The Aviary experiences a drop in quality during its attempts to goose the audience, but its two lead performances remain consistent.

As a techie, I expected more from Creative Control.

Addicted is supposed to be erotica, so perhaps thinking about it too much is unfair, but the film is so uneven (it's both hot and preachy), as well as way too long, that thinking becomes inevitable.

It’s lucky that Klapisch has an actor as disarming as Duris playing Xavier, or else the character would be completely insufferable, never mind just intermittently so.

This thematic concern with disingenuous allies isn't subtly expressed, but it is compelling for a while, especially given the movie's high-concept premise.

Imagine eating a giant bag of Skittles, then throwing it all up in a fit of sugar-induced nausea and you’ll have some idea of what it feels like to sit through My Little Pony: The Movie.

Ricky Stanicky feels like a throwback, and not in a nostalgic fun way either. It’s more like a rehash of tired bits and jokes with nothing particularly innovative or clever to say.

Al Pacino's "Looking For Richard" grappled with the great challenge of the play itself, and that monster of a lead role. NOW: In the Wings of a World Stage feels self-congratulatory in comparison, a cast sharing its fun photo album of a year-long vacation in "exotic" locations.

With Rockaway, you don’t have to know all the details of Budion’s life—or have even seen “Stand By Me”—to get a strong feeling of what’s honest here, and what isn’t.

Nightlight is a perfect example of a film with interesting ideas that are totally smothered by poor execution.

Papi Chulo is a buddy comedy, but only by its ramshackle design — it’s a forced friendship, and it’s not cute, let alone funny.

One thing is certain: for all the strain the movie exerts, it never comes close to touching the hem of the writers it purports to depict. And it leaves the mystical and erotic dimensions of their lives and works far outside of its belabored vision.

There are times when what should be escapism approaches “Hostel” levels of viciousness, just one of the many issues with a film that seems incapable of settling on a tone.

It’s a dull, overly familiar affair that really only reminds one that Depp should have segued nicely into old man roles if his personal life and on-set behavior hadn’t derailed his trajectory.

If this mess is what they ended up with after erring with the best intentions, I feel bad for them. If this is actually the end result they were going for, I’d be inclined to use the legal system myself, to file an injunction against them ever getting near a soundstage again.

In writer/director Chad Faust’s Girl — a wobbly and desperately unimaginative mesh-up of contemporary noir and a Southern-fried tale of ancestral trouble — Thorne continues to broaden her range, serving up a quiet performance of emotional burden and impressive physicality.

And when the movie’s over, nothing is resolved that the filmmakers didn’t side-step or reduce to a few unconvincing symbols of hope for a more equitable future. You might like Enforcement if that’s a line you already want to buy; there’s otherwise not much here to change your mind.

If the characters aren’t three-dimensional and the plot is so predictable it creaks into motion by the five-minute mark. you haven’t done the work necessary to pull in your audience. You’ve got to give us something to hang our cowboy hats on.

I’m upset because he’s doing such cheesy wire work, and because the CGI effects he’s interacting with are so lame.

Jiu Jitsu is too disjointed and tame to be worth an impulse-rent; it's also too silly to be enjoyed with a straight face, and too lazy to be endearingly dopey.

The documentary is a hollow experience, emotionally stifled by its plotless nature and lack of any visual edge.

There’s nothing in “Ice Road: Vengeance” that isn’t in any given Redbox/Saban Films Neeson actioner you’ve seen in the last dozen years, and you’ll at least get to the good stuff quicker there.

On both levels of the film, the archival and the textual, there’s much that’s fascinating and worthwhile. What’s regrettable is the refusal to contextualize and explore the ongoing ramifications of what we see and hear.

Hand-in-hand with its bleeding-heart nature, Collide has the ballsy idea of making a serious action movie about a fool in love, but that just becomes one of its many bungled stunts.

When future generations of media scholars need an example of a work that gathered up and displayed with peerless skill all of the techniques yet devised for a new medium—in this case, second-screen entertainment, which superficially resembles cinema or television, but is meant not to make any demands on anybody—”Fountain of Youth” might be the work that they they name-check.

Tulip Fever reveals itself to be so nutty because it explicitly believes it’s not crazy, rambling through its odd events and obsessions without an ounce of 17th century kitsch.

Because even though I’d just seen the exact same movie my son had, I wasn’t sure I completely understood it, either.

But still! Even if Irresistible were released a year ago, when its face-down-on-the-bar, abandon-all-hope vibe would've made more sense, it would still be entering a pop culture landscape in which "Sorry to Bother You" and "The Death of Stalin" existed, and it would seem imaginatively as well as politically bereft in comparison.