Amy Nicholson

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.

Levinson’s battling more villains than any script can take on, and by the end, his sharp jabs bleed into a gory finale that settles for cathartic cheers.

Creed wants all of the Rocky drama but invests in none of the smarts.

It's clear that Straight Outta Compton is at once too padded and too thin. It's as if the story of these real-life legends was so unruly and dangerous that the filmmakers became the cops, forcing it into submission.

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.

Tom Hanks is so quietly compelling that he gives the film an illusion of depth.

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.

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

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

Where Jane feels thinly sketched in pastels, Corrine’s portrait has been detailed in bright permanent markers. A’zion roils with emotions and her character is funny, mercurial, reactive and real.

I’ll give Schrader the benefit of the doubt that his dialogue is stilted by design, even though the female characters are particularly prone to clunkers. . . But it’s still irritating to sit through, and once we start questioning everything we see — would young Leonard really order a bran muffin at an ice cream parlor? — it gets harder to hand over our trust when the movie wants to get emotional.

The movie doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere until it explodes, and the dazzling fireworks don’t quite offset its long, seemingly aimless fuse.

The unwieldy action rom-com Novocaine makes a convincing argument that its lead, Jack Quaid, can do it all: woo the girl, shoot the goon and tickle the audience. The movie itself has a harder time, screwing its three genres together so awkwardly that it tends to limp.

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

Despite its climactic eye-rolls, Friday’s Child is a great showcase for Sheridan

We’re stuck with Hancock’s vanilla saga about a soulless businessman who failed until he won big, a story that might have worked in the cynical ’90s but today has a moral obligation to say something with its two-hour running time.

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

Future Past starts fast and never slows down. There's not a line of dialogue that isn't exposition... What fun there is slips in through director Bryan Singer's visuals.

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

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.

The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé.

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.

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.