Steve Macfarlane

The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.

The film is knowingly sarcastic in its self-awareness without falling back on the gawky meta-squealing of its American rom-com counterparts.

Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don't need to; if the short film is the arena of students, amateurs, and small-timers, then these are overdogs from frame one, coming off every bit as expensive and banal as their makers allow them to be.

The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence.

Noam Murro gives the film nothing so much as a hit-refresh on the same glistening, impossibly golden and gray flecks of pixel-barf that have invaded the frames of every tent-pole studio release since the Bush administration.

It's hard to tell if the film is hampered or helped by the performances of its three stars, because it's so amateurishly written and directed that their participation beggars belief.

Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.

An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.

The tension between verisimilitude and economy of storytelling dictates everything in All Eyez on Me.

Hollywood celebrities romping around in a candy-colored Alexa-shot criminal underworld, pretty much as a means of passing time.

If the glue holding Crash's arcs together was Paul Haggis's belief in the power of racism, this time it's love.

It will come as a surprise to none that Grudge Match is so wantonly clichéd that to watch it is to explore the outer perimeters of one's own tolerance for a specific type of feel-good sports film.

Robert Luketic's supposedly down-and-dirty corporate espionage thriller undercuts itself at nearly every turn by shunning any potential relevancy.

As characters endlessly digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, the film evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.

The film is like an episode of Gossip Girl that's mistaken itself for one of the great satires by Evelyn Waugh.

It adds up to a methodically bland, intellectually sluggish exercise in guilt-tripping that's nonetheless still more interested in its rich and sexy characters than the supposed unfortunates.

The movie adds up to little more than an interminable bildungsroman, sunk early and often by the desperately miscast Spencer Lofranco.

It culminates in a weepy climax that verifies its status as a proud hunk of propaganda from America's massive self-help industry.

This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as "workmanlike" when it's really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.

Uwe Boll's insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.

Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.