Peter Sobczynski

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

While I like the laid-back attitude the filmmakers apply to the theoretically devastating situation, it quickly becomes apparent that attitude is the only thing the film really has to offer to viewers. Although there are a few amusing moments here and there, the comedic situations are too droll for their own good and too often seem to waste potentially interesting ideas.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels is too vapid to work as a psychological drama, too silly to work as a passionate romance, and too tepid to work as a sexy guilty pleasure.

Even those who admired the “Raid” films for their style and heedlessness might find this to be little more than an accumulation of action movie cliches that they have seen enacted to much greater effect in other and certainly better films.

The young ones that this film is being aimed at are of the age when the movies can genuinely be magical, and the best ones can form memories that will last a lifetime. “Migration” may pass the time, but my guess is that those kids will retain more lasting memories of whatever their parents got for them at the concession stand than anything up there on the screen.

Hyena is such a nasty and brutish item that even the hardiest of moviegoers may find themselves repulsed by some of the sights that Johnson has in store.

Unlike a lot of comedians working these days, Iglesias is not particularly aggressive or vulgar--at least not as seen here--and the material that he covers is not particularly edgy or radical.

Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

What could have been a powerful, timely, and potentially funny meditation on the grieving process is instead a work that's about as thin and flavorless as a gum wrapper.

You always get the sense that you are watching a screenplay’s first draft that never got the fleshing-out that it clearly needed to make it stand out, either from a dramatic or emotional standpoint.

A largely tedious cinematic lump of coal that unsuccessfully tries to stretch its one-joke premise out to 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic.

The Tiger’s Apprentice is not an awful movie per se—some of the animation is striking and there are a couple of funny moments—but it is one of those frustrating exercises that seems to have assembled all the elements for a genuinely innovative film and then fails to make much of them.

Blood delivers plenty of the titular substance but not much else of note other than a couple of decent scenes here and there; a central performance from Michelle Monaghan is ultimately more interesting than the film surrounding it.

Brian De Palma is one of the great seducers of the cinema, and he proves it with Passion, a spellbinding thriller.

Its biggest crime is that the whole thing, in the end, is just kind of pointless, and doesn’t offer viewers anything that they haven’t already seen before and it's never as amusing or thought-provoking as it would like to be.

The film is a little too scattershot for its own good, which becomes especially frustrating when some of these detours actually come across as potentially being far more interesting than the central narrative thread.

Most of the rest of the film surrounding it is a conceptually weak and dramatically muddled mess that has acquired a game and good cast and then given them precious little to do.

The problem with “Deep Water” is not that it is a bad movie (which it is), but it’s a gratingly familiar one that doesn’t have a single point of interest to call its own. Instead, it prefers to spend two hours rehashing elements that even newbies to shark-based cinema will find devoid of any real inspiration.

Those not on the Deadpool bandwagon already will probably not be converted by this version and those who are fans may find it to be a vaguely interesting curio they'll watch once.

The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

The Quarry may be a slow burn from a dramatic standpoint but it is only when Shannon is around that it flickers, however briefly, to life.

The film has merit as a sprawling and effective work that combines the expected action beats with quieter, character-driven moments, and elements of pure weirdness to surprisingly strong effect. Even when it doesn’t quite work, and it's undeniably uneven at times, it at least has the good taste to offer up flaws borne of ambition instead of laziness.

Outlaw Posse doesn’t quite work in the end but there are enough moments of note scattered throughout it to let you forget that from time to time.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

47 Meters Down, despite a few things going for it, is an easily skippable work that will, ironically, probably wind up playing better on television and home video, where viewers might be more willing to overlook its failings

An often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between the United States and Mexico in which it is set.