The only past that Dial of Destiny is interested in plundering is the glory of its predecessors.
There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.
The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
The series consistently opts for excess over restraint, with disorienting results.
In the film, the power of the movies is an afterthought to more romantic and socially oriented concerns.
The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.
Symptomatic of the Marvel-ization of modern action cinema, the film seems to exist mostly as an advertisement for future product.
Its themes are propped up by characters who come off as half-formed avatars rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.
Carol Morley’s film wants to blow our minds, but it succeeds only at rousing our boredom.
The extras on this edition of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom feel almost as dully prescribed as the film itself.
Unlike the red balloon that Pooh follows through much of the running time, Marc Forster’s film lacks lightness.
Throughout the film, director J.A. Bayona draws on the childlike fear of things that go bump in the night.
Like the play, it makes something so viable, tense, and compelling out of the anxious boredom of trench warfare.
It reveals itself as vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.
The Snowman is missing so much basic connective tissue as to be rendered almost completely inexplicable.
David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde frequently loses sight of its own action to glibly pay homage to other works.
Happy End is an empathetic portrait of personal grief as it’s experienced in a desensitized first-world society.
Morgan’s makers lose trust in the intellectual heft of their material and chose to prioritize empty sensation instead.
Director Sean Ellis’s film offers a potent examination of the moral rectitude of resistance.
Eventually, director Matteo Garrone’s self-consciously patchwork, one-thing-after-another structure wears thin.