Barbara VanDenburgh

It's more thought experiment than film, and although it's laudable for its daring to be unlike any film you’re likely to have ever seen, it ultimately doesn't have more meaning to import than a well-photographed daily affirmations calendar.

At its best, it hits the gut with the free-fall feel of a theme-park ride. But it’s a long and winding path back to the gate, and “Valerian” loses its way many times, however beautifully.

How do you make a legend as imposing as Shakespeare flesh? All Is True suggests you can't, if not even Branagh, Dench, McKellen, et al. can bring him down to earth. Maybe it's for the best that the real man is unknowable, that man is simply the work itself.

The end result is as dour and unilluminating as British weather.

Despite its ostensive seriousness, Galveston is a tepid crime drama without talons sharp enough to sink into the audience.

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.

Crown Heights is soul-shaking only in the abstract. In execution, it’s deathly dull.

The film’s focus is too easily distracted by celebrity and turns less documentary and more fawning love letter to an industry already in love with itself.

Despite its familiarity, A Bad Moms Christmas is a touch better than the first bacchanal.

How disappointing that a movie about challenging authority should be such a slave to convention.

Doesn’t plumb the depths of adolescent emotions and high-school politics so much as skims the surface in a psychedelic dinghy.

There's a surface elegance that might play as depth in smaller doses, but at feature length, the stylistic flourishes seem to be covering for deficiencies rather than servicing the material.

Delivery Man means well, but it’s innocuous to the point of non-existence. In trying to please everyone, the film runs the risk of pleasing no one.

The Kitchen requires Scorsese levels of charisma to work, and only McCarthy comes close out of sheer professionalism.

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

There's nothing surprising or fresh about these people, their problems or their pairing, each character fitting snugly into his or her familiar archetype.

Without a buttress of cleverness, Cooties is mere freewheeling idiocy.

Oyelowo and Mara try to bring humanity and tension to the testimonial thriller of two lost souls finding their way together, but they only succeed in bursts, hampered by marketing copy masquerading as dialogue.

For all its energy, razzle-dazzle and whiz-bang technology, it doesn't know how to tell a simple story or cobble together three-dimensional characters, and that's a problem not even the best of 3-D glasses can fix.

Paranoia is ostensibly a thriller, but there’s nothing remotely thrilling about it. This slick, plodding bore is as exciting as watching somebody else tap out text messages.

Inexpert execution, lazy attention to detail and a lackluster lead performance conspire to render a juicy mystery rather boring.

There’s daring in the film’s slow unfurling. The problem, though, isn’t one of patience but of payoff. Woodshock is beautiful but it’s all chassis, a root-dead tree that crumbles beneath the ax.

Movie-release schedules are set by studios months in advance, and many are the movie that had the misfortune to open at an inopportune time. But Hotel Mumbai is responsible for myriad other poor creative decisions that make a spectacle of misery.

Rebel in the Rye is Hollywood regular Danny Strong’s feature-film directorial debut, and it fumbles for a voice in tracking the life of a writer renowned for his.

Austenland plays out like an overly elaborate excuse to have people act silly in corsets and bloomers.

That it chooses to waste a capable cast of mature actors by trotting out tired sex jokes as the enfeebled old men plot the world's most needlessly convoluted bank heist solves the mystery of why it took the film two years to limp its way to American cinemas.

For 90 minutes we’re presented with idiot characters who do terrible things to themselves and each other, and in its final gasp the movie tries to retrofit them into heroes.

If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?