Tyler Perry works his Christian ideals into a black pop-culture vernacular, encoding faith in Brian McKnight songs and shots of soul food.
Before I Love the ’80s made revisiting Big Movie Moments chic, spoofs usually existed independent of the titles they implicitly mocked.
Grandma’s Boy announces its retro style with an opening shot of the Asteroids Atari video game.
Venom begins as a promising vision of small-town discontent only to succumb to the worst tendencies of the slasher teen genre.
Johnny Knoxville desperately wants to be a movie star.
Its main character may renounce California glitter for a down-home family life in Jersey, but Just Friends is as Hollywood as they come.
Curb Your Enthusiasm is not unlike an absurdist comedy riff on Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.
The film’s pieces and killings are mostly unimaginative.
The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Showtime, and Taxi seemingly haunt every shot of the film.
Over There lays on the melodramatic relationship unravelings and personal confessionals thick.
The actors possess their characters with a shrill, childlike exuberance and overstatement that comes to define them.
The transcendent Reno 911 doesn’t fall on references to the week’s banner headlines to incite laughter.
The romantic setups and symbols of wealth and male domination in Entourage feel as though they were dreamt up in a lonely singles bar.
A Ghost Is Born, like R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, is a refreshingly instrumental work.
Odelay is very much a revolt of principle, and its songs’ messages are never clearer than in the melodies themselves.
With their first full-length release, the band dumped lo-fi jangle-pop for much bleaker themes.
The compositional uncertainty and sometimes scruffiness of its relatively brief 11 tracks seem just slightly ungenerous.
Waiting for My Rocket to Come is often too shameless for its own good.