Drew Taylor

What makes Joe Berlinger’s riveting new true crime doc Whitey: The United States vs. James J. Bulger such an eye-opener is that it isn’t just about a bad guy who did bad things, but the layers of corruption and moral ambiguity that stacked up on both side of the law.

It's a new vampire classic, one to treasure endlessly.

Unlike most movies that use the current economic crisis as a dramatic backdrop, Healy's character is vibrant enough that the audience can make an easy connection and go through the journey with him.

It's easily the scariest movie since "The Conjuring," and in some ways is a deeper and more satisfying film. It's stylish but not showy, more concerned with the thematic undercurrents coursing just beneath the surface.

While the more down-to-earth Chef does offer some fascinating autobiographical dimensions, the film is also an overlong, unfunny, largely insufferable bore.

Neighbors is one of the funniest, most visually inventive studio comedies in recent memory.

As pithy and sharp-witted as the screenplay is ... the direction by series creator Rob Thomas ... is oftentimes flat and visually dull. ... And so the movie, is more than anything, a bold and breathless work of fan service, configured by the creators of the original series for the maximum enjoyment of the fans of the original series.

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.

Odd Thomas is a much better film than it's non-release would suggest. Hopefully one day it'll find it's audience and people will appreciate it for something other than just being better than "Phantoms."

Non-Stop isn't exactly a smooth ride, but as far it being the big screen equivalent of an airplane novel, one that you read on the flight and throw away when you get to your destination, it is wildly successful. Just don't think too hard about it.

3 Days to Kill might not be art, but it's better than most of the overtly violent action fare that litters the multiplexes these days, thanks largely to the fact that its heart is almost as big as its explosions.

The entire movie feels belabored, lumbering from one awful, over-dressed set piece to another. It's wrongheaded, it's horrendous, it's filled with lines of dialogue that are utter howlers, and yet, it's the type of movie that feels so confident that it really is something. It is, in fact, not.

At the very least, Fantastic Fear of Everything has a fantastic central performance. And sometimes that's enough.

The Lego Movie is an absolute blast—a whip-smart, surprisingly emotional family film where the toy property is seen less as a concrete template than a tool for seemingly limitless potential.

Turns out it was even trickier than originally imagined and that for all of its best efforts, The Monuments Men remains an unwieldy, overtly sentimental (but still emotionally distant) epic.

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

This movie is a corpse in desperate need of reanimation.

If there's a problem that gets in the way of some genuinely scary moments, it's that the filmmakers (all four of them) don't ever give you enough information to invest in the characters.

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.

A movie so ugly and woeful that you'll wish you had superhuman strength to pluck your own eyeballs out of your head.

Heisserer is able to keep the thrills coming while maintaining an emotional tether to the character and the situation. While occasionally the movie veers into the realm of implausible melodrama, it's a well-modulated affair and knows exactly when to pull itself back from the brink.

It’s bold, beautifully told, and surprisingly funny.

What makes “Misfire” so powerful is that it isn’t just the story of the Shooting Gallery — which is tragic but one that doesn’t resonate all that well today because their output was often iffy and unmemorable — but the story of independent cinema of that period.

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

As far as animated movies go, it doesn't get that much better than Frozen. It's a new Disney classic.

The movie is zippy and funny...and more emotional than the man himself would ever allow himself to be. It’s a triumph.

Our Day Will Come is the kind of polarizing, in-your-face movie that we too rarely see in cinema these days.

The characters are so two-dimensional that a meaningful connection with the material isn't elusive; it's downright impossible.

There’s a restless inventiveness to many of the gags that are matched only by the outrageousness of their surroundings.

With its tongue placed firmly in cheek (it is, after all, called Big Ass Spider), it delivers on a whole bunch of laughs and thrills, in a way that some big budget spectaculars can't even muster.

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

There’s always been something romantic and powerful about relationships primarily built on letter-writing, and that’s true for Shepard and Dark too.

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

It's one of the most unexpectedly enjoyable cinematic experiences of the year, even if you couldn't pick a Metallica track out of some hypothetical never-ending playlist.

Had the filmmakers shaved away some of the embellished excess, they might have had a minor classic on their hands, worthy of the Anderson and Hughes canon. Instead, they have a very good movie whose reverence ends up bringing it down.

The movie is sexy, in a very real, occasionally shocking way, and it's interesting to see this kind of frankness in a movie where the characters are all so young.

Riddick, as a character, is best when he's alone, fighting against insurmountable odds, with narratives that serve his singular nastiness.

It's understandable that larger scale movies will want to spawn sequels, but this is about two degrees away from being a movie that premieres on Cinemax on a Friday night, sandwiched between two soft core porn movies with funny titles. Getaway is stuck in neutral. And that's where it'll stay.

No matter how good The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones looks, it's hard to really care about anything that's going on, and not just because we could barely understand it.

When Planes really takes flight, it can be boldly transporting. Other times, though, it feels like it's running low on jet fuel, full of limp characterizations and questionable set pieces.

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.

It's utterly unconvincing and not scary in the slightest.

The Smurfs 2 doesn't even pretend to be anything more but the most base, sugar-coated family entertainment, the kind of things that parents won't even be able to comprehend, much less enjoy.

One of the more disappointing big studio animated features this year, a movie can't even muster the energy to be visually engaging, let alone give you anything to care about story-wise.

Genre movies are rarely this finely calibrated and nuanced and it’s all too infrequently that Statham is able to perform in material this dynamic.

A welcome change of pace and a truly hilarious, heartfelt experience.

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.

It’s easily the most enjoyable animated film so far this year, one that is visually stunning, wickedly subversive, incredibly funny (Day's character is a hoot), and (at times) lump-in-your-throat emotional.

The Purge manages to be smart, scary, and subversive.

V/H/S/2 is a whole lot of fun.

I Give It a Year groans on, with unmemorable scene after unmemorable scene, each one more contingent on coincidence and happenstance than by the actual, gear-filled mechanics of drama or comedy.

Thankfully, as the movie goes along, he tempers his bloodlust, instead engaging in sequences that up the suspense and terror while not exclusively luxuriating in the bloodshed.

As a documentary and a love story, Cutie and the Boxer is nothing short of breathtaking.

Barrett and Wingard are clever filmmakers, but unlike many modern day horror directors, their cleverness never gets in the way. There's an earnestness to the entertainment in You're Next that is truly admirable, and at the end of the day it's a super enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half.

Eden may be unpleasant, but it's not as grim as you'd imagine, and always compulsively watchable. If only all issue movies were this entertaining.

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.

The results are a disturbing mixture of paranormal ghost story and psychological unease.

It'll get your blood pumping, before it starts spilling down your forehead.

If Kiss of the Damned has one thing, it's an identifiable groove, one that is sustained and very, very infectious.

It's a comedy so out of touch that jokes disappear before they're even delivered, as if by magic.

Oplev composes shots with grace and an understanding of where everything is geographically and how scenes relate to each other in the multi-threaded plot. Like everything else in Dead Man Down, his direction is beautiful and brutal at the same time. Whoever thought that this movie would be as entertaining as it is existential is either lying or psychic.

For a movie that tries to create and sustain a sensation of wild unpredictability, it's a huge failure. It's not shocking if we've all seen it a thousand times before. With 21 and Over, it's all been there, drank that.

It’s the kind of garbage that does a disservice to the fearless possibilities of the horror genre and its knack for sly social commentary.

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.

Snitch is just a big, dumb, ugly-looking waste of time, one that turns one of cinema's most charismatic heroes into a restless drone. As they say in the joint: snitches get stitches. But Snitch deserves to be put down for good.

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

Writer/director Richard LaGravenese tries his damnedest to deftly navigate the clunky plot, and while it's not exactly a home run, it's still an incredibly stylish, evocative, edgy (was that an incest reference?) and frequently funny (there's even a Nancy Reagan joke) Southern Gothic romance.

With long stretches (we're talking 20-30 minutes) without a single guffaw, Identity Thief is aggressively dull, and will joylessly steal two hours of your life that you will never get back.

The picture's conspiratorial late-night tone and fleshy after hours luridness was practically built for watching at night, when our parents think we've gone off to bed (think '80s films directed by folks like Adrian Lyne).

This newest film is an undercooked potboiler, one so tastelessly bland and visually indistinguishable that you wonder if anyone associated with the project realized what makes cheapo crime fiction so fun to consume.

A gloriously decadent, gorgeously photographed melodrama – a movie where people burst into tears and act very badly towards each other, all while wearing really fabulous clothes.

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."

In terms of pure pop entertainment value, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more smartly constructed, beautifully shot, pulse-pounding movie this holiday season.

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.

Watching Deadfall really is like being trapped in a blizzard – the cinematography is so muddy you can barely make out what's going on on screen (besides the bright splashes of blood) – you're antsy to be anywhere else but where you are.

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.

Levinson is interested in humanity, in the small moments that make us who we are, and it's these moments that make The Bay so chilling.

It's hard to tell who is to blame for the movie's abrasive anonymousness – Curtis or Apted – but it hardly matters. In either directors' hands, Chasing Mavericks would have been a wipe-out. It's totally bogus.

One step worse than most of these video game movies. It feels less like a game and more like what happens when you leave your PlayStation on and it becomes a kind of dim screensaver. If we had a controller in our hand, we would probably throw it at the screen.

Paranormal Activity 4 is listless, dreadful and boring, an almost painfully inert and superficial ghost story that lacks specificity or scares. Time to turn the camera off, guys.

Alex Cross is more boring than your average weeknight procedural, except much longer, dumber and more violent.

Whether or not you've steeped in film noir lore, Hotel Noir still plays like an enjoyable little thriller.

With just a little bit more prodding and elaboration, the movie could have been rich and evocative. Even if you don't believe what he preaches, the movie (at least) could have bordered on a transcendent experience. As it stands, it's pretty good, but not exactly heavenly.

Hotel Transylvania is very different from its contemporaries. You just wish that, with so much emphasis on chaos, they could have spent a little more time on character.

It says something, then, that Burton's best, most enjoyable, and most emotionally resonate film in years is actually an adaptation of one of his very first projects: Frankenweenie.

We assure you, it's not worth taking a trip to down to the House at the End of the Street. Something horrible might have happened there, but it can't be worse than this movie.

It's a testament to the movie's lack of creativity that Anderson can't even rip off "Aliens" and have it come across as anything less than totally boring.

Whatever Branded is selling, we aren't buying.

Here everything feels limp – simultaneously over and undercooked. It doesn't leave much of an impression and every scare seems to be either some lame jump scare or a fright inflicted by the shrill score.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and in a few months it will also be paved with unwatched DVD copies of The Tall Man.

A plodding, undercooked, and old-fashioned (not in a good way, either) chiller that will bore you to tears instead of scare you to death.

Viscerally, The Bourne Legacy packs a punch. If you're looking for a traditional sequel though, you'll probably be disappointed, but if it's a whole new ride you're after, you've come to the right place. Bourne has indeed been reborn.

ParaNorman is a micro-sized masterpiece that wears its heart (and its half-eaten brains) on its sleeve.

Anyone watching Assassin's Bullet will be gripped with a similar sensation -- to be anywhere but watching this movie.