Jeff Baena’s film, at heart, is just another overly familiar story of a boy struggling to get over his first love and who’s rewarded for his troubles with a less volatile replacement model.
The film is a hybrid of a Lifetime movie focused on a “strong woman,” a run-of-the-mill murder mystery, and a yogurt commercial from hell.
Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor’s nice-guy neuroticism.
Essentially the film aims to trade in the awkwardness of teen sexuality, but too often settles for the gross-out gag instead.
More gag-friendly than idea-based, relying on the considerable charm of its leads to ground its supernatural conceit.
The film is an embarrassing girls-behaving-badly indie romp you’d expect a group of friends to write after an all-you-can-drink brunch.
The Oranges is a wasteful study of the white and privileged with their neck hair standing on end.
The film is a noisier but arguably less idiosyncratic experience than attending an actual Midwestern business convention.
The Runaways feints in the direction of being an obstreperously feminist biopic worthy of its subject.
There’s a lot of underlying potential here, but there seems to have been no one around to whip it into shape.
Throughout, everyone is framed in cramped compositions that suggest the influence of The Simpsons by way of Ulrich Seidl.
Too often it feels like a catalog of the worst offenses of films like Crash, Frozen River, and The Visitor.
Nothing says Christmas quite like incompetent slapstick, saccharine sermonizing, and cavernous cleavage.
At times, it’s difficult to determine if Arrested Development is good or just really fast.
The film’s formulaic rags-to-roundball glory story tellingly parallels Martin Lawrence’s deteriorating career.