Pat Brown

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.

The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

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

Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.

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.

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

The film misplaces the root of our current existential dilemma, then covers it with tepid droll comedy and clunky melodrama.

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

Matthias Schweighöfer’s film puts itself in a box, consistently failing to justify why its story deserves our attention more than the spectacle of the recently deceased rising to feast upon the flesh of the living.

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.

Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces shouting blandly melodramatic lines at each other.

It’s difficult to imagine a high-concept thriller that coalesces around its one-line conceit less convincingly than Awake.

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

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

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

The film is an uncanny reflection of the jingoism that Hollywood has been wrapping in glossy spectacle and exporting to foreign markets for decades.

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

The film’s unreflective earnestness is haunting in all the wrong ways.

The film presents its scattershot cop-movie tropes in earnest, as if, like hurricanes, they were natural, unavoidable phenomena.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The film diverts us away from its hint of a social message using a series of tired twists and turns that don’t signify much of anything.