Andrew Lapin

Breakfast With Curtis is so gentle, it doesn’t bother with antagonists, or even much conflict.

Burdge, Lafleur, and Palladino are effortlessly believable as sisters, but that only makes it seem like a shame that the script doesn’t take fuller advantage of their innate chemistry.

Through all the ham-fisted lunacy, writer-director John Huddles displays an infectious love of philosophy, coupled with an exhilarating, anything-goes filmmaking style.

The film’s brevity really does work against it, giving Nicholson cover to fly by the history of gang warfare without having to dwell on anything for too long.

It needs to be emphasized again for the record that The Purge: Anarchy is a tremendously stupid film... But there’s an almost-camp quality to how DeMonaco takes this stupidity to greater heights, building a complex mythology around the plot like a giant moat around a pillow fort.

It’s a brutal argument to make: that the most relevant information to convey about the life of an influential writer is the fact that she struggled early and often. This approach may seem philosophically appropriate for a movie about existentialists, but dramatically, it makes the film a bit of a slog.

It’s appropriately weighty and filled with loss-of-innocence undertones and some fun cultural detours, yet the film’s odd flatness makes it hard to invest in.

Date And Switch is a plucky step in the right direction for diversity in teen comedies, but it lacks the extra oomph to stand on its own merits.

The film creates a kind of romantic view of the minutiae of running a museum, yet it’s barely concerned with the actual artwork housed within. Maybe this won’t matter to the audience, if they find the mere idea of a museum fascinating on its own.

Smith and Kravitz, both tremendously likable, simply don’t have enough to do together.

Ultimately, the filmmakers are more interested in congratulating Occupy for taking a stand than in shedding light on its fascinating infrastructure and backstory, as though a protest’s existence automatically spells victory for its cause.

Against The Sun, like its rudderless seacraft, goes with the path of least resistance: a talkfest where the men reiterate every obstacle they face out loud (all the better to show off period-friendly dialect), engage in some temporary breakdown of friendly bonds, and pray. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but there’s also nothing special about it.

What’s truly strange about Two is how halfheartedly director Heather Winters acknowledges anything that might have provided some nuance in the Childs’ lives.

The film doesn’t ask its stars for much, and they deliver.

The chief problem is that no matter what the nameless dude is up to, it hardly seems to matter.

The majority of the cast are non-actors, and act it, judging by their stilted, wooden performances and robotic attempts at simple human interactions. This seems to be the point, since they’re playing non-characters, but such indifference in a film is only tolerable for so long.

The film is fitfully amusing but a bit too shapeless, even for a story about slackers.

Ultimately, the Tickells cram so much into their 90-minute cause machine that nothing really sticks, and seemingly crucial interviews soon become distant memories.

Once the Heavies arrive back on the scene, Raisani uses their presence—and the way the military dispatches them—to dodge complexity in favor of shooting stuff for freedom’s last stand. It’s Starship Troopers without the irony. But it looks nice.

Even with a strong first half lampooning the vapidity of American news media, The Interview is the worst thing Rogen has ever done.

Apart from its shallow analysis, Terms And Conditions is, if anything, not alarmist enough: Its worst-case scenario has already come true.

Panning across still photos and scouring island maps like Ken Burns hunting for treasure, Geller and Goldfine (Ballets Russes) whittle a truly insane murder mystery into a competent artifact for Weird History buffs.

The Machine is small science fiction. In a genre that openly invites invention, it barely bothers.

The filmmakers don’t bother to dig into the psychology of their subjects, or even get to know them as anything more than symbols.

Revolting plays with interesting ideas about how different generations of activists inspire and feed off of one another, but that theme plays out as blindly congratulatory.

There’s something deeply depressing about a debut film centered on fading talent, but even more depressing are the downright amateurish insights it musters about youth, the art world, and the burdens of growing up gifted.

The movie’s style consists of tossing up a lot of heartbreaking medical stories next to a characterization of the industry as a mysterious monolith, and letting viewers finish the correlation in their heads. When it’s possible to use the same line of reasoning to push both truth and lies, different tactics are in order.