Angelica Jade Bastien

While Bullock and Kidman return to their roles with the sisterly rapport necessary, the film itself is a closed circuit with no narrative electricity to power it.

I could shrug off the misshapen political commentary and inability to create distinct characters if the film pulled off the righteous violence it aspires to with its action scenes. But the violence here feels cruel more than engaging. Unfortunately, Onslaught gets too lost in the sandbox of better directors’ creations to make a case for its own pleasures.

It is the way the movie reckons with corporate malfeasance with humor and surprisingly heartfelt emotion that matters.

No one in this film and not a single attribute comes out looking good. Not the lazily constructed direction, not the scattershot, infuriatingly anemic script. Not the characterization that makes people do dumb things when the story needs to force a plot point. Not the performers grasping for some sense of characterization in a story that doesn’t deserve their efforts. The film isn’t even two hours long and it felt interminably drawn out.

If you’re only looking for bloody, wet horror with bodies broken and bent unnaturally and traumatizing set pieces, you’ll find a few visceral thrills in Evil Dead Burn. But if you need horror to emotionally earn its nastiness when dealing with a theme as important as domestic violence, you’ll find it as soulless as the Deadites that Alice must destroy to claw her way toward an uneasy survival.

It would be easy to look at Couture as slight. But its observational curiosity hones in on the tender qualities of day-to-day life, where emotionally ground-shaking revelations sit next to the mundane. But there’s no time to waste dwelling on the wanting rather than the living required of us. After all, there’s always work to do.

Our culture has changed in monumental ways when it comes to dating, romantic connection, sex, and how marriage is viewed by younger generations. The genre itself needs to evolve in tandem with this. Despite their momentary delight, films like Office Romance tell us that Hollywood is stuck creating outdated movies for a version of our romantically yearning culture that doesn’t exist anymore.

Riley’s film only works in fits. Its stunning visual bravura can’t distract from what’s lacking within its filmmaker’s arsenal of storytelling tools.

Its comedy is successfully awkward and discomfiting until it’s evident Borgli isn’t interested in exploring people so much as using their mistakes as gristle to create an endless sprawl of socially awkward scenarios with all the grace and interpersonal cognizance of an edgelord. It is only through the sheer force of the actors involved that the movie is engaging and entertaining.

While the press tour for the film has highlighted the rapport between its attractive and game stars, that doesn’t reflect the chemistry between them onscreen. There isn’t a flicker of heat between any of them. But the bigger issue is that each character is more of a threadbare idea improperly stitched together than a person.