Scott Tobias

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.

Listen Up Philip doesn’t care to be liked. And in that, it deserves to be loved.

Edgerton may write himself out of the problem too easily, but at least the problem itself is fascinating to consider.

There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.

The shorts in The ABCs Of Death 2 are wholly forgettable, and leave the limits of the gimmicky conceit completely exposed.

The thrill of The Overnighters is in witnessing a heartrending payoff that could not be anticipated nor written—and, miraculously, closes the movie on a perfect irony.

The small grace of The Good Lie, from Monsieur Lazhar director Philippe Falardeau, is that it fully recognizes the problem of telling stories of black hardship through the prism of white charity, and does everything it can to avoid those pitfalls.

To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”

The impression left by Harmontown is that the podcast and the tour are feeding the beast, worsening a pathology that casts him as the “mayor” of whatever stage he happens to be occupying at the moment.

As it settles in, the thrilling chutzpah of The Blue Room’s opening salvo gets lost in the intricate curlicues of the plot, which take away much of its illicit rush.

Say this for The Equalizer: It gets the job done, and that job, to quote A Clockwork Orange, is delivering a little of the old ultra-violence.

Cullman and Grausman extend a lot of sympathy to this strange, lonely, sick man as he goes about his business. But perhaps he’d been better left alone.

By trying to have it both ways—goosing up black-market trafficking for cheap thrills, while posing as being sincere about a real global scourge—the film winds up stuck in the middle.

Without the landscape or the heroine expressing themselves particularly sharply, Tracks is just a taciturn young woman wandering through the desert for months. In other words, a slog.

Wingard’s direction is a robust throwback to the VHS gorefests of yore, but with a distinctly more modern slickness and snap, and he knows how to play around with the audience.

Stray Dogs evokes the whole of Tsai’s filmography, but also pays off his collaboration with Lee, who shows a side of himself that’s been hidden away for all these years.

Even allowing The Identical its premise, the reframing of the Elvis myth as a wholesome example of following God’s plan is not as inspirational as the film seems to believe. Rock fantasies are rarely this milquetoast.

German director David Wnendt and his co-writer, Claus Falkenberg, are determined to package one teenager’s unhygienic coming-of-age into a slick, funny, accessible romantic comedy. They mostly pull it off.