Drew McWeeny

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.

Ant-Man has its own voice, no doubt thanks to all of the talent involved, and it stands as a surprisingly sturdy success for the studio, a delightfully weird little movie that has no business working this well.

It is rowdy at heart, but smart about it, and it is one more reminder that Channing Tatum is really not like anyone else working in movies right now. It is also celebratory in the way that the first film was sad, concerned more with self-acceptance than running from something.

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.

Like most comedy sequels, it is too long and too indulgent in calling back to the original film.

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.

Trevorrow seems to be genuinely enjoying what he's doing, and it's that sense of someone having fun behind the camera that ultimately won me over.

There's nothing particularly wrong with the ghost story itself. It makes sense, there's an internal logic to the way things happen, and Whannell does his best to keep a certain pace up so there are near-constant ghost attacks punctuated by scenes of the characters trying to figure out how to handle them. Quinn's just not a very interesting character.

The way an Entourage story works is that they establish what it is that Vinnie and his friends want, they challenge them a little bit, and then they get what they want. And while that's something I find unsatisfying, it is the exact reason that fans watch the show and it's why they'll watch the film.

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 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.

Poltergeist is professional and slick and entirely fine. It's also unnecessary in every way.

Co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen have told a very, very small-scale story when you look at what happens in the actual physical world. But in doing so, they've done something very powerful, because they have paid full respect to just how turbulent and important the inner life of a child can be.

Tomorrowland may be well-made, but whether you're talking about it thematically or dramatically, this is a profoundly mixed bag.

There is nothing easy or predictable about what George Miller delivers with Mad Max: Fury Road, a stone-cold action master class, beautiful and brainy and startling in the ways it throws off the current definition of the blockbuster.

The film feels very tiny, and intentionally so. This isn't a horror film at all, which is an odd thing to say when you're talking about a movie with zombies in it.

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

This is a movie that is almost exhaustingly large-scale, and Ultron's ultimate plan involves a crazy visual idea that Whedon makes sort of beautiful and eerie. It's got so much action that I'm going to bet some audiences go numb after a while. But in scene after scene, there are beats and stunts and poses that suggest that an army of comic book fanatics worked on this movie.

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.

I'm giving this an "A" letter grade because I find it utterly absorbing, start to finish. I don't know if I think it's a good film, but it is a powerfully compelling film. Perhaps my favorite kind of strange or insane film is the personal passion project, and "Roar" is one of the most remarkable examples of this.

It's obvious that they're aiming for something more fun than genuinely haunting, and it helps that there is a good deal of humor used to punctuate the horror. It doesn't all land, but there's a fair amount of wit in something as simple as watching what someone types, deletes, then retypes.

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.

Tim Johnson gets the character stuff right, and the animators do an amazing amount of subtextual work with color and with texture ripples on the various Boov characters.. It's lovely work overall, and it might be the most cheerfully benign conquering force we've ever faced on film.

There is a giddy sense of glee that runs through most of this movie, making it feel like Feig can barely contain himself with all of the things he wants to do and show you in the movie.

This is a film that suggests that Morehead and Benson have something important to share with their work.

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

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

Trainwreck is more than funny. It's also wise, and that hard-won wisdom makes this a can't-miss for anyone who feels bruised by love, but never beaten.