Drew McWeeny

The Purge: Anarchy improves upon the original, but it's still a long way from being the sort of smart, savage satire it would have to be to fully exploit such a socially charged hook.

These self-actualization stories, while certainly well-intentioned, get exhausting after a while, and it also starts to make storytelling for kids feel like it's all wrapped in this language of affirmation, and it smothers the simple joy of creating good characters we want to spend time with.

The film wants to be wild and dark and crazy, but it's also a big studio summer movie, and so it feels like it flirts with truly insane material, but without ever really committing to it.

While I thought it was gently moving at times, it feels like Gondry is hoping for a much more powerful impact, and the film just doesn't swing hard enough to make that happen.

It's like a supernatural version of "Gone Girl," and yet, there is some very, very dark comedy in the film as well, and by keeping it dark instead of letting the humor undercut the severity of the situation, Aja has made what has to be his most commercial film so far.

Boyhood is more than a movie; it is a vibrant, living thing, and it is beautiful, and it is sad, and it is wise, and it is sprawling, and it is intimate, and it is painful, and it is more than any filmmaker could have intended, and, yes… when it comes to trying to capture truth in a way that cannot be argued or denied or even summarized… I am sure that nothing will ever be this good again.

It's a dark and grimy film, and while I think it's juggling a whole lot of cliches, there is something genuinely admirable about the way it tells this story and the way it handles the supernatural onscreen.

Tammy is a mess, and it feels like a real misstep for this rising star.

"Dawn" is not just a good genre movie or a good summer movie. It's a great science-fiction film, full-stop, and one of the year's very best movies so far.

Earth To Echo is a little bit big and broad, but that's also part of its charm.

There are probably funnier satires out there, but They Came Together is laser accurate in the way it skewers its targets.

The action sequences in the film are spectacular, and there's one in particular that I think is an all-timer, both in the way it's imagined and in the way it's accomplished on film, but this isn't a film about empty sensation. It's a richly realized science-fiction world, and the cast is just tremendous.

Age Of Extinction more than delivers on whatever promises Bay makes to an audience at this point. Giant robots. Giant mayhem. Destruction on a global scale. You know what you're in for if you buy a ticket, and Bay seems determined to wear you down with the biggest craziest Transformers movie yet.

[Eubank] creates some remarkable images and moments in this movie, and his sensibility leans towards a sort of painterly love of quiet and sustained imagery. He juggles some pretty big shifts in tone here, and doesn't always pull it off, but it's really interesting to watch him try.

The details are what matters, and the script by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, adapted from the well-loved novel by John Green, is very smart and fairly unsentimental, which works to the material's advantage.

Suffice it to say that it is a cannily-constructed film, and it does have a bigger "movie" feel than the first film. There are places where they swing for some big jokes that don't quite work, but the ambition is dizzying all the way through.

John Carney, who wrote and directed "Once," has made another great film that focuses on songwriters and the way their lives influence their work.

The reason the film works is because it throws everything into the blender and comes up with something new, something that has a great lively sense of wit and humor to it, and it takes the time to fully explore its wild premise fully.

While I can see how there is a version of this film that might be able to successfully grapple with its central metaphor, I'm not sure Stromberg is the guy to make that movie.

A Million Ways To Die In The West certainly has merits, and in some ways, it is a step forward for MacFarlane, but it is also deeply undisciplined, and it undercuts its own best instincts in ways I find almost unbearably frustrating.

Force Majeure is an impressive and adult piece of work, bracing and intelligent.

There is a very quiet, natural quality to even the most dramatic of scenes.

Lost River is a beautifully dressed minor effort, a movie in which all the muscle in the world can't transform the thin, thin script into something more.

Beyond being very smart and funny, it's also a great looking movie.

It is a ridiculous story, and these aren't human beings acting in a way that any of us would recognize.

Julianne Moore seems to be the one person in the film that truly gets the tone right, playing Havana like a person walking a tightrope over a yawning pit of psychosis, her every emotion bubbling up and threatening to knock her off.

At its best, the film has moments that are creepy and that work on some strange primal level.

While there are some very strong performances in the film, the movie is inert, dramatically speaking, and covers such familiar ground that I can't really recommend it.

These performances are beyond reproach, which makes it even stranger that the film never quite turns into the crushing experience it feels like it should be.

Palo Alto is the sort of debut picture that makes me eager to see how Gia Coppola is going to grow and change as an artist, but it's more than just a demonstration of potential.

This is a sequel that has its own story to tell and that gets right down to it, and it expands on the ideas from the first film, but in a way that tells a thematically satisfying and complete story. In other words, this is how franchises are supposed to work.

It feels like the single most successful attempt to pull the shape of one of the beloved comic stories into the film world. It also feels like Bryan Singer has finally figured out how to shoot an action scene where the X-Men actually look and feel like the X-Men, and where the fantastic is handled the right way.

It's a feel-good story that raises cultural questions that the film doesn't seem terribly interested in answering, and it feels like an easy triple in the grand Disney tradition.

This could easily be ground zero for a whole new series of films, but if it remains a stand-alone single movie, Edwards told an entire story, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, it feels like Godzilla actually matters.

This thing swings from broad gross-out comedy to something that seems to be struggling to be a reflection of real life, and it never establishes a baseline reality. It is a strange misfire that is only saved from being a complete disaster by the efforts of the film's two leads.

If you can't handle extremes in your horror, Wolf Creek 2 is not for you. It is definitely ugly in places, and it wallows in it a bit.

By the end of this film, they've done a very good job of setting up the next three or four films in the series, but at the expense of this film telling any sort of cohesive story.

The sheer sly joy of the filmmaking that is on display here is one of the reasons I go to movies.

It's a completely average film that makes a few terrible choices.

There is nothing in this version that make any of this feel urgent or even important.

300: Rise Of An Empire is a worthy sequel to "300," stylistically consistent and equally loony, featuring what may well be the first truly can't-miss performance in a film this year.

It is safe to say that The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of those breakthrough moments, a movie that is so beautifully realized from start to finish that I almost doubted myself on the way home. Could I really have enjoyed that film that much?

The film plays with some funny ideas about time travel, and like any good time travel movie, it flirts with paradox and what happens when you violate the rules of time and space. It doesn't really go far enough with those ideas, though, and the end result is too often timid instead of brash and silly.

The film is loose and genuine and makes great use of place.

[Bateman] proves himself just as comfortable behind the camera as he in in front of it, and "Bad Words" is very, very good as a result.

As someone who enjoyed the show enormously while it was on the air, I am relieved to report that the film felt to me like it successfully recaptured the spirit of the show's first season.

Not only is it uproariously funny and almost breathtakingly dirty, it is better written than it needs to be on a character level, delivering completely on its premise.

Need For Speed is several different movies at once, and most of them are very stupid.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a tremendous piece of pop entertainment, smart and engaging and featuring a home run movie star lead performance by Chris Evans.

Darren Aronofsky's Noah is not just one of the most ambitious films I've seen this year, it's one of the most ambitious films I've ever seen.

There's a great sense of rot to everything as shot by Bruce McCleery, and David Sardy's score is propulsive and appropriately caustic. What ultimately works about Sabotage is the way it so unabashedly plays rough.

The script by Keir Pearson is admirably restrained in many ways, but it is also almost completely devoid of anything that would give the film the feel of actual life.

The film earns some big laughs, but it never sacrifices character for a punchline.

Rio 2 is a perfect example of franchise maintenance in place of storytelling.