The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.

Directed by an unimaginative Robert Zemeckis three years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, it uses Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones franchise as the template through which to bolster Douglas’s public machismo.

Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

Far from seeming like a strategic element created to define Lady Gaga's reinvention, the documentary instead feels like a natural outgrowth of it.

There's a Tarkovskian layer of social despair in the web of corruption joining the child and the adult, the bedroom and the nation.

Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.

Although the film never allows itself to be quite so freewheeling as Bozon’s earlier work, and pales as a result, one of its pleasures is how giddily it suggests its characters finding release from the bureaucratic rigmarole in minor though often inane ways.

In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.

This remake proffers the sort of cinematic nowhere place that's all too common of an increasingly corporate, globalized cinema.

The film's central theme, about where attention-starved narcissism leads when taken to extremes, isn't quite sufficient to sustain an entire feature.

Although Last Rampage's overarching narrative travels a well-tread road, it strikes a number of potent grace notes along the way.

The film advances that old Hollywood trope: Blacks can't get justice unless whites are willing to get it for them.

It's an exercise in joviality, unflinching in its love for Joan Didion, and unwilling to be much more.

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames.

For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.

It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.

The film's biggest problem is its inability to lend its clichés and tropes any dramatic thrust or satirical bite.

Perhaps the film's failure to surprise in the end is a result of leaning too heavily on a toolbox not yet translated into the language of cinematic form.

As effective as director Josie Rourke is at exposing the emotional and physical toll of reigning as queen when exploring Mary and Elizabeth's relationship, her portrait of an endless string of betrayals ends up as simply faceless and impersonal.

Sylvio's banal depictions of everyday loneliness through the diurnal tedium of an anthropomorphic animal brings to mind BoJack Horseman, but without the caustic navel-gazing and self-destruction or the mordant pop-culture musings.

Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.

Viswanathan, Newton, and Adlon generate a bit of chemistry throughout, but it's undermined by the fundamentally mechanistic nature of Brian and Jim Kehoe's screenplay, which ultimately forces these girls' experiences into neat little scenarios that are constructed every bit as didactically as a workplace training video.

Like so many shoot-‘em-up video games that repeatedly break for cutscenes, the film too often diffuses its tense energy by whipping up context.

Director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland can’t seem to figure out if Psycho II should resemble a film from the 1950s or the 1980s, so they split the difference, and the result is a bland, meandering movie with no real look or tone at all.

Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.

Initially offbeat, Bitch awkwardly pivots toward a more inspirational story of regret and reconciliation.

In Between is most affecting when its characters are at their least guarded, but as Nour, Salma, and Laila are hurt by those closest to them, Hamoud's film pulls back toward more formulaic expressions of conflict.

Despite its fascinating subject matter, Total Eclipse is both unflattering and loveless. Holland seems to care very little for the way Rimbaud and Verlaine’s crass relationship was channeled into words. Worse than DiCaprio’s accent are his and Thewlis’s ludicrous sex scenes.

By concentration exclusively on humanity’s negativism, Haneke proves to be as damagingly reductive of life’s possibilities as the emotional malaise he sets out to expose.

One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.

Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

If there isn’t a single element in the entire film that’s not derivative of the studio’s then-recent past, you can’t blame them for sticking with what worked best—business models-cum-creative habits conditioned by horsewhip die hard, if at all.

Dakota Fanning's Wendy is less a truly thought-through character than a compendium of quirks.

Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them, probably because addressing them could too quickly shut down the romance.

Novelty and Melissa McCarthy’s comedic chops only carry Life of the Party to midterms, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s a star vehicle without any engine.

At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.

Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.

Lost, or at least merely glossed over, throughout this hagiographic documentary portrait is the miraculous story of an effeminate Brazilian boy who was actually allowed to blossom through dance and who, because of such permission, has managed to survive his queer childhood a little more unscathed.

Though Kingsley’s saturnine poise is much more interesting in roles which call for varying degrees of slipperiness, he nevertheless manages to bring shades into the inherently monochromatic saintliness of the role with life-sized, profoundly felt gravity and dignity, all while executing that marvelous, peculiarly British trick (remember Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips) of seeming to age from within.

The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.

Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.

Laurie Simmons isn’t so much creating art as a means to explore cinema’s effect on identity as she is conducting an act of indulgence.

The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.

Bumblebee exudes some of the tediousness of a reformed sinner who decries hedonism, trying hard to convince us that it now believes in something.

The film goes through its motions too quickly for its imagery to convey the irrepressible force of provocation.

Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.

László Nemes’s follow-up to Son of Saul simply feels like two films awkwardly affixed to one another.

Even after the film (quite entertainingly) explains itself, it never feels like more than a howl of frustration and cynicism.

In writer-director Ari Aster's smugly agitating feature debut, the devil is certainly in the hackneyed details.

For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.

The film is loaded with inconsequential detours and questionable and inconsistent character psychology as it stumbles awkwardly to its foregone conclusion.

Amos Gitai regularly takes incidents and anecdotes out of context, making it difficult for viewers who lack intimate knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to follow the proceedings.

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

Director and co-writer Hannah Fidell's film never finds the right mix of meaningful parable and sophomoric romp.

There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.

As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.

Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.

The film buoyed by Kelly Macdonald, who's a master of understated vulnerability, but she can't steer it out of the doldrums.

Trapped inside its overwritten crime story is a breezy character study starring two men with genuine chemistry and a flair for both physical and verbal comedy. In the rare moments when Pryor and Wilder simply talk to each other, there’s the potential for a funny and poignant interracial two-hander like I’m Not Rappaport. It’s too bad that potential is squandered on a senseless murder plot.

This tentative questioning of the sometimes unscrupulous methods and deleterious consequences of political correctness is further undermined by Ted's insipid character and general indifference to his fate.

The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.

An incessant deluge of subplots drowns what could have been a sparse and beautiful ghost story.

It often plays like a toothless PR video designed to rehabilitate the Catholic Church's reputation in the wake of its global pedophilia scandal.

The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.

The film is subsumed by the unshakable sense that Jared Leto is intended to make Martin Zandvliet's take on the yakuza underworld more palatable for American audiences.

The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.

It’s been said that casting is 90% of directing, and it seems to be 90% of the writing in Bill Holderman's film.

Unlike the red balloon that Winnie the Pooh follows through much of the running time, Marc Forster's film lacks lightness.

The film is content to present Anton Chekhov's ideas rather than grapple with their provocative and complex subtexts.

Seriously, watching Angela (and to a lesser extent Ricky) being targeted throughout the film is like watching a group of shrill brats shooting rocks at a baby bird—if it wasn’t so obvious that everyone’s non-stop cruelty was in service of some big-reveal, or if the performances weren’t so damn preening, the film would be completely intolerable.

Anthony Bryne's high-flown style only serves to highlight the film's icky way of exploiting real-world tragedy for kicks.

The documentary's labored juxtapositions create fission, the feel of a director scrambling to dictate the game.

A Simple Favor haphazardly vacillates between suburban satire, goofy comedy, and dark, twisted psychological thriller. Which is to say that the film doesn't evince the seamlessness of presentation of its clearest antecedent: David Fincher's "Gone Girl."

The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.

While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.

Cargo makes the mistake of benching its menace, banishing the undead to blurred shots on the horizon, while doggedly pursuing its theme.

Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.

A mediocre, quasi-diverting B movie.

The film is good enough to redeem the bad taste that lingered from its predecessors but too uninspired to make one want more.

Though the film makes the important point that even the most liberal parents' acceptance of a child's difference may be repression by another name, it fails to excite sufficient sympathy for its broadly drawn principal characters.

The film seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.

Bong's debut is not all it could be, but any film that has a line as hilariously warped as "Jesus, that thing's hairy" deserves some recognition.

Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.

Right out of the gate, the film only sees a kind of blunt irony in this blurring of her public and private selves.

Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

Drake Doremus's compositions seem to be motivated by the idea that there’s no more profound image than sunlight reflecting off one-half of a character’s face.

As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.

Gene Stupnitsky’s Good Boys is Big Mouth for those who prefer ribald humor about tweenage sexuality in live action, though it lacks the Netflix show’s frankness and authenticity.

Onur Tukel’s film doesn’t live up to the promise of this fleet-footed opening.

A bald rehash of Jaws, only with the Moby Dick elements played up even further, Orca isn’t a cheap thrill (producer Dino Di Laurentiis was also the man behind the idiotic-but-exhilarating King Kong remake), but it sure does seem like it’s in a rush to finish.

The Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.

The film collapses on the crutch of hackneyed narration and constant music cues that formally undermine the ripe banter between Madelyn Deutch and her male co-stars.

It’s always clear who’s right and who’s wrong, which material interests each is representing, and who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

Lukas Dhont isn't really concerned with Lara's journey to find peace and balance, as he's interested only in her downward spiral of crisis.

The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.