Pat Brown

The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.

The film’s approach is completely subsumed by the importance of the Mayor Pete persona as the means and ends of the candidacy.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.

The film’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.

It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.

Expending so much energy anticipating our avenues of interpretation, Malcolm & Marie leaves us with little to interpret.

Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.

Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.

Artemis Fowl concocts an adventure that requires its privileged hero to go virtually nowhere, physically or emotionally. As if he ordered it on Instacart, conflict is simply dropped off on his front stoop, and all he has to do is throw on some shoes and sunglasses to pick it up.

Whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, the film is just another assembly-line reproduction.

The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.

The film’s outward liveliness can’t mask the inner inertia it has as just another lifeless product assembled in a factory.

Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.

After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.

The film wastes its charismatic leads in a parade of wacky CG creations whose occasional novelty is drowned out by its incessance.

Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.

The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

Transforming Ophelia’s abuser into a helpful co-conspirator hardly seems like the most daring feminist reading of Hamlet.

There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.

Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.

Throughout, the film can’t decide what attitude to strike toward its characters’ evident greed.

The film has a rather perfunctory feel, as if it were unwilling to go all in on its ludicrous concept.

Clarke works hard to make the messy, perpetually flustered Kate relatable, but the film surrounds the character with a community as kitschy and false as the trinkets she sells in Santa’s shop.

In transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product.

The film could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.

The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another Liam Neeson avenger defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men.