Sarah Kurchak

Regardless of its seemingly admirable intent and ambition, The Laundromat is not a good film. It’s sloppy, and self-indulgent, and in no way worthy of the self-satisfaction it brings to its big conclusion. It’s not without its amusing moments and solid performances, but it is, in the end, a thoroughly frustrating and tedious experience.

Neither Todd Phillips’ hollow script nor his hey-check-this-shit-out direction offer much to work with, but Phoenix still manages to wring enough out of Fleck to make Joker almost work as a character study.

With its wacky space shit, off-kilter gore, creepy atmospherics, and hammy breakdown, most of which happen all at the same time, Colour Out of Space is, inarguably, one hell of a trip. It’s just not a trip that everyone is going to enjoy taking.

Halloween deserves credit for its efforts to balance old and new, for taking us back to Haddonfield in a way that isn’t purely for cheap nostalgia, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s something more that it could have been achieved.

Payne’s heart might have been in the right place with this one, but the execution feels flippant at best.

It doesn’t work on a purely aesthetic level or as a political statement, and the combination of the two goes together about as well as a mid-level Coens comedy and a morality play about racism masquerading as a thesis.

Fans of [Herzog's] unique style and humor will find much to enjoy in Salt and Fire, even if the film does lack some proper cohesion. Anyone who’s wavering in their critical affections, however, can easily use this as an example of what happens when a good artist buys into their own hype and mythology.

Lofty ideas of class, thwarted ambition, the superficiality of L.A. life, the nature of love, and the meaning of art are all explicitly addressed – and maybe discussed in a pretentious conversation or two – and then just as easily dropped, as if the simple act of naming themes is enough to establish their continued relevance in the film.

The film starts to risk adrenaline fatigue after the first hour.

It should be impossible to turn this kind of raw material into such an interminable slog, and yet somehow writer and director Marc Abraham...managed to do just that.