Sherilyn Connelly

The story is serviceable enough.

As compelling as an individual thread or scene might be, the picture as a whole lacks forward momentum, as is often the case with films with asynchronous timelines.

Only Yesterday it ain't, and you probably already know whether One Piece Film: Gold will make you ecstatic or not.

Though Pollak's direction in his first narrative feature is solid, The Late Bloomer is mostly an excuse for predictable sex jokes and ample toplessness.

Bad Johnson is probably the most thoughtful movie possible about a penis that takes human form.

In the end, Right Now, Wrong Then is a two-piece puzzle that's less than the sum of its parts.

Southern Baptist Sissies might have benefited from some judicious editing.

Fabienne Berthaud's Sky is a road movie that never quite makes the right turns.

It’s still worth watching at least once, just to see what can go wrong when funny people aren’t allowed to be funny.

Mamoru Hosoda's The Boy and the Beast works with many common anime tropes but doesn't find anything new to say about them.

As is to be expected from Green in his pensive mode, there are lovely images in Manglehorn... But Manglehorn is also the latest entry into the tiresome Sad Man Learning to Love Again genre.

The final revelation of the big secret that haunts the family -- hinted at throughout the movie -- is more than a little maudlin, and the dedication feels like nothing so much as ass covering. Until then, After is a frequently absorbing miserablist family drama shot in appropriately chilly winter tones.

Craig William Macneill's The Boy tries so hard to be ominous that it nearly strains itself in the process.

There are some scary moments among the slapstick, and the picture surprisingly doesn't pull its punches during its Harry and the Hendersons–style denouement, but Monster Hunt is hindered by its overlong running time and often mawkish sentimentality.

The tepid Jackie & Ryan's only real strength is its supporting cast.

In Stereo is not without its merits, but it doesn't really get going until the last ten minutes, which play like the opening of a movie that would be much more interesting than the one that preceded them.

While it has its moments, Miguel Arteta's comedy relies too much on gender-shaming and emasculation jokes.

Tiger & Bunny: The Rising indulges in homosexual stereotypes that would have been regressive in the 1980s, let alone in a spin-off of a 2011 television series, and it's a damn shame.

Where Your Name’s star-crossed protagonists were fully formed characters who held equal weight in the narrative, Fireworks is very much told from the male point of view, and Nazuna seldom rises above “free-spirited object of desire.”

It's either much smarter and more profound than it's letting on, or it doesn't add up to anything at all. Or maybe both — it's all relative.

The soapy material is at odds with the largely distant catastrophe, which often feels too abstract to be a real threat.

Life of a King isn't setting out to reinvent cinema, or even a genre, but rather just to be a moderately uplifting tale that makes watching chess interesting.

It may be a low bar, but Michael Tiddes's A Haunted House 2 is actually an improvement over its predecessor.

While it doesn't quite encompass everything, the film's still a bit too busy for its own good.

The film's tone is all over the map, with weird bursts of casual racism toward its ethnic supporting cast and unnecessarily explicit sex scenes that approach a The Room level of ickiness.

There's little in Slugterra: Return of the Elementals to interest nonfans of the show, and the sheer laziness would be more forgivable if not for the equally lazy use of broad ethnic stereotypes. But at least it's over in an hour.

The original Brothers Grimm stories were hardly feminist, but The Seventh Dwarf's female characters are deplorably retrograde on both the script and design levels; they have little to do except be rescued, and Snow White is a vain, buxom sexpot whom the dwarfs leer at.

Drake Doremus's Breathe In is a star-crossed romance where your enjoyment level will depend on your tolerance for what feels an awful lot like potential statutory rape.