Pat Brown

The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.

The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.

Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.

It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.

Gene Stupnitsky’s Good Boys is Big Mouth for those who prefer ribald humor about tweenage sexuality in live action, though it lacks the Netflix show’s frankness and authenticity.

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

Like a traumatized psyche, it remains uncomfortably stuck in the past, replaying familiar events in an effort to empty them of terror.

Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.

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

While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.

After a while, the film’s not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of “gritty” realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality.

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.

Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.

Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.

Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.

It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.

Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.

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.

It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.

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

Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.

The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.

As it proceeds through a series of teary reconciliations in the last half-hour of its 110-minute run time, the film's didactic drama begins to grate, its treacly emotions feeling increasingly unearned.