Amy Nicholson

The result is sniggering slapstick that’s two-parts biological fluids and one-part salute to the innate empathy of mankind, often in the same scene.

Costume designer Ceci’s ensembles and Scott Kuzio’s production design are spot-on. Just as impressive is Simien’s steady handle on his serio-comic tone, at once sly, resonant, and horrific.

While the romantic comedy is hobbled by the lack of onscreen chemistry between the stars, it’s never in doubt that both actors are giving these exertions their all—each excels individually, but they just can’t kiss like they mean it. Instead, their rapport is that of professional colleagues who complement each other’s work, and Ms. Bullock allows Mr. Tatum to showcase his brilliance at playing dumb.

The big CG sequences are less captivating than simply watching the four ladies kick it with a pizza. Wiig and McCarthy nestle into their comfortable roles as the soft-spoken priss and the bustling madwoman, leaving room for Jones to barge in with her big punch lines. But keep your eyes on the background. That’s where Jones’s Saturday Night Live costar McKinnon lurks, quietly transforming herself into a movie star.

Freakier Friday won’t trade places with the original in audience’s hearts. But this disposable delight will at least allow fans who’ve grown up alongside Lohan to take their own offspring to the theater and bond about what the series means to them — to let their children picture them young — and then pinkie-swear, “Let’s never let that happen to us.”

See How They Run is a retro homage that surprises audiences with giggles and suspense.

It doesn't entirely engage, in part because it's so determined to correct the story that it can't let us explore it ourselves.

The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut.

Even at its most suspenseful, when Jed Kurzel’s cello score stabs at the eardrums, Overlord feels familiar, a collage of cinematic nightmares checking off its influences.

The intended message is that B.J. must stop chasing the spotlight to let his son be the star. But his character can’t do it and neither can he. In fairness, the title is a clue that technically the focus was never Korean music. The story was always about Pops learning to be a dad.

Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a slumber-party charmer that wants to satisfy every craving, even when what audiences are hungry for clashes, like pouring a chocolate milkshake over a pepperoni pizza.

None of the sizzle is as compelling as this character study of a young woman who confesses that her only childhood companion was the TV.

As a ballad about a rock star’s soul, The Nowhere Inn is a fun riff performed on flimsy strings.

A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.

The best part of Ridley’s performance is her plodding, heavy-footed walk that reminds us this well-groomed lady is still a stubborn child underneath her fancy dress. She has a blank, open face that absorbs the court’s machinations and reflects little back until she decides to act insane.

Bird layers on plenty of dazzle... But his heart is what keeps the story motoring and the ending is perfectly engineered, including a coda that encourages all of us to try harder.

Eventually, Jumbo clatters to a stop with a tinny cheer for acceptance, a sugar rush of Belgian new wave music, and the sense that the audience has been taken for a bit of a ride.

Every scene has a delight.

They Came Together is one joke repeated until you're broken down by the giggles. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and wouldn't if it weren't perfectly cast with America's Comedy Sweethearts.

Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film: the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods.

Bad Moms is a retro throwback that proves girl comedies can rage as hard — and as mindlessly — as any dumb all-dude giggler.

Johnson doesn't seem to trust her star to unclench and act... In contrast, the rest of the cast, down to the gossipy local bank teller (Christine Lahti), feels electrically human.

The result is as sugary as a fatal toothache, though it's hard to hate a film that merely wants to give the world a hug.

Between the hammering misanthropy, the herky-jerky editing and almost defiantly crummy sound mix, this exasperating film keeps you enjoyably off-balance.

Unbroken wants it all: the big cinematography, the close-up grit, the postcard flashbacks, and the grisly Götterdämmerung that earns directors awards. But it aches for a lighter touch -- the facts of Zamperini's life more than stand on their own.

Instead of bothering much about dialogue, Fuze is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace.

I can say without hyperbole that there are conversations in this movie that I have never heard before (and refuse to spoil). Better, I can confirm that Brown — the straight man to Duplass’s comic relief — delivers his half with conviction.

The paradox of "Little Monsters" is that it’s so guileless in its story and execution, it could have been made for kids, except for the disembowelings. Still, Nyong’o not only survives the film with her dignity intact, the audience might exit admiring her more.