Steven Scaife

The film isn’t designed to challenge what you think you know about the Church of Satan.

Whenever Mayhem! makes any attempt at character building, it feels as if we’re watching a trashy DTV movie, and as a result reveals itself as a run-of-the-mill revenge flick that practically crawls toward its preordained destination.

In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.

Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.

Perpetrator cycles through characters and settings at a considerable clip, never stopping long enough to flesh them out beyond an outline.

Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.

There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.

The film defaults to the most pedestrian narrative turns imaginable when it’s not just recycling bits from the series.

Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Christopher Smith’s own prior work.

The film provides no space to explore its relationships, and as a result there’s little friction to the climax.

The film has the knowing swagger of something on the cutting edge but none of the self-awareness to realize it’s late to the party.

The film’s characters hardly possess a sense of a history or an interior life to adequately convey racism’s psychic toll.

Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.

For all of its ostensible thoughtfulness, in trying to describe “real art,” Random Acts of Violence ultimately doesn’t describe anything at all.

The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.

Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.

Nicolas Pesce evincing little of the promise he showed in his prior films, and even less drive to remake the old into something new.

The film gets so lost in its affected idiosyncrasies that it stops probing any discernible human feelings.