Pat Brown

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.

At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.

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

Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.

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.

At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.

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.

The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.

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.

Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.

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

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

More than its violence, the film is defined by its vileness, its straight-faced attachment to outmoded ideas about masculinity and law enforcement.

The Woman in the Window never manages to transcend the impression that it’s merely being clever.

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

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

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

The film could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort.

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

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

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.