The whole experience feels like a generic inventory of recognizable tropes—the possessed child, the creepy old woman, the deeply-concerned priests, and the Ouija board are all here. Except, the cumulative fear bizarrely fizzles before it reaches something significant or emotionally meaningful.

A crashing disappointment, even if you haven't seen director Masaaki Yuasa's relatively inspired and completely unpredictable 2004 anti-coming-of-age fantasy "Mind Game."

The limitations of Palansky and co-writer Mike Vukadinovich's shared vision are, realistically, the biggest problem with Rememory.

This is a film that so blatantly cribs from other popular works that it never develops a personality of its own.

For a while Pearce does a very clever balancing act, taking everyday unpleasantries and grotesqueries of life and exaggerating them just so.

A terrific cast can only do so much with superficial, maudlin material in the coming-of-age dramedy Wildflower.

A plainly affable romantic comedy that’s not too powerful with its romance, and certainly not its comedy.

Writer/director Camille Griffin’s feature filmmaking debut is an ambitious but muddled mix of Christmas comedy and apocalyptic drama.

Every movie, even a remake, deserves to be viewed on its own merits. But that’s easier stated than done when you have a film like Downhill, a largely inferior American knockoff that's far less dynamic than the 2014 dark comedy it's based on.

While there’s a bit of hero worship going on that deflates the piece, and Wain’s direction is surprisingly uninspired, the biggest problem is the script that tries to cover too much ground but doesn’t really have that much to say as it does so.

There’s no question that Islamophobia is also on the rise around the globe, and this film — however inadvertently and well-intentioned — plays directly into it.

The result is a promising film that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, like a meal well-presented on the plate that just doesn’t fill you up.

An impressive team comes together in front of the camera and behind the scenes for the heist thriller Triple Frontier, but the results are frustratingly uneven.

It’s structurally awkward, jumping around in time needlessly and sometimes confusingly, rendering Nureyev’s story weirdly inert until the final 20-30 minutes.

While Clown is far from the disastrous misfire that typically stains VOD horror movies (most range from awful to “I never want to see a movie again”), it comes apart about halfway through, losing a very difficult tonal balance. Having said that, there’s more to like here than the studio burial would have you believe.

Take an ordinary family in the Hollywood Hills and throw both a wildfire and a menacing pack of killing machines at them and you have “Coyotes,” a movie that frustrates more than it thrills, never quite finding the right tone for the most harrowing night in the lives of its characters.

Quivoron, who co-wrote Rodeo with Buresi, often switches gears between character study and a heist movie, creating an uneasy whiplash.

It's more of an affectionate spoof on 1980's "summer camp" slasher films.

It’s a movie that's constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. A few big things too.

The Great Buddha+ is one of those movies that's much more rewarding to think about than it is to watch.

The Odyssey is one of my favorite stories of all time, and I was looking forward to "The Return," but it never rises above the level of an honorable but misguided good try.

Finley deserves credit for adding extra wrinkles to Anderson’s story, but Landscape with Invisible Hand doesn’t cut deep enough to leave a mark.

At a time when it seems like women’s representation seems to be regressing, the intention of the film feels more timely now than when the film ends in 2019, before the pandemic, and the fondness for dating apps starts to wear off. But it was the user experience of the film—where its simplistic narrative design leaves no surprises and plenty of shallow characters—that felt unsatisfying.

The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

There’s a big meaning to all of this, and yet the movie can’t eloquently express it, even though the metaphor is in the title.

Even as it’s spinning through enjoyably goofy action set pieces, most of them enlivened greatly by a fun performance from Jason Momoa, there’s a desperate familiarity to the entirety of “Fast X” that makes it feel more like reheated leftovers than this series has before.

They’ve shared home movies previously, but this documentary—meaningful in concept, but fleeting in its expression—puts them in close-up, with Gainsbourg behind the camera in her debut.

The Dancer clearly needed a better task master behind the camera. There are too many scenes of Fuller physically and mentally suffering for her art as she questions if what she does actually qualifies as dance.