Amy Nicholson

Sweeney and Powell could do wonders with a better script, something that makes more use of the way they grin at each other like they ate knives for lunch. She’s skilled at layered insincerity; he specializes in smirky, put-on machismo, shooting the camera a horrifically funny tongue waggle.

[Singh's] film is good with physics and lousy at philosophy.

Sure, Sagan’s scientific method dominates the universe. But here on earth, this crowd-pleaser convinces us to spend one day savoring an American Dream.

He’s made a mystery with no curiosity, a cautionary tale with no good advice. It’s unclear if Guadagnino’s elites believe their moral arguments don’t apply to themselves or if they’re just stupid — or if the script makes them do stupid things to keep the audience off guard. Regardless, raise a glass of Pinot anytime someone says “This was a mistake.”

For a story that's pro-poor and anti-wealth, every frame of it looks like it cost as much as human life itself — and that, more than any bludgeoned battle cries for freedom, is the pleasure of the film.

Every frame of silent, lip-biting, pent-up tension in the series has been holding its breath for this -- a 600-minute soap opera suddenly exploding into a Grindhouse slasher.

We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage.

A Working Man strikes an unsteady balance between solemn and ridiculous.

Is the result - a slapstick, bizarro melodrama where Ferrell plays the Mexican born and bred scion of a wealthy farmer - meant more for Spanish speakers or stoned and giggly Americans? It's a tough call.

Labor Day is so self-conscious and phony, it must be the work of a pod person. Humans, film lovers, and fans of Reitman's till-now-flawless filmography: We've gotta fight back.

Every bit of it is more advanced: The actors are better, the plot is tighter, the special effects sleeker, the messages more heartfelt. Yet it lacks Verhoeven's bloody, biting scream.

Linsanity doesn't—and shouldn't—hide its star's religious beliefs. But the doc should have the courage to explore them.

Gebbe never asks us to believe in Tore's god, but she asks us to honor his beliefs. She's found an incredible conduit in Feldmeier.

Hazanavicius has made a movie that tests our ideas of creative genius.

Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable.

Every line of dialogue in Trial by Fire is wrapped with so much exposition that the film feels tied to the train-tracks of good taste. Characters don’t converse, they simply say all their thoughts aloud.

Anvari has set out to make a mood piece that succeeds in scaring the audience senseless.

Once I Think We’re Alone Now establishes that Grace and Del represent love versus stability, the film doesn’t have a convincing way to reconcile the two.

Two hours of femmepowering wish fulfillment.

This over-the-top sequel caters to the lowest common denominator in the best possible way, and it's so fully committed to brainless bombast that it muscles audiences to applaud by sheer force of will.

The film is besotted by its own cleverness. The overwrought dialogue clashes with the rest of the movie’s naturalism. But Smyth’s very point is that ordinary folk have the right to strive for poetry — and his shaggy sincerity wins out in the end. With this promising ditty as his debut feature, the filmmaker introduces himself as a voice to be heard.

The bad news is that if you haven't seen "Thor," "Captain America" and "Iron Man 2" - that's six hours and three minutes of homework - The Avengers won't make sense. The good news is if you're a human under the age of 45, you probably already have.

Lovelace, ahem, blows it. The narrative rewind gives us new facts and a whole heap of crying scenes, but no added insight into Linda's mind—she's still as empty as an inflatable toy.

Why is Emmerich elbowing his way into the conversation about Shakespearean authorship? Because the debate is explosive - and he can't resist packing on a few more pounds of dynamite on his confident drama of incest, greed and beheadings.

Adams doesn’t gain much by returning for Disenchanted, a cluttered and noisy sequel directed by Adam Shankman from a screenplay by Brigitte Hales. Neither does the original film’s fan base.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

These ladies - even at their weakest - carry themselves with the confidence of winners, and we cling to their strength like a life raft.

I’d call “Wallis Island” a contender for the most quotable film of the year but there are so many good lines stacked on top of each other, and so much giggling on top of that, it’s impossible to keep up with Key’s wordplay.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

The new songs are forgettable and the animation is cluttered with every pixel competing to show off. There are too many leaves, too many petals and too many pores on the fully animated dwarfs, who bound into the movie with noses the size of pears.

Everyone involved knows exactly what movie they’re making — especially Craig Robinson as the hilarious town sheriff.

Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year.

Roberts and Clooney wear their stature like sweatpants, rousing themselves to do little more than spit insults like competitive siblings. They’re selling their own comfortable rapport, not their characters’ romantic tension.

This movie believes that true love isn't supposed to be hard. A fine ideal, but it feels as flat as a pizza.

A stellar debut.

Half Magic is hobbled by a debut director’s desire to be liked. But Graham’s passion is sincere, even if her tone and rushed pace — the byproduct of cramming in every idea in case she doesn’t get a second chance — teeters on sitcom.

Federer describes himself as an emotional guy, but with the international press and his management team nearly always on the sidelines, there’s little privacy to get personal.

The sequel is all glitz and no heart.

Even calling the film a documentary feels deluded.

The film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds.

No one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.

The caffeinated cuts and pacing never allow the audience to find its footing in the film’s large, expensive set pieces, which prevents the action from becoming truly thrilling.

The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.

Rumpled, hangdog and literally kicked around, Mr. Pitt wears indignities the way Marilyn Monroe sported a potato sack; he’s delighted to make a joke of his appeal. With him as his canvas, Mr. Leitch elevates visual whims into art

Reminders of Him could use a little more swooning, a little less of the endless middle stretch of driving and talking, interrupted by wet sprints through thunderstorms.

The only reason to root for Riddick is that his name is on the ticket stub. But he's so dull and the hunters so weird that we're literally cheering for the movie to kill off its personality, one throat slash at a time.

While the promise of that gangbusters opening sequence goes a tad unfulfilled, “Killing” has two strong twists and plenty of reasons to enjoy the romp.

Adam Green's inventively gruesome slasher is the widest unrated release in 25 years.

Let There Be Carnage flourishes in high-energy moments and feeds off low expectations; it’s the mold in the Avengers’ shower.

Like so many meathead action thrillers, it's too busy fogging the windows with hot air to see the big picture.

Live by Night loses energy whenever Sienna Miller’s not around. She makes this world with its showdowns about machismo and machine guns seem fresh, instead of the same old antler clashes.

Aniston gives the character personality and heft, but the script gives the character nothing to do.

Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt.

It'd be easier to root for lead Tris's (Shailene Woodley, the go-to girl for drab roles with grit) quest to escape her Abnegation roots and those ghastly gray skirts to prove herself a worthy Dauntless if director Burger felt committed to the concept.

Like us, the deft and merciless director Daisy von Scherler Mayer ("Party Girl") sides with the girls, and to stack the deck she's hired five tremendous actresses.

The confident, female-driven sensuality of Kiss of the Damned anchors this handsome nonsense.

The film is polite when it should be wicked — it’s melodrama that thinks it’s saving lives, like it drank too much chardonnay and convinced itself that since Gone Girl almost got an Oscar, maybe it can, too. That tonal muck prevents the film from going in any direction.

The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music.

Riff Raff is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring.

Åkerlund’s music videos established him as a whiz-bang technician, a skill he only unleashes in two terrifying montages. Lords of Chaos proves that he can also get great performances out of a young cast, especially Kilmer’s otherworldly Dead.

When no one is making believable choices, who cares who’s human? It’s all just lines of script.

This is the most absorbing and well-paced film in the trilogy to date, despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time — de rigueur for modern spectacles that want to convince audiences they’re getting enough bang for their buck. “Secrets of Dumbledore” gestures toward themes of frailty, thwarted intentions and forgiveness.

An odd little film that aims only to please itself.

Oddly, after leaving us aching for the film to go off the rails, when “Angel of Mine” finally does in the final scene, its message is so screwy that the audience might feel as loopy as poor Lizzie.

Howard is great at capturing the timbre of the ship, the creaks and snaps and the whir of the hemp lines, and the sonar clicks of the whales strategizing below. All his sound and fury has a befuddling purpose. His emotional climax is about, well, disaster insurance.

Young Ones is an old-fashioned, worthwhile curio down to the closing credits.

Oddly — and rather fascinatingly — this is a film about a spiritual revolution.

The film’s early snark turns as cloying and insincere as the cultural doublespeak that it parodies. By the final act, its dialogue is so burdened by inspirational maxims about personal authenticity that it feels as though the script has been hijacked by yearbook quotes.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a fast-paced romp that’s silly, filled with quips and unabashedly for children — which is refreshing, coming at a time when so many other children’s franchises have succumbed to Sturm und Drang.

The power of the film — and of Palmer’s phenomenal performance — is watching Alice grow into her voice.

Winstead makes you believe, however improbably, that if a woman like Kate actually existed outside a screenwriter’s imagination, she wouldn’t be far off from this portrayal: isolated, mule-headed and ready for a change.

Sandberg started his career in small horror films, and doesn’t seem to have much ambition to scale up. Most of the sequences are cut from medium shots strung together without much style — they may as well be a "Saturday Night Live” sketch.

[Aselton's] disregard for her male characters causes Black Rock to spiral into dudette "Deliverance."

Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, "Startups." Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly people may not notice.

As sloppy as it is, there’s no denying that Honey Don’t! works as a noir with a pleasant, peppery flavor. Yet, there’s a snap missing in its rhythm, a sense that it doesn’t know when and how its gags should hit.

“Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.

Green is sexy, funny, dangerous, and wild -- everything the film needed to be -- and whenever she's not on-screen, we feel her absence as though the sun has blinked off.

The film strips Fifty Shades of Grey to its essentials: a confident man, an awkward girl, and a red room rimmed with leather handcuffs. From there, Taylor-Johnson rebuilds. She constructs an erotic dramedy that takes its romance seriously even as it admits that Christian Grey's very existence is absurd.

Most oppressively, every inch of Horns is choked in religious metaphor that strangles the fun from the film. Aja clutters the movie with golden crosses and Garden of Eden snakes, but doesn't dare wrestle with the theology behind them — this is a snapshot of a steak, not a full meal.

The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.

This is a film that spells out its intentions for an audience still learning its ABCs, a film where Michael Giacchino’s misty violins never stop insisting how to feel, where Krasinski’s goofy dad literally wears a heart on his chest.

Destination Wedding barely holds together as a coherent film. It’s too callous for coos, too chipper to examine the dark corners of the soul. Yet it works as a valentine to old-fashioned star power — two modern legends, older if no wiser, daring the audience to somehow love them for all their faults, and on that level, somehow succeeding.

This is a heartier celebration of McCarthy’s talents, a mash note to a comic who can also play flirtatious, empathetic, and human. She’s believable, even if the scenes setting-off her performance aren’t.

Bragi F. Schut’s script mumbles its potentially intriguing themes.

O’Brien could grow into the role. He has an earnest, high voice — perhaps the reason he’s barely allowed to speak — and shines in the rare scenes where he gets to show personality, as do Keaton and Kitsch when they put down their guns.... It’d be more fun to watch the three actors swap war stories over beers than batter each other — especially when their worst enemy is the script’s coma-inducing machismo.

The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.

Half the time, Black’s dialogue is just announcing what we’re looking at, from diamond swords to flying hot air balloons that look like goth squids. But it’s the gleam in his eyes, the gusto in his delivery, that makes every line zing.

This is a curio that demands to be seen.

Taken 2 is 91 minutes of "See Neeson kill-kill, Neeson kill!"

Step Up All In cuts too fast, the way an MTV hack does when forced to disguise that a starlet can't move.

The problem isn't that these lustbirds suffer no delusions about their temporary affair. It's that Nichols and screenwriter Mark Hammer can't commit to the cynicism.

Cross, who also wrote the script, is content to come across like a grumpy old man. His comedy is one-note, furious, and fun-enough.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt dominates this slight, worth-a-watch dramedy.

Country Strong is a charmer that makes you forgive all of its false notes simply because the talent plays them with conviction.

Compared to Rampage, King Kong and Godzilla have James Brown levels of soul. Peyton has just made another movie about the Rock running through rubble.

In 1994, 16-year-old surfer Jay Moriarity braved the biggest waves ever seen off the coast of Northern California. His biopic, Chasing Mavericks, gets that fact right but changes everything else about his life in order to bowl audiences over in a saccharine tsunami.

Gaudet and Pullapilly argue, cheekily and convincingly, that the real crooks are the unseen conglomerates who’ve created a society that devalues products and their consumers.

Theron proved her comedy chops in the underrated Young Adult, and here she and MacFarlane get along like two eager puppies. If MacFarlane indulges in self-flattery by keeping in all the times this babe bursts into laughter at his jokes, he's forgiven; at least we feel like the characters are actually listening to each other.

Neither disposable nor a long-lost masterpiece, she might not be loved by all the boys, but she's still worth a Friday night date.

Almost as bad as we want it to be, which is to say, it straddles the line between campy and legit without winning over either audience.

As much as I enjoyed this bizarre, ambitious adventure and its careful popcorn kitsch, Tarzan’s story will always leave our ears ringing with something we hate, whether you choose Burroughs’s white-savior syndrome or Christoph Waltz’s shivery final speech: “The future belongs to me.”

Chris Matheson's script focuses its energy on small, wickedly funny gags, half of which Robinson seems to have sputtered out as improv.

This is sloppier and more personality-driven than [Moorhouse's] past work, but the performances are so shamelessly exuberant that, after a while, you simply throw up your hands at the flaws.

The movie is constrained by its own conscience.

While the high jinks are too haphazard to give him a credible — or heck, even coherent — character arc, Cena is here and there able to seize moments to show us the fissures in his layered personas, a fragile construction of confidence, ego, vulnerability and need.

Let's not blame Vince Vaughn for this stale cupcake. He's halfway through his Alec Baldwin-like transition from underbaked hunk to charismatic character actor.

The only surprise is that Roberts shuns cheap jump scare surprises in favor of well-crafted suspense scenes that play out like a game of three card monte. There’s delight in cinematographer Maxime Alexandre and editor Dev Singh’s slow-building visual gags.

The high-aggro guitar score is a misstep, but a panting, battered King is credible and compelling as she kicks, stabs and screams for the right to choose her own destiny.

Step Up Revolution has again found some of the most kinetic talents in the country.

San Andreas can't wait for the carnage. The problem is, it's too chicken to ask us to comprehend it. It's all big, distant, unfathomable wreckage -- all shattering skyscrapers and rippling cityscapes -- with no sense of the human cost.

Only when Sarah and Toni meet for the first time, an hour in, does the film allow a genuine conversation — and, gratefully, a moment of recognition.

If the movie succeeds at anything, it’s in capturing Marley’s lingering spell on fans.

It’s all a little slow and stoic and familiar.

What makes Forte so funny is that he stalks through the flick cocksure and utterly deadpan.

Like Kogonada, I believe that artifice is a useful tool to dig up honesty. But a script with this much contrivance only works if it’s delivered with snap and confidence. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is sticky sweet and sludgy and so cloyingly aesthetic that the roadkill bleeds ropes of twee entrails.

It’s clear why these films need Neeson: He commits to every line like his life actually does depend on it. But gravitas alone can’t salvage the frustrating plot contrivances and ridiculous dialogue that make the characters sound dumber and dumber the more they explain their motivations.

While the plot is a non-starter, the margins of Gold and co-director Tammy Caplan's debut feature are scattered with other real-life magicians who make quarters vanish every time our attention does the same.

The New Mutants spent three years on ice before being allowed to escape into the slowest summer season in a century. That’s fitting for a film that’s all buildup and no bang.

The heavily improvised flick ambles as slowly as a toddler rounding first base. Hopefully, Garlin's next movie bothers to include a plot and jokes, i.e. the essential building blocks of a comedy.

The jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy.

Insurgent is so vapid it seems impossible that there's enough story left for another sequel.

There's plenty of atmosphere and awe, even if it's in the service of a story that starts rote and finds its sea legs only when half the divers have sunk their bones to Davy Jones.

This recycled trash is no treasure, but I’m betting the majority of this redo’s audience will be young enough to find ’90s-style schlock adorably quaint.

Won't Back Down makes grand drama of bureaucracy, positioning Gyllenhaal as the knight slaying 400 pages of government paperwork in order to wrest control of her daughter's elementary school. It's rousing - if not thrilling - stuff.

The plot is a bust. Five credited screenwriters and not one compelling stake.

Even viewers with a tolerance for this kind of saccharine cinema — oversaturated green grass, slow-motion sprinting, kindly biker gangs, and a fleeting bar squabble in which the nastiest insult is “Idiot!” — will likely say their favorite part is the end credits.

The execution is at once laconic and nonsensical.

The film has so much visual imagination that it tends to squander it.

When it was all over, I found myself googling Dante for my own clue as to what I’d just suffered: “He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.”

Show 'Em What You're Made Of convincingly argues that these boy-men have something to say about the fickleness of fate — something they knew more about as young men than any of the cynics who dismissed them for dancing in unison. The hardest part will be convincing people to listen.

It’s a mess — and I’m not just talking about the close-up of a bleeding, ghost-gratified fingernail.

The Great Wall doesn't have the lunacy that made last year's Gods of Egypt a hoot. Zhang can't kick his craving for respectability, even if he's making a movie that flips the middle finger at historicity.

It has good style and a handful of fun ideas, but it’s ultimately as superficial as the puff pieces it’s attacking.

The script has plot twists so cuckoo they make soap operas look cowardly.

As a debut film, Arizona shows that Watson could become a director with interesting ideas, but this housing crisis horror comedy is definitely just a rental.

Kills tops the 2010 original by not giving a mierda about logic or character.

Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films.

Forget going soft — Ride Along proves Ice Cube's got bigger image problems than kiddie movies and Coors Light commercials.

The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

There's something fearlessly uncool about the film, which suffers mostly from being made 30 years too late.

The screenplay, adapted by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles from a British mini-series, gifts Bullock a few big screaming scenes but mostly has her slouching around silently while it dithers over whether or not to root for Ruth to rebuild her life.

Like James in the ring, it doesn't pack a lot of power, but it comes out swinging and sweats for applause.

Instead of focusing on the squad in the title — the chemistry the audience wants to see — Ayer doubles down on the usual DC tics: dark fights, a humdrum dependence on guns and fists, a cynical everyone-sucks grasp of politics, and sudden rain showers that people ignore. It’s moody and mindless, an angry toddler screaming over his parents’ classic rock mix of The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and a 14-year-old song from Eminem.

French Girl is a love triangle farce that’s mostly set in Quebec City but takes place on Planet Rom-com where bipedal characters act out in ways that rarely resemble human behavior.

Of course, the movie doesn't work. But Costner does. No matter now nonsensical and uneven 3 Days to Kill gets, he's miraculously consistent.

Despite the screaming gore, the movie is so rote that it can’t even rouse us for the de rigueur exorcism.

It’s hard to spend time with Jackie, and Hackford doesn’t make a convincing case as to why we should. Instead, the script attempts to justify his bitterness by lowering the rest of the world to his level.

Director Gary Fleder seems to sometimes suspect Homefront could pass as comedy.

The filmmaking deserves credit for refusing to leer as the ladies convincingly kick and punch — all focus is on the stunts, not on sex appeal. Yet there’s a sense that “The 355” felt forced to pick between being sincere or being fun. It chose solemnity. As a result, it’s flat-footed even when the setups yearn to be playful.

Funnier, sharper and sweeter than expected.

Beat by beat, My Little Pony: The Movie is at once clichéd and exceptional.

Despite all the boobs, The Change-Up is very fair to its female characters-well, at least to Mann and Wilde, who both ring true, even if Wilde is almost too good to be true...It sounds like a trifling detail, but those details are sorely missing from most "date movies," in which even the women laughing in the audience exit feeling like they're the butt of the joke.

[Paquet-Brenner] squanders Dark Places' icky setup for a rote investigation to find the real killer, a revelation greeted not with a "What?!" but with a "Whatever."

Scott Waugh's moronic flick has multiple personalities — it's the Sibyl of street racing, with a script that doesn't feel so much typed as button-mashed.

Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.

Don’t force a plot to emerge. Better to experience “Here” like open-eyed meditation, nodding at connections and ideas so fragile they’d disintegrate if said aloud.

All that's missing from Just Like a Woman, Rachid Bouchareb's salute to "Thelma & Louise," is the quality.

The usual possession beats are here — creepy crawling! smoking crucifixes! shivering violins! — and given their own quirky spins. (One key revelation takes place over coffees at McDonald’s.) Yet, Daniels carves space for the intimate moments that matter to him.

For all its careful evasions, I believe that the Michael this movie reveals is true and worth watching. But ultimately, it’s the music that breaks down our resistance, from the opening funk beats of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the climax, which essentially cues a greatest hits tape right when we know the bad times are about to begin.

Can a plane jump a shark when it's already in the air? To Disney, that question is moot. It's so certain that Planes will make a mint in toys, if not in theaters, that it's already slated a sequel for next summer.

Boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.

The film is so stylishly done that I could accept it on those plain terms.

Genisys is all bullets and bombs, action without pause, as though if the ride stops the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.

Bad Santa 2 doesn't hate Christmas. It just hates women.

Director Douglas McGrath's empathy rescues it from the brink of disaster porn - it's so good-hearted and optimistic that a swath of stressed out moms will feel the flick speaks directly to them, which it does.

A raunchy, aggressively inane cartoon that flips the bird — both onscreen and thematically — to a strain of patriotism that insists that men who profited from slavery were sober-minded heroes whose vision of democracy remains flawless, bro.

When the head-scratching impossibilities are more irritating than intriguing, does the last-second explanation outweigh the two hours we've spent rolling our eyes?

In 2014, Men, Women & Children feels like a sermon. It's obvious and mundane, "Chopsticks" pounded on the piano.

Murder Mystery feels as shamelessly gaudy as paste jewelry — a trinket for nights that aspire to nothing more exotic than a pizza — but Aniston sparkles like the real deal.

Shadyac spins cooperation in a different direction. I Am takes the sharing instinct as proof that all living beings are interconnected.

Though the arc of the film is as saccharine as a Precious Moments figurine — and it'll play that way for audiences who can't be bothered to look closer — Hudgens is too honest to believe in simple, happy endings.

Fun Size isn't good enough to ascend to those John Hughesian ranks, and its small holiday window means it won't scarf much box office. But at least first time feature director Josh Schwartz can expect a minor slumber party hit on DVD.

It’s a shallow look at shallow people.

The movie comes across as a deliberately, almost defensively, inane trifle; a cupcake whose icing reads, “Enjoy the tooth decay.”

Space Jam: A New Legacy is chaotic, rainbow sprinkle-colored nonsense that, unlike the original, manages to hold together as a movie.

While it's easy to tease first-time writer-director Tom Gormican's raunchy rom-com, the trio has a shaggy chemistry, and most of the jokes hit.

Parents with restless, animal-loving children may as well throw it a bone.

What it means, Alcazar leaves open for interpretation. He’s more a mood maker than a story teller, and the film feels like people watching at a fancy party and inhaling different wafts of perfume.

The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.

It manages to be both bizarre and boring. While I admire Jones’ inventive details...the film simply looks cheap.

Who’s the real victim here? The audience — yet Kemper’s no-nonsense pixie who suffers a dozen thumbtacks to the face runs a close second.

Everly has the heaving, bloody bosoms of an exploitation flick, yet Hayek gives the character powerful dignity. She's no victim, nor an off-the-shelf "strong woman."

From abandoned panic rooms to flubbed Ghostface executions, the characters make so many dumb choices that eventually we’re convinced that Williamson is frustrating us by design. Maybe in the boldest meta twist of all, the inventor of "Scream” wants to kill it off himself.

The plot is scattershot; the drama ant-size.

The film's anthropological interest in Indonesia is the smartest thing in an otherwise familiar scramble of kidnapped babes, expensive jewelry and millions of bullets.

A delirious, pulpy mishmash of knockoffs, The Scargiver isn’t good, but it sure is something.

Diana is a Lifetime movie in sensible pumps, at once too silly to be taken seriously, yet so self-serious it rarely allows us to giggle.

Get Hard is most comfortable — and funny — when Cohen gets back to skewering class warfare.

Madec and Ben's showdown becomes a battle to see which type of man is best equipped for survival: the well-funded scoundrel or the honest grunt. The film is too honest itself to always give us the answer we want. It's also too dully on-the-nose to entertain.

Red One is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids — especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun.

McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.

Love Hurts is an action-romance that fizzles like a science-class volcano made of baking soda and cheese. The individual ingredients are fine: two killers on the run from punishment and their personal feelings for each other, played by Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. But their chemistry is all wrong.

Though the gags are retrograde groaners, Lapkus embarrasses herself with confidence. Her full-throttle verve transcends the script like a water skier leaping over a Great White.

The Space Between Us has admirable ambition, even though none of it works. Sure, the romance is a bust and the script is a howl. Yet every so often, Butterfield becomes infatuated with a new earth treasure...and for a moment, the film reminds us that there are things on this planet worth risking your life for.

It presumes that children care a great deal about cellphone towers, political campaigns, and Twitter. Still, Quvenzhané Wallis, as Annie, is raw, charismatic, alive, and unpredictable.

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.

More of a stunt than a script, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) should get a modest amount of I-dare-you ticket sales, but it's about as mass market as a dogfight.

A good romance can make us endure an implausible plot as long as the leads have heat. Luke and Sophia's connection feels true. Who cares about the mechanics? By the time The Longest Ride runs right off a cliff, we're already strapped in to the passenger seat. Give in and enjoy the plunge.

There isn't enough visual beauty to forgive the screenplay's ugliness, but Bay does brave a daring new standard in product placement.

It's a handsome nothing, at least until you get sick of the screaming.

To Rad, Dangerous Men was a life's work, and to sit through it feels like honoring the dreamers of the world who at least get shit done. Is it terrible? Of course. Is there belly-dancing? Duh.

This is a film as tidy, transparent and kid-friendly as a square of Jell-O salad, and so squishily eager-to-please that it doesn’t engage with its religious themes so much as tuck them into song lyrics to hover in the narrative like grapes.

As ever, he has the last laugh. This is How Stella Got Her Groove Back, for the Pop-Tart crowd, a wish-fulfillment weepie that not only narrowly clears Perry's low bar, thanks mostly to McLendon-Covey and Brown, but has already sold the TV sitcom rights to Oprah.

This TMNT is bigger and emptier, a wasteland of pixels.

Oddly, that extra star power makes Black November look cheap. It's threadbare for an action flick... The story Amata wants to tell is much simpler, and he might have been more successful sticking to his own guns and staying with his sturdy, empathetic heroine.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

For smart, strong girls and the guys who like them, Vampire Academy will hit a vein.

Corporate Animals is a character sketch in search of a plot.

The flick, written by debut screenwriter James McFarland, is twisty, clever, and totally Nineties.

This all-star mercenary squadron composed of ’80s-to-aughts brutes is the cinematic equivalent to Slash’s Snakepit, a supergroup throwback to an era when men were meatheads and we in the audience merrily cheered them on.

Looking at the obnoxious TV ads for The Smurfs, it's easy to dismiss the film as a shrill, joyless exercise in special effects without substance. It's even easier after actually seeing it.

A serviceable if silly B-movie.

Like a hot tub itself, it looks inviting, but all too soon you've had enough.

Bright has brief jolts of life.

Hector is trying to say something true about a generation of quietly dissatisfied demi-adults who are terrified to take emotional risks. At least it left its comfort zone and tried.

The funniest Madea film in a fair stretch... It's also, of course, not good by any definition.

Here's a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special.

While Kiriya can shoot a sword fight, his preferred pace is glacial. He wants to make sure the audience feels every plot point.

We're not sure what director Michelle Danner, who plays Herman's defensive mother in an uncredited role, wants us to get besides a reminder that angry boys act out for a host of half-defined reasons.

The hard part will be convincing audiences to shake off their Depp fatigue and embrace a film that's daffy, dated, and precisely as intended.

At least Williams displays a bit of inventive flair with novel booby traps and a chase scene that features a lurching garbage truck.

You can see the jokes, but most of them don’t land. Still, there is some neat design work if you squint.

Taken 3 isn't brilliant, but it's a hell of a lot of dumb, head-smacking fun.

A cardboard cutout of a movie.

The disarray is baffling for the audience, and downright punishing for Hart, whose lead character is forced to shape-shift between scenes, veering from milquetoast to petty to tyrannical to pushed-around.

Neither the film, nor the film within the film, hold our attention. Bummer, Keanu.

We get the broad strokes of how the hippies corrupted their own movement, but there isn't a single lead character we'd give a dollar to on Haight Street.

It’s yet another comedy of indignities — sorry, make that inanities.

There’s a frozen loogie at the heart of The Snowman.

Jack and Jill is a barrage of fart jokes and fat jokes and mean jokes that sincerely thinks it deserves to end with a hug. It doesn't deserve awwwws - and it doesn't deserve your money.

The Cobbler has invented a new category of terrible: cruel schmaltz.

It's a goofy, episodic trifle designed to induce swoons among the saccharine who coo every time they see a cute guy, or a baby, or a cute guy holding a baby while watching YouTube videos about how to change a diaper.

There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew.

Perhaps Cage flipped a coin before Armstrong called “Action!” and decided to play this role straight. Alas, he has robbed the irony-attuned audiences of their only reason to go.

If you think three months is an impossible amount of time to write and produce a feature film, well, it is.

Yes, Nine Lives is dumb. Yes, it’s for very young kids. Yes, Lil Bub has a cameo. And yes, I giggled anyway.

3 Geezers is painful.

I’m hesitant to call Melania propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well. If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed.

The result is high school English crossed with "Waiting for Guffman," though the humor is largely accidental.

Piscopo...isn't just too good for this film, he's too good to be giving it this much effort.

Stepping High is both a trifle and an impassioned argument that dance is a direct route to character, ethics and world peace.

Is it good? No. Is it fun? A little. Is there a makeover montage? Of course.

Long before the motley crew crashes the Met Gala, it’s clear that director Ryan Crego is bolting wacky gee-gaws onto a rote plot. Still, several gags pay off.

It’s as uplifting and threadbare as a feel-good viral video stretched to feature length, yet Makijany’s ability to rally the troops, get solid performances from first-time actors, and simply get the film made is worth a genuine cheer.

It’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance.

The director Rachel Suissa runs Laclos’s story through a heavy Instagram filter in this outlandish, flimsy adaptation.

One wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.

Only after Emma’s circumstances get worse — the poor dear is knocked comatose — do things onscreen improve.

This political context is vital to appreciate the rebellion underneath Sarnet’s romp; otherwise, it’s easy to dismiss it as merely a goofy riff on the Shaw Brothers Studios’ landmark Hong Kong hit “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” which likewise followed a novice’s hard-earned spiritual and gymnastic growth. Of course, it is that, too.