The Bad Batch never organizes itself around a coherent idea or works up the urgency to pay off its premise.

| Oct 10, 2017

The Bad Batch has enough flashy, fashionably grim accessories and accoutrements to fill a Hot Topic.

| Jun 30, 2017

All of these elements unfold in more a stream-of-thought manner than real design. And Waterhouse turns in a solid performance.

| Jun 27, 2017

The Bad Batch squanders its strong start and rich setting on a too-thin plot.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 23, 2017

Feels less like a coherent film and more like a pastiche.

| Jun 23, 2017

A film with neither engaging emotional threads nor the kind of panache that makes such cinematic mayhem worth it.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 23, 2017

It's a trippy, sun-scorched apocalyptic horror film with a rom-com finish that gets as bloody, visceral and cannibalistic as its U.S. R rating will allow.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 23, 2017

Amirpour has ambitions bigger than the art house. She wants to make big, colorful blockbusters, too, and The Bad Batch feels like an audition reel to take over Mad Max.

| Original Score: B | Jun 22, 2017

It's good, dirty fun. But it also takes exploitation - of bodies, of feeling, of labor - seriously.

| Jun 22, 2017

Brace yourself for a dark, nasty and surprisingly enjoyable ride.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 22, 2017

As a politically barbed fantasy, "The Bad Batch" is intriguing but facile; as a bid for cult-classic status, it's strained and self-conscious.

| Jun 22, 2017

The Bad Batch has all the ingredients necessary for a minor cult classic, but it's tough to get that recipe just right.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 22, 2017

This gaudy postapocalyptic adventure from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour never stops moving, its heroine bouncing back and forth between the revelers and the flesh eaters, but it never really gets anywhere either.

| Jun 22, 2017

By the final sequences, the excitement of seeing what a young filmmaker with a ferociously distinct sensibility is going to do next has evaporated into the hot desert air.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 22, 2017

This visually impressive dystopian western-thriller establishes Ana Lily Amirpour's filmmaking chops [...] even though it falls short of delivering an engaging story.

| Jun 22, 2017

Ana Lily Amirpour's first feature, "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night," was such an original vision that it set the bar impossibly high for what she decided to do next. Sadly, her latest, "The Bad Batch" doesn't come close to clearing that hurdle.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 22, 2017

Amirpour's latest film is a beautiful and shambling Western, plus it has cannibalism and machine gun-wielding pregnant women.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 22, 2017

It's too on the nose as a political allegory, and too lacking in coherent narrative to satisfy as a hipster comedy-drama.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 22, 2017

In addition to presenting a parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour's film is also a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 22, 2017

While Amirpour has put a lot of effort into creating sweeping desert photography and detailed thrift-store set dressing, those are ultimately just ornaments on a sparse narrative tree.

| Original Score: C | Jun 22, 2017