Chris Nashawaty

To cover up the script's lack of originality, screenwriters Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman pummel us with a string of self-aware meta-commentary jokes that poke fun at bloated sequels.

Transpecos is a lean-and-mean atmospheric thriller that starts off tautly but ultimately slackens as it goes along.

It’s a shame the rest of the soap-opera story doesn’t measure up to its stunts.

Stalingrad is a 3-D epic that's one-dimensional.

After a while, the director of the more perceptive "Frances Ha" and "The Squid and the Whale" tips his hand, painting the aging Xers as guardians of integrity and the millennials as opportunists. It’s a cheap shot, and it feels like he’s telling the kids to get off his lawn. It’s not Stiller’s character who’s the curmudgeon, it’s Baumbach.

Tonally, the movie can’t decide whether it’s a comedy, a romance, or a wistful wartime madeleine. What it’s missing is the sense of joy and wonder of its predecessor.

As far as cheap warm-weather junk food goes, it will suffice. It will have to.

While it’s loaded with excellent ensemble performances and flashes of real poignancy, it can’t seem to help itself from occasionally jack-knifing into heavy-handed wrong turns that can play as clichéd or phony. It’s half of a great movie.

Heartwarming, mildly funny, and occasionally thrilling without ever being anything more than just fine.

There aren’t enough laughs here to goose it past formulaic. It’s harmless and mild and likable, but it’s also a toothless comedy that should have had some bite.

A lot of us have really missed Pee-wee, and seeing him go through his fun-house morning regimen at the outset of the film is a giddy treat. It’s like catching up with an old friend. But nostalgia gets you only so far.

The biggest problem with the new Hunger Games movie is right there in the title: Part 1. Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins' best-selling YA trilogy, wasn't conceived in two parts.

The loner has to learn to put someone else first. It’s both as manipulative and hokey as that sounds, but occasionally it works well enough that you might find yourself getting choked up against your better judgment.

The biggest problem is that the film, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, never makes a convincing case for why Valli the man or the singer matters beyond the music in the way that "Ray" and "Walk the Line" did for Ray Charles and Johnny Cash.

Berg has made a powerful film and an important reminder of what really happens when we send men and women off to war. It's just too bad that subtlety isn't a stronger weapon in his arsenal.

Howard’s film, for all of its storytelling skill, technical polish, and rousing high-seas sequences, never quite casts the spell it should. It’s too polite to give us a real feeling of life or death. Its sense of danger is watered down.

Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that’s so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

It’s fine and funny and sweet and lush and some of the songs are infectious, but I still don’t completely understand why it exists — and why they couldn’t do more with it.

When the lights come up, you don’t want to feel like you’ve watched a ­better Cliffhanger. You want to understand the tragedy you’ve just watched. Yes, you want to be entertained, but you also want the icy, whipping wind of reality to sting.

There’s something about the movie that makes it all feel as though it’s being presented under glass. Nureyev is more of an idea than an actual flesh and blood character. The only time The White Crow truly shoots off sparks is during its dance sequences. For those brief, beautiful moments, you can almost feel what it must have been like to witness a one-of-a-kind artist at the spellbinding height of his powers taking flight. But then the spell is broken, and the crow falls back to earth.

There are some stretches of the film that are frankly a bit boring and wouldn’t be missed if they were cut.

It’s smarter than most films, but not as smart as the first one. It’s funnier than most films, but not as funny as the first one. And it still probably belongs in the upper tier of Marvel movies but nowhere near as high up as the first one.

Aside from a few cheap but effective shocks and jumps, there's nothing here that horror fans haven't seen in better recent films like "The Conjuring." Not to mention all of those wonderful Hammer films from the '50s and '60s.

The moments that work the best are the ones where Tammi lets the pace and pulse slow down, lets the ominous wind whistle and groan, and it isn’t trying to turn The Wind into Meek’s Cutoff as interpreted by the director of Insidious.

With the exception of maybe two scenes, you’ve seen everything in this movie before.

The documentary offers a compelling overview of the case, but Bar-Lev spends too much time painting Paterno as a victim and scapegoat. That advocacy doesn't sit well.

As it is, Youth is hit-and-miss, beautiful and frustrating.

The Runner is a well-meaning character study with an admirably cynical ending, but it’s too cold to ever fully draw you in.

Death Race 2000 isn’t the sharp satire Corman thinks it is, but it’s fun.

Marcello may remain a mystery, but the thing that makes Dogman worth checking out is the actor who portrays him. It’s a performance that never barks too loudly, but leaves you with an unmistakable bite.

It’s a film that lazily whistles past the graveyard as it brings that graveyard back to ravenous life.

Yardie is a sprawling drug-world saga, but whatever narrative flaws it has are helped out by an infectious selection of dub-heavy reggae tracks and an authentically gritty sense of period and place.

Predictable, corny, and mild.

The too-clever conceit sabotages the whole thing.

What’s missing is the pent-up anger that simmered behind Chevy Chase’s doofus grin. His Clark was always on the verge of a nuclear-family meltdown. Helms lacks Chase’s passive-aggressive edginess.

Shot in inky black and white, Ana Lily Amirpour's fractured Farsi fright flick has a spooky, otherworldly quality. It's like an early Jim Jarmusch indie set in Little Tehran at 4 a.m.

While it's breezy and funny and perfectly pleasant, you probably won't remember this particular gift by the time the next birthday rolls around.

San Andreas shows that sometimes the fake stuff can get the job done beautifully. I don’t want to make any claims that San Andreas is a great film. It’s not. But as mindless sensory barrages go, its fakery taps into something real: It shows us just how impotent we all are to control our planet. Unless, of course, you happen to be The Rock.

The Shallows could have been a really fun B-movie. And in a lot of ways, it is. There’s no denying that it has some great jump-scares and scratches a certain summer itch we all get this time of year. Too bad it’s a bit too watered down.

Only half of these setups go anywhere very interesting. The rest just feel like button-pushing stunts that, like so much of the merry-prankster conceptual art Christian champions, zero in on your intellect rather than your gut. Or, better yet, your heart

It's the small, tossed-off moments — Bateman's deadpan mugging, Day's frenzied cluelessness, and Sudeikis' smarmy one-liners — that land the best.

It is ridiculous, cheesy popcorn fun. And Statham, God bless him, knows exactly what kind of guilty pleasure he’s signed on for — Sharknado with a bigger budget and a much bigger monster.

Writer-director David Ayer (End of Watch) skillfully sets up the film, introducing each of the crazies with caffeinated comic-book energy. But their mission...is a bit of a bust. The stakes should feel higher.

It’s possible that Skyfall created expectations that were too high for Spectre to match. But with all he’s done for the franchise, Craig deserves to go out with a bigger, smarter bang.

In the end, Walter Mitty is a film about acting out our dreams. But Stiller never quite shows us the soul of his dreamer.

Still, my real beef with these movies — and this one in particular — is how same-y they’ve started to feel. Each time out, everything is at stake and nothing is at stake.

As a result, the movie comes across like a bunch of “bits” when it really should be getting at deeper emotions and truths. Then again, Woody Allen, another comedian-turned-writer/director, ran into that same problem back at the beginning of his career. And he ended up doing okay.

All of the highlights are dutifully hit, as in a made-for-TV movie (albeit a lavish, gorgeously photographed one). Unfortunately, they're hit with a sledgehammer.

Viper Club is an earnest and often engaging film that’s undeniably heartfelt. It’s capital-I important and timely. But without its star’s passionate, nuanced performance, it would run the risk of being a bit generic and forgettable.

It’s 85 minutes of grim abyss-gazing with no hope of salvation. If Silverman’s going to bare her soul this nakedly, she deserves a better film to do it in.

It’s a triumph of style over substance. But what style!

Based on a real-life rash of teen suicides in Wales, Danish director Jeppe Rønde’s 2015 Tribeca winner feels like the sort of slow BBC America procedural you’d quickly give up on.

Like so many reunions, this one starts off all smiles and quickly grows tiresome.

What comedy there is comes from Tom Hiddleston’s Lord Nooth — a miser with a head like a soft-boiled egg. But the laughs are mild at best. At least there’s director Nick Park’s playful Silly Putty visual imagination to take your mind off just how thin the story is.

The film’s no great shakes; it’s a Down Under Goonies wannabe about three wisecracking kids shredding on their bikes as they’re chased by bungling bank robbers. But the baby-faced Kidman is easily the best thing in it.

I’m not sure that this aimless, lukewarm take on The Mummy is how the studio dreamed that its Dark Universe would begin. But it’s just good enough to keep you curious about what comes next.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is essentially a 90-minute episode of Jack Klugman’s late-’70s TV show "Quincy, M.E." with more graphic gore, goo, and guts.

High Life is, at turns, gorgeous, ridiculous, and confounding. Yet, the more you wrestle with it, the more it haunts you. As for Pattinson, who commits as fully as ever, he can rest easy knowing that he’s left his audience another riddle to chew on.

Surprisingly tasty serving of delirious junk food.

The film is undercut by long metaphorical stretches that dampen their impact.

He doesn't seem too interested in his actors — they're more plodding than their reptilian costars and you don't care about a single one of them — but Edwards does know how to fashion some serious monster mayhem.

Even by Bujalski’s shaggy standards, Results never adds up to much. Instead it just sort of sputters out and settles for a predictable rom-com ending. Conventional doesn’t suit him.

Still, there are enough glimpses of the old master peeking through that it’s hard not to have a bit of a good time. It turns out that even second-rate (okay, third-rate) Woo has its moments.

Jeff Bridges seems to be the only one having fun, playing a videogame designer who gets sucked into a Day-Glo world of his own creation. It’s like Alice in Wonderland acted out on a kids’ Lite-Brite toy.

The first two-thirds of The Maze Runner are a clever feat of fantasy world building. It's thrilling, twisty, and as mysterious as the mammoth Skinner Box environment the film takes place in. But the promising set-up raises so many puzzle-piece questions that when it's all finally explained in the final reel, you can't help feeling a bit gypped.

It's the latest male weepie cast from the same Disney mold as "The Rookie and "Miracle," and it's essentially "Jerry Maguire Goes to Mumbai."

Get On Up too often plays it safe when it needs to be dangerous.

While the film has an undeniably sexy glow, it’s too earnest and sappy by half. Fortunately, Frank Langella and Glenn Close drop by as Brian’s disapproving parents.

The harmless high jinks all go down easily enough without being particularly memorable or pushing the art form past the expected.

Hiddleston and Larson are especially let down by the script, which wants to be jokey in the way that something like Predator was, but can’t pull it off. The same lack of care goes into the period-specific song choices that have as much imagination as a Time-Life Songs of the ‘70s set.

You more or less know what this soft-drink-sponsored movie is going to be as soon as the lights start to dim. What makes it worth recommending is that it ends up being just slightly more than that by the time the lights come back on.

The film is maddeningly uneven. Just as it starts to settle into an inspired groove, it uncorks a couple of gags that fall lethally flat, making for half of a great comedy.

After 519 days at sea, Dekker finally achieves her goal...and decides to keep sailing, only this time with a hunky boy as her mate. If I were her parents, I wouldn't have signed off on that, either.

Taken together, the film is kaleidoscopic, sober, and also a bit glib. 22 July is exceptionally choreographed and tough to sit through, but it also leaves an uneasy, bitter aftertaste knowing that the movie is probably exactly the kind of continued attention a deranged narcissist like Breivik would have wanted.

Parents looking for a 21st-century E.T. to share with their kids are bound to be a bit disappointed even as their eyes are dazzled.

The film coasts on its time-capsule fetishism and affable supporting turns from Susan Sarandon and Lea Thompson, but it never achieves the emotional punch of like-minded comedies such as "Adventureland" and "The Way, Way Back."

West is a talented director and knows how to build suspense. But here’s a case where the truth wasn’t only stranger than his fiction, it was scarier, too.

Skip it, and you'll be depriving yourself of one of the summer's most satisfyingly stupid pleasures.

Most movies like Power Rangers get the first-half Y.A. character stuff wrong and the second-half smashy-smashy action stuff right. This one does just the reverse.

Netflix feels like a proper home for a film this idiosyncratic. After all, you’ll know within 30 minutes stumbling onto it whether you want to keep following its unsettling descent into blood-soaked madness or pick up your remote and head over to the relatively sunnier and safer comforts of "Broadchurch."

Shannon’s intensity is the best thing Frank & Lola has going for it. And it’s almost enough to make it work.

As a faithful update of a cherished classic, the new Dumbo will get the job done for restless kids on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Still, we’ve come to expect more magic, more bizarro pixie dust from Burton. Maybe that’s why the second marriage between the director and Disney feels more like an uneasy corporate alliance than a union of artistic passion.

It’s just another three-hankie teen weepie, albeit one with the saving grace of another excellent Haley Lu Richardson performance that gooses the film just past serviceable into the realm of slightly better than average.

The best thing about it is its star, P.J. Boudousqué, who locates a sense of terror and betrayal that the script lacks.

There are some solid scares (Wan is too gifted in the dark art of gotcha manipulation to not make you leap a few times), but there’s nothing on par with the first film’s brilliant hide-and-clap scene with Lili Taylor. If there’s going to be a Conjuring 3—and this movie is just decent enough to suggest there will be—our heroes should be a little choosier about which case they dust off next.

Fantastic Beasts is two-plus hours of meandering eye candy that feels numbingly inconsequential.

James Caan is underused as the crusty coach who needs a championship season, but he is supported by good turns from the highly angst-ridden quarterback (Craig Sheffer) and the straight-from-the-streets rookie running back (Omar Epps).

Del Toro’s low-key resignation gives the film what power it has, but the female characters (played by Mélanie Thierry and Olga Kurylenko) are disappointingly thin.

Michel Hazanavicius’ new film, Godard Mon Amour, tackles that period in Godard’s life on and off the screen — and does it in a dismissively light-hearted way that I’m sure the auteur himself loathes.

More than anything, the film feels a bit like a trial balloon for the relative star power of Jacobs, who’s been promoted from best friend to headliner here.

A classed-up B-movie riff on "The Most Dangerous Game." Call it “Tex-Mexploitation.”

For a movie produced by red-meat action maestro Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Thor himself as the face of camo-clad vengeance, 12 Strong somewhat surprisingly manages to fall (just barely) on the nuanced side of the scale. Even if you can feel the film’s director, Nicolai Fuglsig, battling with himself to get it there.

Like a dog that endlessly chases its tail in circles, Pets is amusing for a while, then it just tires itself out.

It’s likely to be enjoyed more by audiences unfamiliar with the original.

The most haunting thing in Bennett Miller's latest film, Foxcatcher, is Steve Carell. That's right, the same rubber-faced comedian who gave us the dim-witted meteorologist of "Anchorman" and the oblivious corner-office boob of "The Office."

It’s well made but drearily familiar.

How many times can you watch two middle-aged men impersonate Michael Caine? Your answer to that question will determine whether you should tag along with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on their third and latest fictionalized (and largely improvised) eating tour of Europe.

It isn’t until the wonderful Gladstone comes along with her aching tomboy heartache and sad seeking eyes that the film finally burrows below the surface and finally hits a dramatic nerve. Unfortunately, by then, it’s too little too late.