With nothing but artful austerity to offer as a tether back to reality, The Ice Tower shatters.

This pleasingly mellow portrait of a bunch of kids making movies is also an instance of defanged nostalgia — when it was an occasion to highlight the economic, political, cultural circumstances that made this kind of creativity possible.

Ill-defined, overlong and wandering with unlikable leads (even Alan is too feeble and useless to sympathize with), The Mend would be a disaster if it weren't for the fact that the lack of vision is marginally absorbing in a kind train wreck, “will this movie ever reveal what the hell it’s about?”-like manner.

The Plagiarists is a fantastic idea that is irredeemably marred by poor execution. There is a genuine sensation of effort on screen and a select few of the ideas the film touches upon are outright brilliant, but the product still falls remarkably flat.

Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you’ve never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you’ve seen all too many times before.

The concept of the film could have been played several different ways, from farce to high-drama to Hitchcock-ian thriller. Ozon decides to try it all, but in the end doesn’t pull off any.

A lot like many of the noisy artists on display, “Woodstock 99” has a lot to say, says it loudly but fails to connect in any meaningful way.

The Impossible strikes an insincere tone, one that doesn't let the obviously powerful moments stand on their own, but instead follows the beautiful Hollywood stars to safety, while the real story is left on the ground.

While it’s nice to see Toni Colette and Chris Messina face off both in and out of the courtroom and Zoey Deutch gives a strong dramatic performance as Ally, even the best acting can’t make Juror #2 make sense.

The Painted Bird is the kind of exploitative cinema that thinks drowning its viewers in increasingly drastic scenes of torture and brutality is inherently righteous. “Look at our terrible history!” “The Painted Bird” screams, but the film’s unrelenting onslaught of revolting ghastliness makes each chapter less impactful than the last.

Brad’s Status rarely affords its titular character an opportunity to have a real conversation with anyone else his own age, so the movie becomes a monologue from someone you quickly realize you don’t really want to get to know anyway.

The movie’s practical and special effects are a rogues’ gallery of gougings, stabbings, shavings, and scalpings; those who like to have their stomachs turned will find much to cheer about. But is it actually scary – suspenseful, tense, trafficking in more than the cheap shock of a jump scare or vivid effect? Not really, no.

Unfocused and unpolished, “Le Concours” might’ve been fared better if one of the prospective students picked up the camera instead.

Although the majority of Beirut proves to be quite the task to watch, it’s still rather refreshing to witness Hamm continue to come into his own as a genuine A-list talent.

There are so many interesting ideas and concepts that could have been spun from this framework. Instead, it's the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it.

The meandering narrative flow leapfrogs without any sense of rhythm, almost as if the collection of scenes was augmented by a haywire randomizer.

While the more down-to-earth Chef does offer some fascinating autobiographical dimensions, the film is also an overlong, unfunny, largely insufferable bore.

Neither an exciting thriller nor a satisfactory (“elevated”) horror metaphor for one of society’s ills, FRESH is certified meh.

The film is not only one dimensional when it comes to its subject, but also of the time and place where Hendrix arrived.

This is an excruciatingly stupid movie, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that, at 83 minutes, at least it’s over quickly.

The Good Lie is so manufactured around a particular dramatic blueprint that any sense of spontaneity, surprise and engagement are sucked right out of the picture.

The Audition is a harsh, and often cheap, picture that offers a fragmented view of a family diseased by the pursuit of perfection, who yet enable the behavior to continue at the ongoing cost of their happiness.

Muddled, muffled and mixing empty comedy with empty dramatics, The We and the I is an abject failure.

‘Jane Doe’ never aspires beyond the ordinary, and more crucially even fails to meet that modest standard. Lifeless and lackluster, ‘Jane Doe’ never draws blood.

Look, America certainly needs relief, support, escape, and laughter, yes, but good god, ‘Barb & Star’ is not it.

Forbes’ script simply cannot make the things she lived through alive for us in anything but the most glib, shallow and contrived way.

Mr. Nobody is simply a failure.

For all its rage about moral decline and the psychic poison of content culture, Faces Of Death never rises above the same cheap sensationalism it pretends to condemn. Instead of confronting the sickness, it feeds on it and spits out something just as rancid as the faux snuff films it claims to abhor.

It’s an ugly, unpleasant viewing experience, one that sees geek culture as a hateful cesspool of exclusion and juvenility, miserable to experience first-hand.

Unfortunately, while Set It Up sets up instances of subversion, it ultimately topples into a predictable mess of romantic noxiousness.

Campy and cartoonish, Burton’s Big Eyes is not the return to form many were hoping for. It is another phony and hollow piece of sugary kitschploitation masquerading under the guise of an “important true story” that places a nearly grotesque premium on style over any traces over substance.

It goes without saying that Cranston has a lot to carry on his shoulders and he does an admirable job. It’s hard not to laugh every so often at one of Wakefield’s snide remarks and that’s effectively because of how Cranston sells it. But even this accomplished actor can’t make you feel any sympathy for a character whose actions defy convention in the most unimaginative ways.

If nothing else, Babylon is a giant swing, a three-plus hour orgy (sometimes literally) of sex, drugs, and cinema, a respected young artist reaching for a profound statement about art and commerce and America. He misses it by a country mile, but hey, he sure does take that swing.

Moussaoui’s underwhelming use of fractured storytelling technique not only dilutes any organic narrative development, but he completely jeopardizes the impactful nature of the film’s potentially poignant message: how we as humans are in one way or another connected to each other.

Sacca’s script is an exercise in poor plotting.

Wanting to create a leading character worth rooting for, and experiencing the schadenfreude that comes from her failure, is a complex balancing act, one that Adult World simply cannot pull off.

No One Will Save You is a very bizarrely unremarkable, abnormally lifeless movie, seemingly starting right out of the gate in the second act and then trying to reverse engineer the audience’s sympathy—and everything else— for the unknowable protagonist.

The film is so po-faced that you wonder what the point of all this is, let alone what we should be hoping is the outcome. Struggling to bring gravity to the proceedings are Wakefield and Hinshaw, who give off the heat of two slabs of baloney slapped together.

Either this movie was made due to one of the most humongous creative blind spots in all of filmmaking, or it was made because in this, the year 2019, there are still people who believe that eroticized, lightened-up rape scenes are not only permissable – they are empowering.

A movie that is fundamentally ill-conceived, poorly written, and missing most of the basic charms that made the original “Wonder Woman” such a delight (minus the last act). Directed again by Patty Jenkins, the film is also something of a nonsensical mess narratively, even by the most lenient and forgiving standards of superhero movies where fantastical, impossible things routinely occur. Suspension of disbelief is crucial to this genre, but ‘WW84’ is constantly breaking or conveniently upgrading its rules in ways that definitely break or at least always test your suspension of disbelief.

Dumont’s uncompromising approach to the material makes for a love-it-or-hate-it affair, and it should be clear where this particular viewer fell on that spectrum.

The bitter aftertaste of dullness remains in its place, an unforgivable sin within the art form Constanzo seems so set on paying tribute to.

My Blind Brother is mirthless, though Kroll and Slate have a delightfully easy charm that occasionally rises above the tedium.

These characters are undoubtedly supposed to be parodies of themselves, but their collective unrepentant narcissism broods more resentment than laughter. By the end of the feature, it’s hard not to cringe every time somebody talks.

The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next.

I Love My Dad cannot overcome its off-putting premise. Nothing is out of bounds, of course (especially in comedy), but if there’s an approach to make the material palatable, either played straight or broad, it is left undiscovered here.

A major gaffe, God Help The Girl finds a great artist taking on a huge challenge and stumbling painfully on its ambition almost every step of the way.

Shadyac’s movie may ask difficult questions about the ills that society grapples with today, but it tackles them in a shallow, facile, sometimes uncomfortably out of touch manner.

There is a winning buddy comedy deep inside The Accountant 2, but it’s buried under so much tedious meandering that it never gets to fully see the light of day.

Even as a late night Netflix viewing for fashion aficionados who enjoy a scandalous bit of melodramatic trash, The Model doesn’t offer anything new, interesting, or engaging.

The risible Stoker is a brutally empty, deeply unfortunate movie, and Park Chan-wook's jackhammer of a tool he calls a brush is, on this evidence, something that should be locked away.

Lacking narrative momentum, saddled with thin characterizations and uninspired plotting, Trouble With The Curve should've stayed on the bench.

One of the more disappointing big studio animated features this year, a movie can't even muster the energy to be visually engaging, let alone give you anything to care about story-wise.

Taika Waititi’s self-proclaimed “anti-hate satire” “Jojo Rabbit” exists in service of a single idea, a notion so desperately idealistic that it lands somewhere between naïveté and disingenuousness.

The film plays nary a note of reprieve and the dank aesthetic does nothing to help the mood. “Low Down” is unequivocally a downer.

The meat of the film is sadly, a tedious misstep for a director who, even when he's experimented in the past, has generally come up with something more interesting than this. It is, however, still better than "9 Songs"

In the depths of the abyss below, The Gorge mostly turns into a high-concept action film that’s so dull, predictable and ugly to look at it’s extremely easy to tune out and have your mind go on autopilot while the otherwise charismatic Teller and Taylor-Jones are wasted.

It's the sort of film where music montages are used like wallpaper to take narrative shortcuts and minimize messy conflict.

Chunks of childhood trauma, a dash of the opioid crisis, a few drops of environmental distress, and Native American mythology swim together in a foggy concoction of a plot without meaningfully merging.

It’s all largely an ugly, vulgar, vacuous time that’s disposable and never as amusing as it clearly thinks it is.

Bad Words wants so desperately to be funny that there isn't much time left to make any logic out of the story.

While stylishly capturing the verve, exotica, and free-spirited mojo of swinging '60s London, uber-prolific English director Michael Winterbottom's portrait of legendary U.K. smut impresario Paul Raymond is otherwise a shallow misfire.

Fans of the novel might get some minor thrills from the big screen adaptation, but it's hard to understand what made the material so popular in the first place.

Pleasant enough to look at but impossible to care about, this movie isn’t bad because it fails at what it sets out to do, but because of the most evil of all reasons: it never figures out its reason to be at all.

“How It Ends” is not actually an end-of-the-world film at all; here, the Apocalypse is just a well-shucks excuse for a bunch of yak sessions between goofy (but attractive!) oddballs doing quirky shit and Speaking Their Truths on an accelerated timeframe. With all due apologies to the plants, animals, and 7.5bn other souls about to be incinerated in a doomsday fireball, #teammeteor.

Hyper-violent and narratively undercooked, the film represents a creative nadir for pretty much everyone involved and manages something even Ritchie usually avoids: boredom.

By the time the ridiculous child psychologist character encounters a government employee with a convenient bounty of useful information, Mama just becomes laughable, then annoying.

What's interesting about Proxy is that it plays with all of the ephemera associated with pregnancy – the way that a person's psychology can warp around it – but too often gets bogged down in B-movie clichés and an unnecessarily convoluted narrative that strives for profundity but comes across as crass and dull.

Settlers is ultimately little more than a bit of style and a smattering of substance.

By establishing little stakes and few moments of genuine connection between the main stars, it lacks the warm authenticity and the stranger-than-fiction reality of the real story, which will ultimately be weirder and more enticing than any narrative version of this story could ever be.

Our Time is gorgeously shot, naturally, and the intentions are well-meaning but far too self-serving.

Manufactured and manicured to appeal to the teenage fans of Green's book, Paper Towns is so polished and edgeless, that even Margo herself would look at the finished product, and question its authenticity.

Director Ari Sandel, working with a script by Josh A. Cagan, doesn't have the deftness to really convey how Bianca's personality turns conventional wisdom into her own unique, attractive qualities.

The marketing engine of Minions is undeniably powerful. This is something craftily designed to sell toys and theme park tickets and special cans of Tic-tacs. But it’s not a movie. It’s an eyesore.

With no plot to speak of, a baggy tangent across Europe in the mid-section, and no forward momentum, War Machine soon descends into the quicksand of its own design and never recovers. From there it’s an enervating slog of two hours that invites sleep.

Apparently a filler movie taken while Hitch was under contract, this is entirely phoned in and almost completely devoid of any of those inspired flourishes that can make even the least of his pictures worth the watching.

About Time, inadvertently, reveals itself to be About Men, and how they devise lies in order to create the illusion that all women supposedly want to see.

A noir-ish melodrama so oversaturated with dourness that it borders on parody.

Honoré's made better films, and he'll make better films again; the most damning thing you can say about this one isn't that it feels like Honore doing a third-rate imitation of Francois Ozon ("Potiche," "8 Women"), but rather that it often feels like Honoré doing a third-rate imitation of himself.

Uneven pacing and an anemic plot hamstring the film, which has a couple of interesting ideas yet precious few about how to convey them to its audience.

If DreamWorks Animation is hoping to get back on track with this movie, a lavish sci-fi comedy based on a recent children's book, they're pretty much doomed.

Perhaps the array of characters read better on the page, but it all feels slight in execution, particularly when half of the running time is spent on Tommy’s past and what unfolded between himself and Shelley. Combine all that with a particularly lackluster sense of urgency and pacing, and you have film that offers few reasons for investment.

Kiefer Sutherland feels somewhat miscast as the mentor, but nowhere near as badly as Hudson is as the love interest. In all fairness, it’s a nightmare of a part, an artist (whose art is, as it turns out, is terrible) haunted by the recent death of her boyfriend, and seemingly unable to read basic human feelings and emotion. But Hudson doesn’t really help things, coming across more often than not as unintentionally funny.

It’s a film that you would, of course, expect from the director of such an entity as The Greasy Strangler, but, say what you will about that film, at least it wasn’t boring.

An unsavory, underdeveloped and uninspired bore, it takes too many blows and doesn’t give nearly enough counterpunches. It doesn’t cut. It doesn’t bleed. It doesn’t even hit. Hell, it barely puts up a fight. It comes out the gate frail and disoriented, already down for the count before the picture has started.

As exampled in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” any chance to hear Hawkes perform solo on guitar is time well spent. It’s time well needed, too, as it provides a moment of reflection to remember why we came — Hawkes — and wonder how he found himself in such a confounding misfire.

The First Purge— for all that it could have said about race and class in America— is perfectly content to provide the bare minimum and deliver some cheap thrills. And in doing so, the thrills come at the expense of the seemingly sharp points, now blunt, no longer cutting deep and drawing blood like they used to.

Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline works best as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of of believing that everything written by The Bard is “timeless.”

It would be too easy to say The Magnificent Seven isn’t magnificent. It’s definitely not, but the film has an even more egregious quality: it’s uninspired. There’s no risk, no real attempts to subvert expectations, and no desire to truly give the audience something, if not entirely new, then at least surprising.

Lacking any thematic direction or narrative momentum, the film wanders around like so many Muscovite strays on the streets of Russia: aimless yet not exactly lost. A tough sit on top of all this, and lacking anything resembling a coherent point, this one should be shot into space without a return trajectory.

It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not well plotted enough to be a thriller but it's also not smart enough to be an actual exploration of all or even any of the many philosophies it, and Abe Lucas, espouses.

Broken simply can't get it together on any level, delivering a tedious drama, that for all the characters and over-emoting, doesn't have much to say.

Gout’s entry should be a victory lap for this relatively often dumb and dirty treatise on all that’s wrong with America, especially one that has become so powerful with multiple box office hits. Instead, it displays all that makes these movies a failed experiment in blockbuster exploitation.

We Have a Ghost tries to add too many elements to the mix–the horror, the comedy, the drama, and the message about how we need to leave our dead behind. Without committing to a tone, it all feels a bit mangled. It’s a movie that wants to be a mix of everything but, in the end, winds up being nothing.

The film, like the original, feels very haphazardly structured, a hotchpotch collection of scenes rather than a unified whole. There's also no tonal consistency, with Webb lurching awkwardly from quippy comedy to brooding drama to high tragedy in short spaces of time, undercutting all three modes as a result.

Hampered by a character growth problem, tonal inconsistencies, shoddy mime work, and a collective French accent trainwreck, the film fumbles the few opportunities it does have at something better.

Fun acting, playful imagery, and a catalog of great ‘80s songs should be the winning recipe for a delightful musical. Alas, the Valley Girl remake doesn’t have the musical chops to separate itself from being compared to an overly long episode of “Glee” and definitely doesn’t bring anything new to the film world that will influence movies for years to come, as the original did four decades ago.

Rather than make the more interesting movie, Chaves and Johnson-McGoldrick kick the can down the road toward the next money-making sequel. Which would be totally welcomed if the The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It weren’t so artistically inert, and oh so boring.