A (relatively) tasteful and restrained approach to potentially lurid subject matter isn't necessarily any better than one that gives in freely to what might be seen as a filmmaker's baser impulses.

The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.

Serial Mom is the strongest film of the post-midnight-movie chapter of John Waters’s career.

About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes

The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.

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

Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.

Writer-director Alanté Kavaité's film is a string of softly weaved pictorial metaphors steeped in reverie.

The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.

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

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.

Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.

As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.

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.

Everyone heals, or doesn't heal, on cue, and the initial pathos of the narrative is dulled by the architecture of its through lines.

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.

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

Alternating between self-consciously offbeat comedy and existential J-horror, It's Me, It's Me never quite satisfies in either mode.

Supposedly created as a showcase for Stratten (whose tragic death cast a pall over the film’s release), the picture instead offers a splendid ensemble, from Gazarra’s world-weary suavity and Ritter’s slapstick acuity to Hepburn’s autumnal grace and, above all, Colleen Camp’s marvelous blend of abrasion and snap. Indeed, the actress embodies the garrulous yet vulnerable charm of They All Laughed, which, for all the Hawksian ping-pong of the dialogue, is closer to the melodic élan of a Jacques Demy film, as wistful and fragile as a sand castle.

It’s as if by being confronted by new innovations that appear to have come straight out of a sci-fi film, Werner Herzog exercises his galaxy brain to see what we could be capable of a decade, even a century, from now.

The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.

The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.

This is an engaging, no-frills entertainment that still fails to justify its reason for being.

With none of the satisfying aesthetic appeal or narrative potency of the original, Dawn of the Nugget is happy to plod along as a functional joke vehicle fueled mostly by fond memories of its acclaimed predecessor.

The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.