It would have been interesting to see a better version of a working class “Eat Pray Love” or “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” that swaps thrilling destinations outside the U.S. for a bus ticket somewhere in the States to reconnect with who you are. Juanita feels like an approximation of this experience.

The Wandering Soap Opera also sometimes feels like it was made by a filmmaker who doesn't understand where he is anymore. That mixture of excitement, confusion, and terror defines all six of the movie's vignettes.

Its greatest value is probably in how it could educate budding movie-lovers on cheesy and predictable storytelling, but even that seems like a lesson Rim of the World cynically teaches at an elementary level.

Davis’ dialogue remains clunky and he never misses an opportunity to punctuate every feel-good moment with overwhelming, swelling music. He draws stiff performances from most of his actors, whose interactions are often painfully awkward. And as was the case with the original film, the structure is predictably episodic.

The Hong Kong Triad mob thriller The White Storm 2: Drug Lords is a cynic’s delight, though often not in the ways you might expect. As a message movie, The White Storm 2 is pretty toothless.

Most of the jokes in Tone-Deaf are variations on this gag: Harvey is a sentient fossil while Olive is an entitled brat. “Fine People On Both Sides” might have been a more apt title for this dud.

Falling Inn Love may look and sound like a lot of other movies, but you could never confuse it for being dishonest.

With a running time clocking in just over two hours, Promise at Dawn often plays like a truncated miniseries, with scenes moving along too quickly for their emotional peaks and valleys to reach their fullest expression.

The end of Eli subverts the majority of Eli, making it kind of like a cheap game. It’s not as damaging as the ridiculous final scene of “Fractured,” but I was left with a similar bad taste in my mouth.

For fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mountaintop is pretty much a must-see—it gives them a chance to see their heroes at work in a raw and unfiltered manner, and the fact that the Colorado album is Young’s strongest collection of new songs since Psychedelic Pill is certainly a sweetener to the deal. Those who cannot stand their sound, on the other hand, are not likely to be won over.

It’s easy to see why even Blum wanted to forget The Gallows: Act II. It may be his company’s worst film.

Typically reliable actors like David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan can only do so much when they’re given so little to work with on the page.

Kenny Sailors may have invented the jump shot, but the film about him pays him a great honor by being about so much more.

Through its images of peaceful protests and demonstrations from the era, McDonough's narrow but inspiring film finds deeper relevance in the face of the current protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder.

Mighty Oak is clumsy when presenting its darkest stuff, and can't balance that with its sporadic attempts at broad humor.

It fails to rise above certain clichés, dulled further by stiff performances and a clumsy handle on the movie’s interwoven time periods.

In the case of Merland Hoxha’s The Departure, my first note was “why does this movie exist?” An hour and change later when the credits rolled, I still couldn’t answer my own question. My best guess to explain this vile movie is that it’s based on some nasty relationship drama, and we’re all invited to watch Hoxha work his way through some still-lingering resentment.

There’s something eerie, and sometimes even dreadful at the heart of The Soul Collector, a new South African horror movie about the damage done by hungry ghosts and their ignorant descendants. Mostly because The Soul Collector often suggests more than its streamlined plot and mythology can express.

Clichés are already shorthand, so when you shorthand the shorthand, assuming audiences will just take the leap into whatever "reality" you are trying to create, you end up with a cop-thriller like Darkness Falls: a bizarre series of cliché after cliché, with no real work done to fill in the blanks with complexity, nuance, or even basic human reality.

A wholesome fantasy built of serene settings and cute animals is more fun when it gets a little wacky, and thankfully A Whisker Away has some left-field ideas to make the tale more magical as it goes along.

I’m still shocked that Followed is as funny as it is given that Mike is as obnoxious as you might expect given his very online, anything-for-the-lulz persona. He’s a cartoonishly loud, entitled millennial who never stops reminding us that he only cares about the sound of his own voice. He’s also sometimes unintentionally hysterical?

Any degree of sleaze requires a little wit, and Yummy has none. As it struggles to be even mildly significant in the sprawling history of zombie stories, it eventually leaves viewers with a movie that's just plainly ugly.

Yet while the doc might prove that his approach worked, it’s progressively tedious to revisit these hits through such a thick air of self-affirmation.

Guest Artist feels like a typical one-act, intelligent but not especially distinctive or compelling.

This is a movie so strange, bizarre and so unclassifiable that as soon as I was done watching it, I contacted my editor to see if deploying the phrase “batshit crazy” would be acceptable.

Kevin Tran’s The Dark End of the Street is a warm, modest film all around—its ambitions, filmmaking, and especially pacing.

Nowadays it seems when European filmmakers want to make pictures in North America, it’s always some gritty backwoods blood-drenched drama or thriller. Same with young actors like the Fiennes fella wanting to play black-eyed scruffy snotty miscreants. Is this some wayward pursuit of a kind of authenticity? Because what it is, ultimately, no matter how much competence is brought to bear to such exercises, tiresome.

I have to admit: the wrap up got me good, enough to make me admire Facinelli’s ambition and handling of mechanics.