Drew Taylor

The entire thing feels forced and hollow, less an authentic expression of the human experience and more a gee-whiz exercise in cleverness, slathered in a healthy coat of multiplex-friendly weirdness.

Unfriended is sometimes a blast to watch and is occasionally funny and unnerving, but by its conclusion it becomes screechy and overwrought.

Digging Up the Marrow could have been an effective riff on Barker's "Nightbreed," but instead becomes just another found footage horror lark, with occasionally nifty effects and an overriding sense that Green's ego, and not a wonderful Ray Wise performance, is what the movie is really about.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a creaky, sometimes painfully boring Old Testament slog, and finds the visionary director unable to successfully wrangle a human story out of a tale of gods and kings.

Yes, it’s funny and charming and sometimes deeply amusing. But at the same time it lacks any kind of emotional resonance.

He's a romantic and a psychopath and creature of the night. Sadly, Dracula Untold, with its humorless aura and been-there-done-that feel, doesn't allow Evans to inhabit many of these aspects. Instead, Dracula Untold feels largely uninspired.

While The Town That Dreaded Sundown is ambitious and supremely weird, it fails to cohere into something more resonant.

It offers a handful of effective moments and some characters that are fun to watch squirm through muck and bones, but not much more than that, especially when the films spins out of control towards its conclusion.

If you’re not looking for reinvention and loved the first "Sin City," then you'll probably love this one too. It's a gorgeous-to-look-at, brain-splattered case of "more of the same."

At 100-minutes, the movie drags and drags until finally losing steam in the last act and then collapses into a pile of worn out platitudes, limp gross out gags and gooey sentiment.

All in all, Earth to Echo is passable family entertainment, neither unforgettable nor particularly bad.

Maleficent desperately tries to create a character whose motivation you will understand and empathize with. But the screenplay and direction are such a tangled, thorny patch of conflicting ideas that it's hard to tell what that motivation is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, this low budget chiller is unable to capture the same kind of awe and terror that made "The Thing" so powerful, although its attempt to be more character-based and emphasis on practical effects is somewhat admirable. Somewhat.

You get the sense that Rio 2 wasn't thought through as much as it was quickly cobbled together as it went along, with a simple, clearheaded goal in mind: just make it good enough to warrant a "Rio 3."

It's the accumulation of a set of ideas that a bunch of creative types and executives think would be clever, instead of something that actually delivers on an engaging entertainment level.

24 Exposures has a handful of interesting ideas, and a lot of cute topless girls, but it doesn’t add up to much.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit refashions the character (this time played by Chris Pine) into a man of immediate action, and in doing so drains him of anything that made him a relatable human being.

Chun admirably attempts to make each thriller-y motion mean a little bit more. But oftentimes he fails, and the back half of the movie is filled with perfunctory suspense set pieces, doused in blood and full of trauma, that leave little impact.

It might be overlong, overstuffed, and occasionally operatic, but that doesn't mean that it can wring the tears out of you.

The message, like the filmmaking, seems fuzzy and unfocused.

The pleasure and the pain are all up there on the screen; we just wish it was less painful to watch.

When the final moment comes and it's revealed how the children died, it's less of a surprise than a shrug. Drama robbed of suspense is just dull.

You just wish that the kind of attention lavished on the visuals of Despicable Me 2 could have carried over to its storytelling. Despicable Me 2 lacks emotion and depth, and all the minions in the world can't make up for that.

The movie is so apolitical; there could have been a nice slant to the movie, about how both sides of the aisle could get together to kick out these Korean terrorists. Instead, it remains totally void.

Rubberneck is a thriller too drab and self-obsessed to ever be truly thrilling.

Alien abductions are a truly terrifying idea, and building an alien abduction movie on the template of "Poltergeist" is a great idea. But "Poltergeist" had one thing Dark Skies is sorely in need of: follow-through.

Quite frankly, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files would have been better if it had a little more meat on its bones.

There are filmmakers who are able to weave social commentary through the arena of big budget entertainment, without having it come across as lopsided or boring; Allen Hughes, it turns out, is not one of these filmmakers.

Overall, there is a fundamental lack of excitement or energy; it's a 95-minute movie that feels twice as long as "The Hobbit."

Apatow indulges in his freeform tendencies to a particularly destructive degree with This is 40, resulting in a movie in which the ambitions are only equaled by the shortcomings.

There's something deeply poetic about Lincoln making his way through a changed nation to meet his demise. Such poetry is nowhere to be found in Lincoln.

Citadel, which won the Midnight award at the fest, further explores the fears and anxieties of urban Britain (and Ireland), and the results are sometimes scary, sometimes silly, and always politically questionable.