Ross McIndoe

Ultimately, Richard LaGravenese’s rom-com is a little too packed with soul-searching speeches.

Without a compelling reason for us to care about the people inside the car, a reasonably diverting journey never accelerates into an outright thrill-ride.

As the plot progresses, the film appears increasingly adrift, discordantly sliding between farce, satire, and murder mystery.

A fumbled ending lets the air out of what is otherwise a fun and quietly stylish caper.

As Knox Goes Away motors steadily toward redemption and family reconciliation, it leaves all opportunity for real moral reckoning in its rearview mirror.

Blink Twice clearly has thoughts about the danger that men can pose and the way women are forced to perform happiness while in the company of such predators, but it never provides more than a surface-level understanding of such dynamics.

The film retreads ideas familiar from time-loop stories without offering anything especially new.

Nick Rowland’s film doesn’t seem to have faith in the story the novel tells.

A horror tale told from the perspective of a dog, Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is the sort of film that was always destined to live and die by the strength of its central gimmick.

Once the film turns into a paranoid home-invasion thriller, there’s no ambiguity left to the tale.

Atlas seems like a story that should have been experienced with a gamepad in hand.

There’s a thoughtful zombie tale with its own distinctive personality lurking somewhere within We Bury the Dead, but it’s overridden by the film’s more generic elements, and that identity ultimately gets lost among the horde.

For a film that’s so well versed not only in the genre but in its tendencies to recreate and recycle itself, it’s disappointing to see Faces of Death do so in such slavish fashion.

Benoît Delhomme’s 1960s-set directorial debut can’t decide whether it wants to be considered camp or not, awkwardly pitching itself between a somber drama and antic melodrama.

Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.

This is a historical drama with a handsome enough period setting and a couple of pleasant musical moments but whose roteness keeps it from resonating.

Swiped’s story sits right at the center of so many vital issues, and a smarter, braver rendition of it—that is, one interested in actually probing beneath the surface of things—might have yielded a film truly worthy of comparison to The Social Network. Instead, we get a piece of corporate hagiography that sweeps all those issues aside to celebrate another tech billionaire.

John Travolta’s scenes are islands of tranquility in a jittery sea of rote crime-movie pyrotechnics.

The film’s writing is the sort that begs you to find it cute and quirky, which makes it quite grating if you don’t.

Hunt Her, Kill Her simply isn’t tight enough to maintain the tension that it seeks to create.

This is an overtly political film that’s hesitant to express its own political views.

The film presents Amy Winehouse’s demise with a sad shrug, as one of those tragic things that just sort of happens.

Aside from the red stuff, the film is scarcely interested in what’s inside its characters.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

The film stumbles sluggishly from one chapter in Foreman’s life to the next.

As a WWE superstar, Cena is a perfect casting choice for a larger-than-life character like the formerly imaginary Ricky. He rattles off jokes with the boundless energy of a man used to spending three nights a week catapulting himself across a ring, and he’s completely at ease as the absolute center of attention.

The slower it moves, the more obvious One Spoon of Chocolate’s deficiencies become.