The Girl on the Train
While the movie leads us through its mystery via a trailing of crumbs, its problematic content comes at us in gratuitous waves.
The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation is a powerful, convicting tale. But it’s steeped in horrific displays of violence. And it wallows in human suffering and uses theology to, essentially, justify wholesale butchery.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Tim Burton’s infatuation with the macabre and the grim is very much present here.
Denial
Denial is anchored by strong acting and even stronger subject matter: The importance of protecting truth and history. And it does so while staying relatively clean.
Masterminds
By PG-13 standards, Masterminds doesn’t push the envelope to the edge in terms of sexual content, violence or profanity. But, man, the film’s underlying, conscience-free ethos is just sad.
Deepwater Horizon
From shrapnel-torn flesh to protruding bones, thundering eruptions to chunks of metal yanked from hideous wounds, this heroic story is not an easy film to experience.
The Magnificent Seven
This violent remake presents its seven stars as flawed heroes—bad men with good hearts who sacrifice themselves to deal with even worse men.
Blair Witch
This sequel still feels like we’ve been-there-and-flinched-at-that before.
Snowden
Is the sympathy Oliver Stone strives to stir up for his subject something we should embrace or something we should be suspicious of?
Bridget Jones’s Baby
Bridget Jones’s Baby wasn’t a horrible movie. It’s funny in places. But even though I laughed, it made me sad, too. Sad that the definition of integrity is now whatever we want it to mean.