that demolishes any intelligible character or plot development, resulting in a story comprised of pretentious meditative fragments.

Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.

Armed Response has less story than your average first-person shooter video game — and far fewer moments of exciting action or nerve-wracking suspense as well.

It’s stale B-movie rubbish of a barely watchable sort, albeit slightly more depressing than many of its genre compatriots.

There's no more disposable type of comedy than the genre spoof, and no greater example of its general creative worthlessness than The Walking Deceased, an interminable 90-minute goof-off propped up by references to popular zombie-apocalypse fiction.

Just as dispiriting as its lack of scares (or sense of humor) is Septic Man’s lack of purpose -- devoid of any commentary, the film pointlessly wallows around in the muck, thereby making itself as valuable as those nasty things routinely flushed down the toilet.

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").

Loren's performance is as tonally off as the rest of Bergmann's jokey lark, which strings together characters and twists with amateurishly chaotic abandon.

Hickey's overarching arguments about war, diplomacy, and American intelligence aren't just muddled, but altogether nonexistent, leaving his comedically challenged film Iraqi-desert-level barren.

The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.

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

Shining an intimate light on an individual in order to reveal greater truths about life and the world, Raw Faith focuses on progressive-minded Portland, Oregon, Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.

For anyone hoping that Jean-Claude Van Damme's self-reflexive turn in Mabrouk El Mechri's postmodern JCVD heralded a new career direction for "The Muscles from Brussels," Assassination Games puts those dreams firmly to rest.

Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.

Writer-director Michael A. Nickles may momentarily shout out to Peeping Tom via a shot of its DVD, but Playback is merely a voyeurism-tinged horror film of dismal direct-to-video quality.

Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.

Olaizola pans across peeling building facades to subtly enhance her portrait of characters crumbling under the weight of self-destructive habits and solitude - a weight that might only be lifted through the selfless compassion of others.

For all its heavy-handed gloom and stylistic unevenness, Fear and Desire has a certain fierceness that's hard to shake.

Bluff's portrait of street life has a grungy off-the-cuff realism that's only compromised by some obviously staged incidents.

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.

For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.

An aesthetic showcase whose repetitive nature winds up diminishing the excitement of its breathtaking feats of mountainous flight.

Aiming to give teens everything they ostensibly like, and yet coming up with little more than a steaming pile of mash-up nonsense, Freaks of Nature proves a lifeless combination of alien invasion saga, zombie thriller, vampire romance and high-school drama.

Any initial, intriguing otherworldly atmosphere is negated by answers that are more pedestrian than terrifying.

Even at a lean 68 minutes, it's a vanity project that's the very definition of insufferable.

The real bogeyman is incomprehensible plotting in director Steven C. Miller's Under the Bed, which matches narrative incoherence with one of the most over-the-top portentous scores in horror-cinema history.

The latest—and perhaps dreariest—horror film to employ a found-footage conceit.

Snow Queen proves both visually cruddy and narratively muddled.

It's an over-the-top cautionary doc less convincing than the weight-loss ads on Facebook.

A cinematic doodle whose lack of ambition is both its most charming characteristic and its most limiting one, Pictures Of Superheroes operates in an absurdist universe where everything is abstracted in the silliest ways possible.

This trio of leads is so wooden, they make Mann’s hysterically over-the-top villainy seem refreshingly energetic by comparison.

Short and sweet, it's an empathetic and affecting tribute to the great — and vital — artists who all too rarely receive a center-stage encore.

Rose’s film is just another formulaic found-footage throwaway, notable only for its wannabe-porno sensationalism, replete with a climactic money shot that’s simultaneously graphic and underwhelming.

Content to stay on the surface, it's a puff piece posing as a real documentary.

Eric Lavaine's midlife-crisis dramedy piles on dreary subplots involving Antoine's grating pals and their one-dimensional romantic and/or financial problems, but his material is unfunny and superficial to the point of inertia.

No amount of industry-jargon blather and flashback-fractured plotting, however, can mask the wholesale phoniness and overpowering lethargy of this dreary drama.

O'Brien's slow-motion-heavy staging is graceless, and his script is twice as unwieldy. With characters stuffed full of clichéd platitudes about fate, love, honor, and other topics the film isn't capable of addressing in any mature way, it's a fiasco of frontier-wide proportions.

Lino Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment channels its melodrama through the filter of neorealism.

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.

This ungainly B movie makes virtually no sense in terms of either mythology or basic plotting.

The film so diligently eschews any tempered analysis that it eventually comes across as akin to the very thing it's decrying.

Bazodee itself dutifully hews to convention, but its plotting is so torpid that it never feels as if there are any genuine stakes to the protagonist’s which-beau-should-I-choose predicament.

With characters who range from mildly aggravating to out-and-out intolerable, and revolving around a game whose outcome is of no meaningful consequence, this underdogs-make-good fairy tale is a dramatic and comic rainout.

The pitfall of a tantalizing set-up is that it requires a sterling payoff to match — a recipe for disappointment born out by Rebirth, whose premise-establishing early passages lead only to underwhelming revelations.

Writer-director Brett Allen Smith’s quasi-romance meanders about with the same aimlessness as its characters, revealing nothing substantial about them, or twentysomething love and identity formation.

The director posits that the world is now shaped by clandestine arms deals conducted, often illegally, by the U.S. and Great Britain, but Shadow World sells its argument about the West's criminality not with reporting but through paranoid propaganda.

The underlying point of this elaborate stunt is that modern audiences are all too willing to believe (and be manipulated by) anything sold in a familiar nonfiction package. No matter how valid that theory might be, there are surely more compelling ways to offer it than via a one-note, 88-minute-long joke.

Alongside electricity and clean drinking water, one of the casualties of Go North's Armageddon was artistic inspiration.

The film proves a rousing, and ravishing, call-to-engineering-arms for future generations.

Unavoidably, this sequel is, for all its majestic beauty, somewhat less awe-inspiring than its revelatory predecessor. Once again boasting narration from Morgan Freeman, the doc has a gracefulness and understated profundity that’ll naturally appeal to those who loved the first film.

House of Z captures the way in which direct hands-on engagement is vital to an artist’s continued relevance, and vitality.

Compounding the action’s lack of originality are both the amateurishness of every performance and the wobbly-camera aesthetics. Worse, though, is the wholesale absence of any political point of view on its immigrant-horror-story subject matter, leaving the film feeling like the thinnest type of retread.

Crowther’s courage and sacrifice deserves lionization, and comes shining through in Man with Red Bandana, but there’s no shaking the feeling that he also merits a more elegant cinematic celebration.

It’s a worthy tribute bound to illuminate and inspire.

The horror film of 2017 is AlphaGo, a documentary about an artificial intelligence program designed to play Go – the oldest and most complex board game in the world – that feels like it’s sounding the alarm for the human race’s impending extinction.

As amateurish as its 1990-grade VHS title graphics, Surviving Peace is possibly the clunkiest — and most one-sided — film ever made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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.

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.

A time-traveler becomes fragmented in disastrous ways, and so too does the film itself, in “7 Splinters in Time,” edited to ribbons in a schizoid manner that likely only makes complete sense to its maker.

Robert Scott Wildes’ directorial debut is the sort of out-of-control whatsit that spins about like a decapitated chicken in its spastic death throes.

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.

By consigning its most interesting character to a supporting role, this amiable slice of fictionalized history loses a good deal of its heft. Nonetheless, solid direction and a charming Berkeley turn help it stave off insubstantiality.

dreary...Bright, crude and aggressively hackneyed, director Nacho G. Velilla’s follow-up prizes energy over originality. While its humor elicits far more eye-rolls than laughs — and will thus leave franchise newbies cold — its high-octane style should appeal to fans of the first film.

Despite having characters incessantly explain key plot points, Separation lacks basic logic.

Handsomely mounted and deftly dramatized, it’s an agonized study of suffering and treachery, and no less valuable — or powerful — for being regrettably familiar.

What it reveals is an exclusionary environment that views beauty, wealth, privilege, and conformity as the highest of ideals—and which seems, in some cases, to exacerbate the very problems these young women believe it will solve.

The Gullspång Miracle is a cinematic Matryoshka doll, and director Fredriksson recounts her layered saga with an intimacy that can be downright awkward.

Without greater context, though, Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case comes across as slight, and that notion is reinforced by a finale that draws no meaningful lessons from its tragic saga.

Prepare to bang your head and raise your horns to what is surely the most epically metal release of 2023—and a satisfying conclusion to a gonzo parody par excellence.

As an authorized project primarily designed to celebrate rather than investigate, that hatred goes largely unexamined in this non-fiction affair.

An affectionate portrait of Chelly as a one-of-a-kind trailblazer who lived life to the fullest, and always on her own iconoclastic terms, all while also providing a vivid snapshot of New York City during its daring and dangerous pre-sanitized era.

The Devil on Trial still allows David and others to argue that demonic possession did take place, but given the evidence on display, many will likely find that up for considerable debate.

A gut-wrenching saga about illuminating the darkest corners of private lives, and about the difficulty—and perhaps unjustness—of genuine Christian forgiveness.

Too much of Realm of Satan comes off as unreasonably poe-faced, which not only neuters the proceedings’ sense of giddy transgression but feels at odds with these characters’ comical bizarreness.

Love Machina’s scattershot structure does its subjects no favors, with the film taking a variety of meandering detours until its overarching purpose grows hazy.

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

They Called Him Mostly Harmless proves most interesting as a story about the various ways in which people both come together and go it alone in order to fill (or at least cope with) the holes in their lives.

Even in a crowded true-crime field, it’s something of a doozy.

[An] overly dramatic and revelation-lite feature-length documentary, whose main purpose seems to be rehashing that which has already been exhaustively covered by the media and, also, underscoring the sociopathic dishonesty of Joran van der Sloot.

Full of the very thrills one might expect from a summer blockbuster.

A documentary that not only formally resembles a conspiracy-minded YouTube post, but is about as reliable and convincing as one.

Cares less about saying something significant than about imparting quirky vibes.

Destined—depending on one’s perspective on this matter—to inspire either heartfelt sympathy or blood-boiling outrage.

A morass of the worst of humanity and, also, a tech industry that seems perfectly comfortable profiting from it.

A 21st-century cautionary tale about the desire for fame and the platforms which make that dream seem so easily attainable.

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.

Flails in trying to cast itself as a heartening story about seizing happiness, but as a snapshot of the foolhardy acts that amour can drive sane individuals to commit, it plays as an eye-opening cautionary tale.

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.

A non-fiction affirmation of Carville’s belief that you can’t affect change without power, and you can’t attain power without winning.

A harrowing documentary recap of Brown’s unseemly track record with women.