Oliver Jones

The series’ trademark blend of character comedy and absurdist sight gags is in full display, served up with just the proper amount of postmodern self-awareness that adds to the fun rather than detracts from it.

Like a stack of silver dollar pancakes at IHOP, Bad Dads is more a collection of episodic situations — one at a school fundraiser, the next at a desert casino — rather than a traditional movie. It’s a structure that reinforces the feeling that you are watching a sitcom that has been fused together rather than a movie.

Rarely will you see a more soul-numbingly empty product of this tragic operation than Halloween Kills, a film that so completely sucks the vitality out of John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original vision that one would be tempted to call it a desecration if that didn’t make it sound like more fun than it actually is.

Without the grounding of richly drawn characters and burdened by ideas that reflect Pentagon policy papers of the late 1980s rather than our current world, Without Remorse has the feeling of product rather than cinema — just another polished, consumer-facing, slightly stale gizmo scooting down the virtual Amazon assembly line.

There’s little weight, not much style and even less sense to the psychological terror The Woman in the Window attempts to inflict.

The main issue is the script. The tale it tells is shopworn.

Yes, it’s a bit helter-skelter, but it is also an adequately enjoyable and untaxing way to kill off a couple of hours.

Trevorrow does not add one fresh idea to this franchise. We are simply too far along in this technological revolution to think that the computer generated creatures themselves are enough, no matter how artfully they are arranged.

Portman’s delicate and damaged portrayal is mesmerizing.

The truth is, the film represents a troubling trend in films today, where production and marketing types think they can get by providing shallow examples of things that are popular in the social justice zeitgeist — women being tough-as-nails lead characters, for example — and act like that’s enough. It’s not. Give us real characters; give us good writing; give us a compelling story. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The best thing about reviewing the new PG-13 horror movie The Turning is that you don’t have to worry about spoiling the ending because it doesn’t have one. It just, sort of, stops.

The movie spends the bulk of its largely inert runtime painfully unaware that it is an example of the self-indulgent narcissism it’s intended to send up.

Inheritance has not one iota of the thematic intensity of Bong’s film, nor any of the dynamic relationships that make Succession’s twists and turns impactful. Instead, there is nothing much on Inheritance’s mind, and the relationships end up as underdeveloped as the film’s cliché-ridden dialogue.

Phil is the only puppet character that registers at all, which is one of the countless ways that the movies falls short of the legacy it is meant to expand and subvert.

A sloppy, stupid, and — evidenced by other casual misappropriations of history at its darkest (Frederick Douglass was also part of this Transformers secret society but apparently couldn’t convince them to do anything about slavery)— quite possibly evil movie.

Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.

After awhile, Last Blood feels less like a new Rambo movie than the latest installment of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

What the film does effectively is revitalize Welles’ work by viewing it through the lens of media consolidation, government repression of art and leftist thinkers, and social justice.