Chris Packham

A study in the frustrating insufferableness of people you probably agree with.

There's a lot of onscreen music-making, some of it amazing, the rest Santa-related.

Akinnagbe's embodiment of Jack is the most wholly realized accomplishment in the film. His speech, hesitant and stammering, is matched by defensive body language, his walk and posture as guarded and wary as a bird's. It's a truly physical performance in a film that didn't demand it.

Sometimes academically clinical, and including infomercial-like narration by Jane Seymour, the film has a bright core of real emotion.

The episodic story and minimal budget result in a small canvas over which these two huge characters dominate.

The film’s hidden asset is the luminous Mary Steenburgen, funny and gorgeous as an empty-nest mom turned lounge chanteuse who beguiles the dudes with age-appropriate flirting and arch humor.

With its fun script and cheap visuals, Escape Plan evokes the halfwit cheesiness of 1980s-era Cannon films, but it also recalls the deft pacing and legibility of their action sequences.

The exhausting and unrelatable Our Day Will Come escalates to a violent rampage as essentially unpleasant and nonsensical as its characters.

Like the Saw franchise, Cassadaga, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, attempts to leverage the horror genre in the service of inducing epiphanies, but keeps tripping over its confused tangle of genres.

[A] quiet, somber film.

Franco adapted a book that often reads like joyless homework into a film that feels the same way.

Through photos and family lore, but mostly through Dayton's own eloquence, Mitchell assembles a biographical portrait that's inspiring in the best possible way.

Bad Milo! meets your expectations right where you left them.

[A] small, gentle coming-of-age story, exceedingly well-cast.

The Secret Lives of Dorks, starring Jim Belushi, is, well, the Jim Belushi of high-school romantic comedies: indifferent, kind of exhausted.

The music is incredible, and through interviews with Rosey Grier, Afrika Bambaataa, Questlove, and a squadron of old-school studio musicians, director Dan Forrer unearths some of the hidden history of American pop.

Finnigan wisely seizes on the gentle strength and charisma of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. She imprints on the film as fully as her former husband.

The tense prologue of writer-director Bryan Ramirez's Mission Park...evokes a tactile, scary reality utterly betrayed by the following 90-minute string of hackneyed, basic-cable plotting and dialogue.

Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.

Unfortunately, the interesting drabness of the afterlife’s police department is paired with the colorless paucity of the film’s heavies...The deados, unmemorable CG brutes, spout generic bad-guy dialogue undistinguished by humor or characterization.

A wide-ranging, if shallow, exploration of intrusive government surveillance practices.

Writer-director Josh Boone populates Stuck in Love with smart characters breaking from emotional holding patterns of varying contours.

Khalfoun makes the audience privy to Frank's memories, migraines, and jarring hallucinations of his mother's recalled abuses.

With its interrogations of gender, feminism, and marriage, Shakespeare's comedy is an apt vehicle for Whedon's own storytelling agenda.

With The Hangover Part III, director Todd Phillips continues to occupy an apt (and very lucrative) niche, casting rich, entitled fraternity dicks as underdog heroes beset by shrewish women, foreigners with funny accents, and even animals-often cute animals with big, dewy eyes.

An extraordinarily undistinguished comedy from director Brian Herzlinger.

Quaid has a genius for broadcasting conflicting impulses. His body language twists uncomfortably away from his intentions, and his smile is built on the chassis of a cringe.

The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.