Vince Mancini

The movie shouts things that should be subtext so loudly that what’s actually happening tends to get drowned out.

Beast feels slapdash and detached to the point of being disdainful. It offers the barest idea of a movie about Idris Elba fighting a lion and nothing more.

90% of the jokes in Me Time are just Kevin Hart doing an excessive act-out for a C+ bit, which will occasionally go on so long that they will, Baba Booey-like, circle around to being funny again through sheer commitment to tedium.

Usually when you overtly acknowledge the tropes and standard story beats in a movie like this, it’s for some purpose, some comment about what we like about or what it means to be a comic book movie. Samaritan is really none of that, it’s more like discount comic book movie slurry.

Shut In is boring, inconsistent, imbued with some kind of inscrutable code, and above all lazy, a perfect reflection of the rightwing media ecosystem.

Blacklight’s filmmakers seem to have spent a lot time trying to figure out why Neeson would have to bonk some heads, and not nearly enough time storyboarding and staging elaborate, gloriously executed head bonks.

Spencer treats Diana as if she was kidnapped into all this, being held against her will. It depicts her life as such a demeaning, excruciating, maddening spectacle that you wonder why she doesn’t just leave. That Diana was a prisoner is a perspective meant to flatter that actually flattens.

If Without Remorse has any value at all, it’s as a headscratcher. You know it doesn’t work, but what were they attempting here?

It’s a conceptual joke in search of actual jokes. Like a C- term paper delivered on time, the most impressive thing about Fatman is that it’s finished.

Dare To Dream delivers The Secret‘s philosophy in classic Nicholas Sparks movie format, complete with deferred scholarships, single mothers finding love, and copious Spanish moss.

From the very beginning of Angel Is Fallen, the camera is far too close to everyone’s faces while the frame jiggles slightly and parts of it cycle in and out of focus as if the action is happening down on the field and we’re watching it from the nosebleed seats through a telescope. Is this an artistic choice or a logistical compromise? Either way, it sucks.

Yesterday isn’t really about the Beatles. It isn’t about art, or career, or cultural context, or the music business, and it’s only about “love” inasmuch as Hallmark cards and McMansion word art are about love. It isn’t really about anything.

Double Tap isn’t a worthwhile sequel, especially after a decade, but it’s certainly a number two.

I can’t think of many less valuable experiences than sitting through some bored rich guy’s extended series of inside jokes and half-baked complaints about smartphones.

Gotti is technically inept, where every scene feels like a disconnected sizzle reel for a different movie than the previous one, but the fascinating thing it about is less what it fails to do than what it’s trying to do.

Even on a technical level Breaking In is shockingly inept.

If anything, the trouble with Wrinkle is that you never really get a sense of DuVernay’s personal touch. In fact, it feels a lot like Brad Bird’s big budget, equally smarmy 2015 Disney film, Tomorrowland. Both attempt to be so broad and universal that they feel disconnected from anything human.

Fifty Shades Freed is meant to make us believe that a matching tea towel marriage doesn’t preclude shirtless Fabio romance novel cover sex, but everything is so catalog-ready and scrubbed free of humanity that it actually does the opposite.

Historical analysis aside, even if you’d parachuted into the theater from the early aughts and knew nothing of politics or the future, 12 Strong still wouldn’t be very good. In fact, the closest thing it has to a redeeming quality is that you can hate it irrespective of politics; it’s objectively bad.