Sheila O'Malley

Southern wields the tropes in a stylistically over-determined way–jump-scares and all–which cheapens the delicate and poetic narrative.

If the characters aren’t three-dimensional and the plot is so predictable it creaks into motion by the five-minute mark. you haven’t done the work necessary to pull in your audience. You’ve got to give us something to hang our cowboy hats on.

Uppercut feels like it’s two different movies, or maybe two short films, jerry-rigged together into a feature.

Goldilocks and the Two Bears is probably supposed to be "provocative," "shocking," and "playful," the title being what it is. The film is none of these things.

Jeanne du Barry cares more about the love affair between two non-distinct people wearing exquisite clothes in stunning rooms than the reality that would sweep away those rooms, those clothes, and those people in just a few years' time.

Muzzle is filled with intriguing aspects not explored meaningfully. There are so many different threads, themes, and plots, even Scotch-taped together in the hopes it will come together. It doesn't.

The characters never take shape, not even as caricatures. There are elements of parody, but Operation Fortune is not broad enough to be a spoof. It's weirdly empty.

Baby Ruby operates at a high-pitched melodrama-horror level, and the constant frenzy becomes exhausting. The film's nerves become so frayed there's almost no feeling left in them; the terror is monotonous and repetitive.

Not enough happens in The Loneliest Boy in the World. There's not enough conflict. The film relies too heavily on cliche and hopes the audience won't notice.

My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?

It's a vast understatement to say that Vonda McIntyre's book deserved way better treatment than this.

Written and directed by Aharon Keshales, whose debut (2010's Rabies) was an attention-getting nail-biter, South of Heaven—with a couple of exceptions—is inert and unimaginative.

Unfortunately, The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

The timing of Oslo is less than ideal, current events being what they are. The framing, too, is blinkered and naïve.

Edward Hall’s new adaptation of Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit is so aggressively un-funny it might make audiences unfamiliar with the script's successful track record wonder why it was ever a success in the first place.

Lily James brings a refreshing straightforwardness to the role in the second half, as the character takes the reins of the situation, but has a difficult time convincing us in the first half that she is susceptible, cowed, in thrall.

I Am Woman is a start in the right direction. However, based on this film you might think that the most interesting thing about Reddy is that she married her manager who then got addicted to cocaine. It's a frustratingly shallow approach to a singer who deserves better.

There are some very funny bits here, but unfortunately the concept takes too long getting off the ground, leaving the first three-quarters of the movie floating in limbo, waiting for it to all make sense.

An awkward and mostly unpleasant hybrid of social critique and horror-comedy, detailing how this psycho kid decides to take the gloves off and become internet famous.

All I Can Say feels much longer than it actually is. Hoon struggled with addiction. He was arrested many times. It's a cautionary tale but one we've heard so many times before. Fans of Hoon will thrill to all of this footage. For others, it'll be a pretty tough haul.

Clichés are already shorthand, so when you shorthand the shorthand, assuming audiences will just take the leap into whatever "reality" you are trying to create, you end up with a cop-thriller like Darkness Falls: a bizarre series of cliché after cliché, with no real work done to fill in the blanks with complexity, nuance, or even basic human reality.

The main problem is: It's not actually clear what is appealing and/or interesting about any of these people.

It's not the movie's fault, per se, although Almost Love has problems other than being jarringly out of date with How We Live Now.

A wild whirlwind of a mess, without any coherence, without even a guiding principle.

Unfortunately, Mary's concept - and it's a good one! - doesn't blossom into the truly spooky, the truly eerie, even though it's given countless chances to do so.

The film is appalling from start to finish.

Does Girl work as a film? No. It does not.

Bohemian Rhapsody is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign.