Unfortunately, this effort, clearly inspired by the French classic The Wages of Fear (and its terrific American remake, Sorcerer), isn’t even as entertaining as a typical episode of the History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers.

A throw-everything-against-the-wall collection of silly jokes that reimagines American history as a bro-tastic action flick, Matt Thompson’s animated film makes Drunk History look like a Ken Burns production.

Directed with a workmanlike lack of style by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and written by Kevin A. Rice without the required ambiguities to feed the protagonist’s paranoia, this pedestrian wrong-place-wrong-time manhunt through Greece never really sparks. And the jury that’s still out over whether John David Washington is movie-star material gets shaky evidence to support that case.

Bad cop crosses paths with even badder hit woman in the stylistic but ultimately unsatisfying"Romeo Is Bleeding. Gary Oldman's gritty lead performance is not enough to save writer Hilary Henkin's modern-day noir fable from shooting itself in the foot. [4 Feb 1994]

The lack of light irony, refined humor and spontaneity and freshness in the dialogue makes the film feel much more heavy-handed than a tale like this should be. For most of the nearly three-hour running time, it all plays as droningly serious, which makes the already long film feel much longer.

Perhaps it is precisely Dumont’s point that satire and the real world have been converging for a long time, but this alone is not enough insight to sustain a movie that’s over two hours long and contains a protagonist few will warm to. for such a high-powered auteur/leading-lady collaboration, France feels decidedly unspectacular.

The film’s mimicry might be deft enough to pass muster here and there. But it doesn’t take an eagle eye to notice that Kate‘s got few ideas of its own.

One in a Thousand’s lack of narrative focus and conflict results in a drawn-out, almost non-rhythm that at least mirrors the lazy summer days it depicts.

The crime comedy ends not as a fat stack of jokes but a jumble of loose change — not entirely worthless, but not amounting to a whole lot, either.

As an update to his 2002 effort on the same subject, Biggie and Tupac, this film provides new testimony about Knight and the alleged role of corrupt LAPD cops in Smalls’ murder. But it mostly proves a tired rehashing of familiar material that doesn’t justify its 105-minute running time.

Freaks Out seems preoccupied with looking cool and feeling offbeat without considering basic narrative requirements. With such an intense visual language and detailed costume and set design, it’s a shame that the story lacks similar heft.

The overall pretentiousness and lack of humor make it more of a slog than a guilty pleasure.

Competent enough to be dull and nowhere near bold enough to be interesting, the new crime thriller by John Swab (Body Brokers) evaporates from memory even faster than it can dole out plot twists.

The scrambled narrative, listless pace, clumsy stabs at profundity and severe lack of humor will limit the film’s appeal to existing converts and cult movie connoisseurs.

It’s much closer to the work of its main subject: a bit hurried, inoffensive and ultimately unsubstantial. It’s loosely informative, rarely revelatory and, despite what the title might lead you to expect, never provocative.

Swan Song becomes increasingly earnest and dull, spending such an inordinate amount of time lingering over tearfully contemplative gazes that it’s too maudlin to exert much of a genuine pull on the heartstrings.

Justin Bull’s screenplay comes up short, failing to adequately capture the depth of its teen’s encounter with the abyss — her anorexia is the aftermath of an apocalyptic revelation — and to integrate it into the more comprehensible domestic tensions that serve as the plotless film’s only framework.

The scripting is painfully thin in all aspects of character relationships, patched together consistently with low-level goonery (outlandish driving, drunkenness, stereotypical fringe characters). The forced hilarity of the proceedings leads one to believe that neither the story team nor the scripter have natural senses of humor. [27 May 1993]

It’s ultimately a mixed bag, with the final moments acquiring an emotional power that should be felt sooner.

Lacking a high concept or memorable central character, the film is a by-the-numbers actioner that coasts on its star’s soulful gravitas and low-key charisma.

Despite its moving conversations, Who We Are never transcends its lecture format.

In the end, the most remarkable thing about Against the Ice is that a real-life story of two men at the mercy of the unforgiving elements, of hunger and illness, possible attack and encroaching madness, can be so curiously deprived of tension.

Though Downfall does some things extremely well, in the balance it’s not very good cinematic journalism and it’s only persuasive to a very limited extent — one that is almost impossible to dispute but doesn’t really take a vital conversation anywhere interesting.

A flawed little time capsule, the doc veers uneasily between kindly character portrait and shallow attempt at media studies.

Its potential for magic is dulled by uneven performances, unconvincing chemistry and an uninspiring script. Summering ends up a movie that’s easier to appreciate for what it’s trying to do than love for what it’s actually doing.

While Taurus does eventually get around to making a point — something about how the toxic combination of fame, addiction, and the music biz can destroy a young talent — it feels for most of its 98-minute run time like a plotless meander through one dude’s very awful week

While it may resonate for some young viewers, anyone whose reality really resembles that of the film’s protagonist should probably look elsewhere.

A slapdash comedy with an embarrassment of misused talent.

As much as it’s a joy to watch Statham slinging explosive harpoons from a jet ski, Meg 2 offers only scattershot pleasures. It’s too ridiculous to muster serious scares and too tonally uncertain to convince us that it’s consistently in on the joke.

When it comes to more rigorous analysis — a bit of pushback, a touch of tension or cultural context — the documentary leaves something to be desired.

Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell (Casino Royale, The Protégé) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

Easter Sunday earns points for its cultural bona fides, its loving portrait of the community it celebrates and its almost entirely Filipino and Asian-American casting. And Koy reveals himself to be a likable screen presence deserving of more starring roles. But it falls hopelessly flat in its comedic aspirations, more closely resembling the sort of bland network sitcom to which its main character aspires.

Throwing a woman in front of the camera and a few feminist quips into the script does not make these films any less conventional, or necessarily any more empowering.

Moonage Daydream is short on insight, and ends up feeling more enervating than enlightening.

For those not motivated purely by a desire for cinematic bloodlust accompanied by an abrasive musical score that sounds like electronic fingernails on a blackboard, there’s some fun to be had.

While there’s a liberal sprinkling of humor, the mysteries it conjures are windy and academic, though not the kind of academic that stands up to scrutiny.

Badly in need of more humor and humanity, like that found in his best Hong Kong features, Tsui Hark's long-awaited big-budget debut "Double Team" is doubly problematic. Beyond a few sequences with some of the Hark magic and the formidable presence of NBA superstar Dennis Rodman, the Columbia Pictures release is not exactly an airball, but it bounces around the rim and finally fails to go in. [2 Apr 1997]

As facile as Triangle of Sadness becomes, Östlund at least provides full-circle follow-through when beauty and sex once again become bartering assets and a late gag mocks the global obsession with branded luxury goods. But this is a glib movie, self-indulgent in its extended running time and far too amused with its easy digs at wealth and privilege.

Faced with an ungainly scenario in which vigilante cops go from bad to worse and involving far too many twists and surprise revelations to sustain credibility, the viewer has little interest in the fates of cold-blooded but vaguely idealistic killers in writer-director Jim Kouf's murky, overlong "Gang Related." [6 Oct 1997]

There’s almost always something interesting about even Denis’ flawed films, but this troubled travelogue just feels a little off at every fumbled step.

Overlong and overdramatic, the two-hour-plus biopic does feature some exquisite filmmaking, in scenes where the romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s music is met with flowing camera movements that capture the action in artfully staged tableaux.

In lieu of a throughline, Beauty offers beautiful, indulgent vignettes — aesthetically pleasing and immersive episodes lacking in ideas but full of vibes.

Nyswaner and Grandage here let the lads get nude and sweaty, rolling around in a golden haze — lots of arched backs, hungry hands and eyes dilated in rapturous transport — that should at least set Styles fans’ hearts aflutter, albeit while remaining fairly decorous. But stodgy storytelling and clunky shifts between the drama’s two time periods dim the afterglow.

Fourth of July turns out to be something we would have never expected from its director/co-writer — bland.

Its chief merit is the rare opportunity it provides Saoirse Ronan to showcase her skills with bubbly comedy, making her the standout in a ridiculously overqualified ensemble. But despite the promise of that title, this wheezing romp slows to a limp.

It’s hard to engage with characters and situations that feel so studied, so stuck in a script that rarely allows them any emotional development — especially when the director himself seems so removed from them.

Unfortunately, Captain America: Brave New World proves a lackluster Marvel entry that feels as if its complicated storyline has been painstakingly worked out without a shred of inspiration.

Joel Edgerton’s haunted central performance as former white supremacist Narvel Roth fits the essential Schrader mold of a troubled soul hiding from his demons. But little else rings true in a drama curiously lacking in texture, which misses the mark in lifeless scene after scene.

This far into the pandemic, with most Americans choosing to act as if it no longer exists, there may simply be no audience left for a gimmicky experimental narrative about people failing so completely to connect with those around them.

For all the authentic genre tropes on display, Marlowe never comes to life on its own, lacking the verve or wit to make it feel anything other than a great pop song played by a mediocre cover band.

The only real amusement comes from the casual asides delivered by Sandler and Aniston, the latter also providing perfectly calibrated slow-burn reactions that too often become overshadowed by the overproduced mayhem surrounding them.

Yuzna appears to be searching for jokes in every scene. The high-key lighting and bright sets also seem geared to comedy. But since he lacks a true comic script, he comes up with mostly dead air. [28 Feb 1992]

The film’s genuine sweetness and affection for its characters go a long way toward compensating for its numbing overfamiliarity.

Action scenes are serviceable enough but rarely exciting, pumped up with Snyder’s usual tool kit of speed-ramping and slo-mo. But there’s a grimy aesthetic to the movie that becomes ugly and tiresome (the director took on the DP role himself), and the episodic plotting seldom builds enough steam to stop you thinking about other things.

Faltering storytelling and sloppy visual technique aside, the pas de deux of tenderness and violence, passivity and aggression between Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay keeps you watching, with both actors mostly overcoming the clichés in the way their characters are conceived. But Femme ends up being less subversive than it seems to think it is.

At a running time of over two hours, the experience eventually feels as wearisome as riding the same ride over and over again.

There’s a lot of heart in Rare Objects, a film that tries to render with compassion the jagged aftermath of trauma.

[Yeoh] has such a commanding and darkly amusing screen presence that the pedestrian film can almost, but not quite, be forgiven for letting her down so completely.

If Nuclear galvanizes a handful of people and even convinces a few more around nuclear power issues, good for Stone. But the movie itself is barely a filmed TED Talk.

There’s a good story at the heart of The Out-Laws about Parker coming to terms with her family’s long criminal history. But that’s more or less tossed aside in favor of all the nonstop gags, in a film that starts off like Meet the Parents and ends like a goofier The Expendables, some excessive violence included.

The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.

By the end, Black Flies leaves the viewer battered, bruised and bleeding out on the sidewalk, but never fully captivated

This exercise in brutal nihilism ultimately proves as empty as the inane philosophy that provides the film its title.

Director Nimrod Antal (Predators) stages the mostly vehicular mayhem with as much variety and visual excitement as possible, especially in a crucial scene in which Matt is cornered by the police in a tunnel. But there’s only so much he can do with the hackneyed premise.

Unlike Green’s Halloween trilogy, which served up diminishing returns with each new installment, Believer condenses that downward trajectory into the first chapter.

Despite some amusing moments, it never really takes off, burdened by a tiresome romantic subplot that periodically stops the movie dead in its tracks.

This mostly competent but largely uninteresting, bordering-on-silly work upholds the Allen tradition of just carrying on as usual

The film is saved to some degree by the unstinting commitment of Ronan and Mescal, sweating it out in an environment that’s stifling both physically and psychologically. But the screenplay becomes so overwrought that it smothers any emotional connection to them.

When it comes to holiday movies, Candy Cane Lane isn’t at the very bottom of the pack, but it’s far from the top. . . The narrative careens through uncompelling territory before ending on a forgettable note.

Riddle of Fire tries to capture the extraordinary way kids experience the world, but the results border on twee.

It should hurt to watch such a relentlessly ruthless piece of work. Yet its savagery feels blunted when nearly every character but Jimmy feels underwritten and nearly every relationship built on plot contrivance.

Divided into seven narratively ill-defined parts, Sorry/Not Sorry moves like the first draft of an article that has all its sources, but doesn’t quite have a thesis yet. Rather than contemplating the nuances of C.K.’s rise and fall, it is simply an information piece, adding footnotes to the story we already know.

All the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this labored reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular.

There’s never enough tension to disguise its blandness. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, Bea and Ben are too clearly into each other to spark real conflict.

Stretching its high concept but thin results to the breaking point, The Family Plan feels like a movie whose best moments were during the pitch meeting.

Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.

Ultimately, The American Society of Magical Negroes is a film bogged down by its filmmaker’s inability to make the central joke work. The film simply is what it is satirizing: way too concerned with how white people perceive Blackness to the detriment of every single Black character in the film.

Taking two of the most magnetic actors on the planet, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and transforming them into emotionally stunted virtual avatars for more than half the running time is the least of the miscalculations.

Despite the filmmaker’s best efforts to drum up suspense via the usual jump scares, Night Swim turns out to be just as silly as it sounds.

If it’s lucky, Emmanuelle might find an afterlife as a kind of Showgirls for its generation, a great-bad movie that’s undeniably craptacular yet strangely endearing, a shameful pleasure in every sense.

While Hammel might be aiming for an ensemble comedy, Stress Positions lacks focus; the director can’t seem to decide who should be the heart of her shapeless narrative, a feeling compounded by dueling voiceovers.

All the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long.

[Daniels] desire to wrest explicit meaning out of the mother’s experience and corral viewers toward a single conclusion unwittingly places The Deliverance in mawkish and disappointingly cartoonish territory.

Unfortunately, the proceedings become increasingly tiresome the more the characters are killed off, with the result that despite an impressive cast, the film comes to feel like a Coen brothers rip-off.

The Watchers, sadly, is less disturbing than dull, less harrowing than hackneyed.

Unfortunately, the exhaustive repetition of the most familiar parts of her narrative — plus an over-reliance on poorly utilized footage from an ethically compromised earlier documentary project — left me more irritated than moved by Stormy, however persuasive I found its main character.

A cheapo gothic horror film intended to ride the coattails of Psycho.

Straining for its ungainly combination of action, romance and silly comedy, Love Hurts doesn’t fully succeed in any department.

Part of the problem of Jacqueline (Argentine) is that it wants to be a film of many layers but Britto doesn’t have the know-how to keep each layer legible separately, with the final result feeling messy and impenetrable rather than admirably complex and, well, layered

Yet another feature comedy that began life as a TV show sketch and is still stuck in infancy (not to mention infantilism), "Run Ronnie Run!" has about 10 minutes of sharp, funny satire to its name before running out of laughs. [15 Jan 2002]

Veering between strained slapstick and thoughtful tête-à-têtes, this boomer-focused reunion comedy strands a game cast of accomplished septuagenarians in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and predictable beats.

Ferrell works hard, very hard, to put the material over, and to his credit, he occasionally succeeds by dint of his boundless comic energy. And Witherspoon, returning to the sort of broad comedy with which she triumphed in such films as Legally Blonde, matches him effectively with her sharp timing and appealing screen persona.

In some ways, Marcello Mio is the ultimate arthouse nepo baby flick, in which the child of cinema royalty embodies her legendary patriarch in order both to get closer to him and to purge herself of some of the demons that have haunted her own life and career — mainly, the fact that people have a tendency to compare her to her famous parents.

That story deserves a great documentary. This well-meaning film is far from that. Rebel Nun is pedestrian at its best and cringe-worthy at its faux-arty worst.

Borrowing liberally from the likes of "RoboCop," "Mad Max" and, of course, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Double Dragon" struggles and ultimately fails to find a satisfying tone (and pace) of its own. [03 Nov 1994]

It all feels old hat by now, with returning director Michael Chaves (The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, The Nun II) failing to bring much freshness or vitality to the proceedings.

Nisha Ganatra’s “freakquel” (blame Disney for that one, not me) swaps the earlier film’s buoyancy and charm for manufactured chaos that’s far more strained and aggressive.

It’s certainly a tasty premise — one that holds considerable noir-tinged promise — and for at least the first half of the film, the quirky blend of increasingly grisly goings-on and wryly observed social commentary forms a cohesive whole before veering irretrievably out of sync.