Blake Goble

Rio, I Love You is worth a passing look for its pot of talent.

The film possesses a quiet, considered tension that draws the viewer in.

After their muddled but well-meaning Tammy, McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone’s follow up is a superior mix of jokes, to the point that even when the film misses its mark, McCarthy and her crew wheel and deal to the bitter end.

Arnaud Desplechin delivers a thrilling reminiscence that romanticizes and believes in youth’s ungraceful but intense splendors.

Grimsby’s provocative, but not stupid. It knows what kind of humor it wants to achieve, and often scores big.

Fey delivers the performance like the super-capable talent she is, with range and authenticity. She’s a character with a fully expressed arc, foibles and all. She’s the dramedy’s best weapon.

The way Right Now, Wrong Then yields different results, moods, and beats as the result of minor shake-ups in the opening scenes is beyond fascinating, often charming, and at times amusingly uncomfortable.

Eddie the Eagle trips plenty, but Eddie, insufferable as he may be, represents the people that in spite of failure being visible at the bottom of a 90-meter ski drop, still take that leap.

Race is a film best enjoyed for its mild ambitions and accomplishments, which easily beat out its missteps.

Perhaps the film’s most striking quality is its restraint. Thematically and stylistically, it’s a film of quiet medium shots, long takes, and clear but evasive words. Every choice is tiny, but humane and usually deliberate.

Zoolander No. 2 invokes that old Simpsons headline: “old man yells at modern culture.”

A comedy of manners and femininity gets bisected by gnarly effects, and the two-tone approach works in its way.

"Jane" eventually comes alive, even if Jane never truly does.

Marlon Wayans is clearly getting off on the gags, but the lazy, hard humor, and elastic joke-making eventually has a numbing effect.

The Finest Hours is exactly that. Fine, while embracing its studio aesthetic and morally true heroism.

If for one second you forget the diverging script, the weak direction, and Efron’s limitations, there’s something to be amused by with De Niro’s flagrantly foul-mouthed, horned-up grandfather figure.

Shots are short, oddly made, and shoddily smashed together. There’s no spatial continuity, let alone consistency in time of day, or even a care for any kind of visual coherence. 13 Hours is just chaos. It’s unwatchable, unlikable, and unworthy of respect.

Phoenix is a death-defying melodrama of rare emotional obsession.

There’s a laziness to The Road Chip, what with its mostly stale or needy jokes and cutesy plotting.

Sisters is made of pure, frenzied comic momentum.

It’s a fierce, visceral vision with a superb cast, that one suspects was more focused on pumping up Macbeth than reminding people why it’s such a lasting cautionary tale.

Here’s a film with all the right ingredients and a few too many wrong moves, yet one that’s admirable for trying as hard as it does.

It’s not that funny, and feels like a ripoff of Animal House. Either way, The Wild Life is like the contractually obligated Crowe script that time forgot, his undisciplined id, playing with cheap thrills before he got a chance to express himself like a human storyteller in 1989.

Yellow Submarine is a journey to the very brightest spots of our imagination, and it’s a vibrant reminder of how joyful, inventive, and freeing animation can be.

Like Prince’s music, perhaps this film is best taken in for its sensation and not its literal output. That, and the dialogue is just ridiculous. But Prince looks cool, owns his story’s loose ideology of churlish change, and stages some marvelously ornate shots.