Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.

Like the recruited criminals themselves, the film longs to be bad, yet its forced by outside pressures to follow narrow, preset rules.

Akiyuki Shinbo and Nobuyuki Takeuchi's time-travel device mostly just exists to complicate what is, at heart, a trite and sexist love story.

Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first.

The film's unlikely combination of didacticism and sexy teen slaughter signals a booming trend: the Occupy horror flick.

Its stance toward every dipshit slasher and creature-horror flick that's come before it never feels less than casually hostile.

If your hook is the promise of seeing Jason Statham go mano a mano with prehistoric sea behemoths, then leaning into the ludicrous is the only way to go.

The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.

Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.

The filmmakers are content to idealize everyone's unchecked narcissism and idle privilege--an inquiry-free recipe for disaster in an age when the American wealth gap is wider and more detrimental than ever.

In the race to achieve unadulterated fourth-wall breakage, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is the new pack leader.

McG may strip down his approach and serve up a variety of slick, well-paced shoot-outs and car chases, but his technical skill can't quite overcome the story's lazy sense of humor and incomprehensible account of international espionage.

The whole endeavor feels like a disservice to Mark Hogancamp’s story, in no small part because no one in the film feels human, even outside doll form.

Its main character's transformation isn't significant enough to justify her complete redemption in the eyes of those around her.

The story allows for Ryan Phillippe to indulge in a self-deprecating brand of satire, but he can't work up enough courage to ever make his character--and, by extension, himself--the brunt of any of the film's barbs.

Todd Robinson's film is a third-rate submarine-set drama until, in its final moments, it sinks to fourth-rate.

A jump scare isn't just a jump scare in the films of Scott Derrickson, which isn't to say this wannabe master of horror has entirely perfected the art of sudden dread.

Nearly everything in Taylor Hackford's tin-eared comedy is as ersatz as the Robert De Diro character's rage is real.

An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.

Call me crazy-stupid, but locker-room anal sex aside, didn't Christina Aguilera just enact this scenario last fall in "Burlesque"?

Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.

It's content to be the sort of film parents can throw on an iPad to ensure 90 minutes' worth of relative peace and quiet away from their antic children.

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

After a while, the film's sing-a-song-for-the-world vibe, so buoyantly optimistic at first, becomes grating and smug.

A full realization of the very worst fears one could imagine when its director, James Wan, unexpectedly emerged from the torture-porn murk with its original, spiritedly directed predecessor.

Its openly mercenary ethos initially scan as a bracing lack of pretense in a market crammed to the gills with insidious faux-sentimentality, but its overstuffed relentlessness proves almost equally tedious.

Women deserve a better vehicle for demonstrating the power of female solidarity than this empty money grab.

The action-movie pyrotechnics succeed only at reinforcing Simon West's macho bona fides and condescendingly forcing Jason Statham back into his wheelhouse.

The film is so humorless and in love with its own obviousness that it grows laughable.

The film has absolutely no interest in the dilemmas or after-effects of war and occupation.

The film is ntermittently inventive in its visual and physical effects, but its politics are unthinking and obvious, a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum imbedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.

The material plays out like a particularly busy episode of Sons of Anarchy, possessing a peculiar joylessness that's anathema to the success of films like this.

The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.

Writer-director Andrew Renzi treats unfettered wealth as a hyperbolic playground through which to explore masculine insecurity.

At its best, Poltergeist III recalls that surreal mix of DIY ingenuity and narrative ineptitude that mark some of Lucio Fulci’s lesser efforts. At its worst, well, it’s just another soulless, hacky-tacky horror sequel.

The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.

Falling Overnight recalls some of the more annoying entries in the mumblecore subgenre that erroneously believe that every indiscriminate moment in a person's life is worthy of a film regardless of subtext.

The film doesn’t reset the Saw template in any marked way. It seems primed to explore the present-day fight against police brutality, but it never lives up to that promise.

It perverts cinephilia by asserting that anyone who engages in criticism actually, deep down, wants to be a practicing artist.

Following the faux-opiate flecked suit of docs like One Fast Move or I'm Gone, The Beat Hotel can't quite rise above its obvious desire to appeal to the former demographic in spite of their apparently limited patience for historical exegesis.

It's the film's unwillingness to deal with the sometimes hilarious and often problematic things its characters say and do that stands as one of its ultimate failings.

The action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés.

Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.

Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.

It's a story arc that wouldn't be out of place on Game of Thrones, except it lacks for the HBO program's dense and surprising dramatic reflexes.

Visually plain and ploddingly paced, My Little Pony: The Movie suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.

Martin Campbell, though a capable director of action (Hal's training session with the Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced Kilowog is proof of that), doesn't have a poet's instincts.

Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.

I'll tell you what's insane: the probability that folks will go easy on this dreck because it's aimed at younger viewers, who are being distressingly trained to expect little from their art.

This handsome mate-swapping drama never moves beyond the erotic to become incisive about the barriers built into sexual experimentation for committed couples.

The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.

The action merely meanders when it should be hurtling forward, running in circles when one expects it to head toward a conclusion or some sense of resolution.

Jacques Doillon's shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief, allowing stray moments to suddenly crystallize unexpressed yearnings.

The film is surprisingly amiable, thanks to the commitment of its lead actors and its refusal to condescend to its characters.

It wants for a keener vision of corrupted power, but at least Mora Stephens navigates her main character's sudden slew of infidelities without banalizing them.

Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

Even when compared to other films posing as Ford Mustang commercials, Need for Speed isn't particularly memorable for anything other than the startling incompetence and dull sheen of the end result.

One may wish that the entire film had restaged the entirely of Tchaikovsky's ballet rather than reimagine it as an ultimately lifeless epic fantasy.

Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.

It misfires in tone, depth, and political tact, dumbing down rather than providing new insights into the Israel-Palestine conflict.

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.

Throughout Queen of the Desert's narrative, there's no sense of danger, of texture, or even of a rudimentary idea of what's truly driving Gertrude Bell.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

There's plenty of gore, but none of it is particularly inventive, nor does it engender any visceral or emotional reactions beyond jaded disgust.

Intentionally or otherwise, Yusry Abd Halim allows the film, in all its candy-colored visuals and slow-mo-laden action scenes, to revel in its inherent campiness.

When it decides to sober up, the film’s comedy lurches into awkward attempts at melancholy.

Ian Softley is far too interested in the minutia of the plot to bother with the Chabrolian elements of bourgeois excess or the Hitchcockian themes of mistaken identity.

Here is all moments, some small and many big, but it’s lacking in gravitas, concerned as it is with tugging at our heartstrings by serving up little more than signifiers that we can project our own memories or personal baggage into.

Writer-director Jacob Gentry's film has the emotional fatuousness of uncertain softcore erotica.

Lee Daniels does such a good job investing us in the human drama of The Deliverance that it almost feels unnecessary when the supernatural elements inevitably take over in the final act.

The film is a mélange of tired normcore horror tropes indistinguishable from any film in the Conjuring universe.

The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, but the various detours coalesce into an amusing wannabe-cult curio.

From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.

The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.

The film ultimately boils down to people bludgeoning one another in unimaginative close-ups.

What’s self-worth in the 21st century without a dollar amount attached to it, and what value does UglyDolls have if kids aren’t walking out of the theater nagging their parents for toys of their favorite characters?

Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.

The film predictably alternates in scaring its characters by tapping into their deepest fears and having them rub shoulders with the relics of a past that insists on being undisturbed.

At this point in the franchise, Anderson is content to alight the saga on a perpetual rewind loop, ever-ending, ever-rebooting, all subsidized by his nonpareil compositional sense.

The lack of any visual ingenuity, reflexivity, or awareness of genre tropes diminishes the intermittent pleasures of the action's slightly involving kineticism.

The Apple is an Old Testament movie in more ways than one, and its relentless bad taste is sure to appeal to the same audience that won’t even realize they’re being slapped in the face.

Writer-director Tim Kirkman tries to peg depth of character on the character of Dean instead of having him earn it.

By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.

The film is clearly wary of either being too saccharine or taking itself--or the notion of compulsive infidelity--too seriously, though its schadenfreude is unwavering.

Relying on such arcane gags as prat falls in knight’s armor, fake French accents, and an array of gadget-based explosions, Johnny English Strikes Again seems almost hellbent on aiming for the lowest common denominator at every turn.

Sits awkwardly between shoot 'em up and psychological thriller without offering the excitement of either.

An ugly rendering of an infantile script that constantly exploits stereotypes for cheap guffaws, and employs the hollow trend of hoping ultra-specific, zeitgeisty lingo will distract from inert, derivative storytelling.

Ben Falcone's film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the bratty passivity of its titular antiheroine.

The optimism that Ella preserves as she takes life one day at a time is compelling enough that it’s hard to get too mad about how shallow the world around her can seem.

Johnny Depp’s perfunctory gestures and flailing pratfalls befit a film that brings the franchise’s theme-park roots full circle.

Complacent with road-movie tropes, director Ralf Huettner and screenwriter Florian David Fitz's Vincent Wants to Sea is likeable insofar as it's familiar.

The film works harder to fix the problems with its source material than to establish itself as an independent piece of art.

The film gradually reveals a lot of unsavory motives, which ultimately deflate the buoyant virtues on which the film had blithely coasted.

Drina is less of an individual, and one whom we wish to see avenged, than a transparent martyr for the collective sins of the wealthy few.

The beautiful game, as Pelé called football (or soccer to us Americans), has never felt like such a sedate slog.

There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.