Pat Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

There’s something very cheap at the core of this overtly, ostentatiously expensive film, reliant as it is on our memory of the original to accentuate every significant moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.