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.