I'll give Fifty Shades Darker this much, at least: The sex scenes are OK.

| Aug 10, 2017

Fifty Shades Darker is not darker or better. It's watered down, raincoat-brigade style erotica, even with the spiced-vanilla S&M.

| Mar 3, 2017

Fifty Shades Darker, which fails so many tests of basic storytelling competence, is all the more stunning for its success at a task that most movies don't even bother attempting: depicting a woman's sexual pleasure.

| Feb 24, 2017

Even someone with Johnson's considerable charisma can't get any heat going with a block of wood like this. Actually, to call his performance wooden is an insult to wood, which is a fine natural resource that demonstrably makes our world a better place.

| Feb 17, 2017

Nothing ever feels alive in this film. It's a couple of automatons acting out a play that was based on other plays, that was based on other plays, and so on and so forth.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Feb 16, 2017

The story of a woman who gives her man better values and a man who gives his woman better clothes, both of them suffering so much for a little bit of nookie.

| Feb 13, 2017

Has even the target audience for this junk finally had enough?

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 13, 2017

It's glossy and at times goofily funny, mostly thanks to Johnson's subtle comic skills, but the novelty of this messy relationship is really beginning to wear off.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 12, 2017

A movie this bad deserves to have its flaws enunciated clearly...

| Feb 12, 2017

Without Sam Taylor-Johnson at the helm, it lacks the knowing bite of its playful predecessor.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 12, 2017

The danger is stripped away to the point that Anastasia has to keep reminding Christian that at any moment he can slip back into his dominant, punishing ways - just to justify the "Darker" in the title.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 10, 2017

Personally I think the three books and the two films to date are interesting in their way. They are not golden, but then they are not vanilla either.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 10, 2017

The movies aren't so bad they're good. They're so brilliantly bad they're genius, with Foley dutifully presenting every inane plot point while gifting us excuses to laugh.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 10, 2017

The volume of hysterical moments is beyond belief, some of them so patently absurd I almost started to wonder if Foley was making a clandestine parody.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 10, 2017

Other than Dornan's exceptional physique, the movie offers little gratification, delayed or otherwise.

| Feb 10, 2017

It's alluring when it isn't trying so damn hard to convince you it's sexy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 10, 2017

The kind of movie that's fun only when you're laughing at its flaccid attempts at drama.

| Feb 10, 2017

No safeword can protect you from the sequel's depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the franchise's claim to notoriety: sex scenes, whether accessorized with hardware or not.

| Feb 10, 2017

Here we are again: watching two anatomical marvels writhe meaninglessly in the moonlight, like a burlesque performed by bots.

| Feb 10, 2017

Makes The Chronicles of Riddick look like Le Règle du Jeu.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 10, 2017