Drew McWeeny

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.

An entirely laughless affair and easily the low point of Cohen's career so far.

The film barely services the main characters and their arcs, so there's really no room for the sort of delicate etching needed to make supporting characters live and breathe. The film is at its best when it embraces the goofy nature of disaster films in general, and when it gives the audience the red meat it craves so desperately.

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.

I’m not sure how a filmmaker whose work normally speaks to me as clearly as Snyder’s does could deliver something that feels this confused, this impersonal, and this corporate. It is a confounding mess of a movie, and while there are individual sequences that I enjoyed as isolated moments, it is almost breathtakingly incoherent storytelling.

The film is often quite funny, and just real enough that we may recognize ourselves in some small way in this family.

The reason you go see San Andreas is to see what the state of the art looks like when you destroy an entire state, set piece after set piece, and Brad Peyton delivers on that.

If you can get past the witlessness of the world itself, there is some very good work in Equals, and fans of the cast will be no doubt pleased with the connection they have in some of the movie's best moments.

Everything is written to theme. Everything moves the film forward. When it comes down to the last half-hour, Braff manages a long sustained emotional crescendo packed with both laughs and tears, and it is accomplished work, carefully balanced, beautifully constructed.

It is apparent that Ramaa Mosley has a voice, and that The Brass Teapot is a focused, controlled piece of storytelling that displays real control.

Visually uninteresting, dramatically inert, and remarkably silly no matter how seriously it tries to play things straight, Insurgent is franchise management and little more.

Wally Pfister, best known until now as the cinematographer on Christopher Nolan's big films, makes his directorial debut here, and as dumb as Paglen's script is, Pfister seems to have no feeling whatsoever for the staging of sequences or for any sort of dramatic narrative momentum.

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.

I'm baffled by the screenplay credit. Richard Price is a muscular writer, and he's done some great work in the crime world over the years, but this feels like a screenplay by someone who has never written a film before, full of first-draft dialogue and weird structural and tonal issues. It's almost amazing how tone-deaf it is.

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.

There are laughs in the movie, but they feel like they are isolated gags, not sustained runs, and in order for this to work as character comedy, they'd have to be playing better defined characters and not just heightened versions of themselves.

Suicide Squad is not the darkest mainstream superhero comic book movie ever made, nor is it even the darkest live-action film featuring Batman ever made. However, it is gleefully nihilistic, and it takes a different approach to what has become a fairly familiar story form at this point, right at the moment when it feels like superhero movies either have to evolve or die.

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.

Whimsy's hard, honestly motivated romance is harder, and when you get both of those things wrong in the same movie, the result is almost too much to take.

The movie suffers from being the same shape as so many modern blockbusters, and the plot in the second half of the film is basically another riff on the “reach the glowing doodad on a roof to prevent the end of the world” structure. But the focus on the Turtles and the film’s overall amiable sense of goofball humor carries the day.

Fast, frequently teetering on the cusp of the ridiculous, and eye-poppingly pretty, Jupiter Ascending is a wicked slice of entertainment, and a heck of an antidote to the typical February box-office blahs.

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

For sheer craftsmanship, As Above, So Below is the type of horror film you should see theatrically. It's really well-made, even if it ends up feeling a little familiar by the end.

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.

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

There is nothing about Terminator: Genisys that suggests that this film was a compelling, urgent, essential dream for anyone involved. This is all about squeezing cash out of people who are fond of the original films, calculated and without any of the soul of Cameron's films.

There's a slightly muted quality to the film, though, which keeps it from being a complete pleasure, but considering how rarely we get a new film from Dante, I'll take something slight over nothing at all.

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

Leonetti doesn't seem to have any particular knack for the staging of suspense or fear.

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.

With no clear purpose in telling the story and no real focus in the actual storytelling, Pan never gets off the ground.

There are gags that work, that pay off in a big way, and gags that fall flat, derailing entire sequences. Because the world around them is so absurd, the film's attempts at creating some genuine heart for Harry and Lloyd doesn't really work.

From scene to scene, there are some beautiful images in the fantasy world where this is set, but frustratingly, it never adds up to something that comes to life. This feels like terrific production design and costuming in search of a story worth telling.

It is forgettable fluff, but well-delivered, and it suggests that they'll be able to keep making these as long as they can prop up the cast, and with the younger generation making a decent showing this time out, they may even be able to hand it off when the time comes.

Competently made but morally repellent, Get Hard may be my least favorite Will Ferrell feature film.

I think it is precisely because the technical work by everyone from James Bobin down is so good that I find myself infuriated by the film. So much muscle, so much effort, so much raw talent on display, and all in service of demographic-and-merchandise-driven garbage that sullies the name of the source material.

The biggest problem I have is that the film seems determined to push the outrageousness as far as possible, and there comes a point where it just stops working because it's all so outrageous.

Wallis, who is an appealing young performer, simply doesn't have the chops for what has traditionally been one of the more demanding leads in a musical for a young performer, and Gluck, along with co-writer Aline Brosh McKenna, has built a film around Wallis that is constantly undercutting the songs, the choreography, and the entire idea of musicals.

It would not surprise me if most reviews for this film are openly hostile. It is a wretched piece of writing, and an absurd final product. It almost seems pointless to pile on, though. The audience who loves Sparks is going to go see this film and they'll no doubt walk away satisfied.

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.

Warcraft errs in how much it asks the audience to juggle, and as a result, the things that the film does well (and I think there are many) are muffled somewhat.

It helps that Gelb shoots this less like a horror film and more like a drama. When the film does finally kick into overt horror, it becomes more familiar and less overall effective.

It would be a lot easier to give the film a soft pass if it wasn't so aggressively lazy.

It is a staggeringly bad film, made up of lots of faulty pieces.

Kill Me Three Times is a confident smaller film, and if you enjoy this sort of chess game with bullets, you'll probably get a kick out of it, and for Pegg fans, it's pretty much continuous pleasure throughout.

Stonewall is the anti-"Selma," a movie that not only fails to fully capture the energy and importance of a true event but that fails so completely as a film that it is almost impressive.

It is a singularly unpleasant experience, not because it is scary or extreme or even interesting. It is unpleasant because it is a dull story filled with characters that are so poorly drawn as to be forgettable even while you're watching them.

The script by Luke Greenfield and Nicholas Thomas makes too many easy choices, and it simply doesn't work in terms of maintaing credible audience sympathy.

To the bitter end, the series manages to wring some fun, solid scares out of something other invading something utterly familiar.

The best moments in this film are the moments where it feels like they're just throwing jokes at the screen. The moments that are toughest are the ones where they try to create some sort of emotional beat, because the moment we're supposed to invest in these guys at all, the movie crumbles.

Walking out of the film, I might have given it a C+ or a C based purely on the fumes of Murray's better work that are present here, but the more I've thought about it, the more infuriating it is to see something this lazy and familiar from Murray at this point.

I think Sandler's miscasting leads to a real deficit of energy at the center of the film, and then the conceptual misfire is so dire that I just don't know what to say beyond that.

Neither the disaster the fanboy nation seems to be itching to attack nor a significant improvement over the Tim Story movies, Fantastic Four seems doomed to please no one.

Taken 3 is formula filmmaking at its most formulaic, a film that exists only because it makes sense financially.