The makeup is really all there is to look at—visually speaking, the film is aggressively uninteresting. But beyond all Dead Snow 2’s flaws, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it has undead soldiers in Soviet and Nazi uniforms straight-up swinging pickaxes at each other.

Lewins’ reductively humanist approach is at odds with how distanced the movie feels from any trace of a real human at its core.

Automata approximates the look and feel of idea-driven science fiction, but it doesn’t have any actual ideas. That future looks bleak.

The film’s aversion toward clichés and hitting expected beats lends it a rare, welcome edge of danger.

The film’s symbolism is never subtle, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

Sleeping Beauty is the most beautiful movie the Disney’s feature animation department has ever made.

Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.

The shorts in The ABCs Of Death 2 are wholly forgettable, and leave the limits of the gimmicky conceit completely exposed.

The thrill of The Overnighters is in witnessing a heartrending payoff that could not be anticipated nor written—and, miraculously, closes the movie on a perfect irony.

There’s a worthy sequel to a better-than-average horror film in here somewhere, but it’s buried underneath a wild goose chase that ultimately goes nowhere.

The main problem with Him is that it takes the form of a generic indie dramedy about a hard-luck dude, desperate for a turnaround in his personal and professional life... Him does have a few scattered moments of Her-like insight and vitality, though.

Her is such a well-drawn character sketch—with such a fantastic Chastain performance—that it practically justifies the whole experiment.

The film fictionalizes his life story so aggressively that it’s no less (or more) entertaining than the average rom-com.

A Good Marriage comes off as curiously flat for a movie about a woman who sleeps next to a murderer every night.

The dark, surreal animation unearths the personal side of the story: its nightmarish aspect and traumas. It elevates the film into a portrait of an unspeakable tragedy.

The film’s appeal is largely dependent on Cage; Left Behind is a batshit-crazy Cage cult classic of a radically new stripe.

The small grace of The Good Lie, from Monsieur Lazhar director Philippe Falardeau, is that it fully recognizes the problem of telling stories of black hardship through the prism of white charity, and does everything it can to avoid those pitfalls.

To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”

There’s real craftsmanship to the film, but it’s in service of a story that can’t quite support it.

A thin but pleasant documentary.

At best, The Liberator is a commendably old-fashioned affair that goes light on CGI backgrounds and heavy on dazzling scenery. At worst, it’s a reminder of all the extras-heavy would-be epics that got tossed on film history’s slag heap.

Hodierne’s intentions were unquestionably good—he spent years researching the short and feature, working with Somali non-pros—but he still managed to fall into the same trap as the other American films on this subject, focusing on individuals rather than group dynamics.

Lapa’s story is in the disconnect between the words and the visuals, or the visuals and what we know to be true, or even the words from one moment to the next.

This movie is so colorless, odorless, and (especially) tasteless, so devoid of mass or substance, that it’s easy to forget even while it’s still playing.

Gone Girl reveals itself as an optimal meeting of the minds, a perfect amalgam of a writer and a director with complementary fixations.

Neither Grossman’s uninspired staging nor the performances help much.

The impression left by Harmontown is that the podcast and the tour are feeding the beast, worsening a pathology that casts him as the “mayor” of whatever stage he happens to be occupying at the moment.

As it settles in, the thrilling chutzpah of The Blue Room’s opening salvo gets lost in the intricate curlicues of the plot, which take away much of its illicit rush.