Barbara VanDenburgh

This cartoonishly violent exercise in cinematic hero worship comes at the audience with chambers loaded and fires off rounds too rapidly to worry about how vapid it all is.

This fully animated reboot embraces the Smurfs Saturday-morning-cartoon roots and creates a sprightly, brightly colored, age-appropriate adventure for young children fresh to the little blue woodland creatures.

Ghost in the Shell sidesteps questions of humanity and the effect of technology on the human spirit and opts instead for boilerplate sci-fi spectacle, eschewing existentialism for predictable plot and the glittery trappings of its 21st-century carapace

This isn’t a war movie; it’s an after-the-war movie. But the battle lines are still drawn, and every ragged breath the film takes braces for an explosion.

Its real accomplishment is that, with so much money behind it and a true visionary at the helm, it manages to feel so dated.

It just feels desperate.

The laughs don’t add up. There’s no dramatic arc. Jackie doesn’t grow or learn from his downfall, so much as bumble his way out of it to an unsatisfying conclusion.

The film is packed with moments of rank idiocy.

Ornamented heavily with creative visual pleasures, the film is bogged down, not just by weighty thematic issues — death, divorce, bullying, unfairness — but by professions of its own grandeur.

When executed with love and peopled with actors who breathe life into their characters, Hidden Figures is precisely the delight it aims to be.

Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.

The characteristics that make Evolution an intriguing piece of cinema also make it a not entirely successful one.

Bell lets the action onscreen tell a story that’s every bit as rousing as a Disney adventure.

The danger in making a movie like Coming Through the Rye is in the constant referencing and hero worship of bigger, better, towering works of art — you can only exist in their shadows and pale all the more for the comparison.

Relying wholly on good casting and the charisma of its actors, big and small, to elevate too-familiar material, the film’s stale humor hinges on two faulty premises: That the suburbs are inscrutable and that the people who live in them are clueless.

Burton reins in his worst impulses, bad habits that he’s been cultivating for over a decade, to make a wickedly dark children’s movie that is, finally, blessedly, fun to look at.

It’s a slight film, but one that hits all the tricky emotional and comedic notes without a hint of cruelty.

Storks is charmless with rote obligation. This is a kid’s film for hire, with none of the creativity, emotion and design that elevate the genre to art, or even simply a fun time at the movies.

For all of Cianfrance’s seriousness, the material proves too essentially melodramatic, hokey and self-serious to save. No gorgeous cinematography and no cast, no matter how A-list, can ultimately save this material from itself.

When the material falters, Sumpter and Sawyers suck you back in with their pitch-perfect performances.

Koreeda makes thrilling the rich inner lives of four young women trying to navigate rocky emotional terrain in the wake of their father’s death.

There’s a limit to how much patience one has for spending time with terrible people living large. But for all the lackluster familiarity of the film’s style, the story is too interesting, too baffling to deny.

It’s a zombie movie that, amidst the giddy bloodshed, allows room for philosophical questions about our fundamental responsibilities to one another. It may not be something we’ve never seen before, but it’s something we can benefit from seeing again.

It’s not the moms that are bad — it’s the movie.

It wouldn’t make the movie good, but at least a meteor strike would preclude the possibility of a sixth “Ice Age” film.

It’s a variation on a theme that Solondz has been working through his whole filmography, and when he’s successful, he convinces you to believe the worst in people and laugh at it. But when he’s not, the film can feel like punishment.

Even more than an expose of bad reporting and social hysteria, The Witness is an intimate exercise in grief and healing

It’s safe to say that Tickled is nothing like what its filmmakers set out to make. That's an artistic blessing.