Despite a premise that begets one of the strangest lovemaking scenes in recent memory—a quasi-incestuous gender-bending head-spinner—the film is too frequently the epitome of pretentiousness.

A raucous mélange of the demented and the degrading, indulging in the very garish, grotesque, X-rated madness it condemns.

Unfortunately the film is both overlong and underdeveloped.

Pulling on the heartstrings with tug-of-war-grade might, it’s a carpe diem fable that elicits more exasperated eye rolls than tears or laughs.

A rousing elegy to an underworld saga par excellence and, in particular, to a ruthless and tormented gangster whom, in Murphy’s expert hands, stands as an undisputed crime-fiction icon.

Exhibits a superficial interest in ribald revelry and yet, in most respects, neuters its wilder impulses.

Amusing, energetic, and just clever enough to sustain its brief runtime, it serves up a boisterous and bruising brand of B-movie bedlam.

On a comedic level, The Gutter is too quiet to be slapstick but too random to actually have an intelligent sense of humor.

Plays like a torturous tone-deaf joke that won’t end.

The amusing thrills intermittently appear, but the novelty is gone.

A rollicking tale of the inextricable bonds between life and art, and the value of ensuring that the latter remains preserved for future generations.

Capturing the pulse-pounding emotional whirlwind of its source material (and its characters), it’s a florid reimagining that’s at once bold, beautiful, and, at its peak, brilliant.

With very rare exceptions, it’s less entertaining than a year’s worth of marriage counseling.

Thanks to a host of colorful performances and an emphasis on over-the-top violence, they mostly pull off their double-dip trick.

In trying to have it both ways, it succeeds in neither, in the process stranding its charming leading man in a saga that needed to be either goofier or more gruesome.

A brutal buddy film pairing Affleck’s killer with his equally murderous brother, it locates the humor in its mayhem and, for it, proves a superior sequel in every respect.

It has one thing to say, and it says it over and over again with a dismal lack of nuance.

You can cut-and-paste all your adolescent obsessions into a giant collage (and recruit Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn to participate in the madness), but that doesn’t mean it’ll amount to more than a messy, insubstantial grab bag of your favorite things.

Snappy, sweet, and moving, this crowd-pleasing winner starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, and Callum Turner continues the genre’s much-needed revitalization.

By weighing everything so heavily, and obviously, in one direction, it eventually comes off as a thinly disguised sermon about ugly oppression and noble suffering and defiance.

A no-frills survival thriller that’s as rugged as its wilderness setting.

A deep dive into a pool of pretentiousness whose absurdity mounts with each new quasi-supernatural—and heavily symbolic—development.

So rote that even an A.I. wouldn’t dare try to pass it off as original.

Were it not for the participation of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it would be an insufferable groaner rather than merely an inoffensive one.

[Its] staginess is offset by their blistering investigation of morality, manipulation, individual and social responsibility, and masculine power.

Never dull if also only intermittently surprising, it’s another of the director’s sturdy star-studded genre efforts.

The Mean Girls movie-musical barely differentiates itself from its predecessor.

As self-contained as any episode of the television show upon which it’s based. It’s also as efficient and straightforward as that predecessor, if not quite as disposable, thanks to its peerless star.