Drew Taylor

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.

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.

In zany set piece after zany set piece, the movie sets itself apart as willing to try anything, do anything for laugh, and it succeeds more often than it fails, even when falling back on some creaky wordplay and the occasional over-emphasis on both fart gags and pop culture references.

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

Overlong and joyless, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a giant, opulent express train trapped in the snow, heaving and off balance. Buy another ticket. Skip this train.

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.

What Ping Pong Summer lacks in conviction or ingenuity, it makes up for in heart. The nostalgia that the entire film is built upon doesn’t seem misplaced.

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.

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.

For a movie that preaches the importance of dinosaur freedom, it’s hard to watch something so caged by its terrible plotting and predictability.

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.

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.

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

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.

Sing 2 is like having a mainstream radio station on in the background. It’s enjoyable and not in the least bit challenging. And sometimes that’s enough.

It might be slight, but Loitering With Intent is fast, funny, and incredibly heartfelt. And sometimes that's enough.

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.

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

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

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 utterly unconvincing and not scary in the slightest.

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.

Made in America proves that the American dream is undeniably powerful, even to those who have accomplished so much that they have to appreciate it in a form that borders on the abstract.

Ted 2 gives lip service to civil liberties and spends the rest of the running time picking the easiest joke to tell, again and again and again.

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

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

It can be said, with some certainty, that ‘Fantastic Beasts’ has finally found its footing. This latest entry is the most fun and most buoyant in the relatively young series. And it’s enough to make you actually look forward to a subsequent installment (should there be one) instead of actively dreading it.

Night at the Museum was always the best when it was closest to complete anarchy, tapping into the zippy, good-natured malevolence of filmmakers like Joe Dante, but here that energy is gone, replaced by a kind of sleepy noncommittal attitude. The magic has dried up; the museum is closed forever.

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

All of the young actors are committed, and director Dean Israelite has a good handle on the material, offering his own contributions to the time travel genre (like how violent the act itself is) while continually tipping his hat to what came before it.

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

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It’s a lifeless, meandering, overlong (116 minutes!) trudge through the oversized ego of its creator, full of wrong-headed humor and inept filmmaking.

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.

Under the Electric Sky shows you the transformative, incredibly positive power of dance music, but in terms of a movie, it falls a little flat.

Ritchie’s ‘King Arthur’ is a pleasing big budget spectacle, oddly aligned to the filmmaker’s thematic interests and startlingly compatible with his signature razzle-dazzle style. In fact, the soggiest moments in the movie are the ones that adhere the closest to that ambitious multi-film strategy, lessening the fun, and emptying its impact.

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

It's ultimately a convoluted, muddy (both literally and figuratively) and overlong bore that takes an intriguing premise and does absolutely nothing with it.

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 story is so poorly-plotted, nonsensical, and misogynist that it's hard to imagine one person liking this material, much less millions of literate book lovers.

While the movie is not without its charms, there's nothing indicating that it's actually a Hammer movie.

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

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.

The fact that the sequel is a messy, dull, instantly forgettable trifle somehow makes it the perfect follow-up to the original -- it's just as horrible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A dumb, loud action movie that aspires to forcibly entertain and provoke thought but fails miserably.

Tammy is a boring, unfunny road movie that limps along idly, consisting of a string of nonsensical set pieces and halfhearted stabs at character development that come across as off-putting and odd.

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.

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

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

If "subtle" horror movies are going to be this devastatingly boring, maybe it's time to bring back the buckets of blood.

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.

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.

The original film was unpredictable and loose and every so often gave up the aura of dangerousness. If anything, the sequel is a tepid, watered down, and at 100-minutes oftentimes boring attempt to recapture the magic but without any of the whimsy.

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.

Lynch has a sure hand... The camera moves but never feels overly active, and within the first few minutes the geography of the apartment is so brilliantly laid out that you feel like you could navigate your way around blindfolded. It has a nice tempo, with the appropriate lulls in the action and some surprising reveals.

There have been some reports that this is the last entry in the series, but it feels like the franchise is (finally) just getting started. "The Expendables 4" anyone?

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.

It's an absolutely horrible, amateurishly assembled comedy that is more offensive than just about anything we've seen lately, a non-stop parade of racist, homophobic bile that would be bad enough from any comedian, but coming out of Ferrell and Hart has the effect of watching a childhood hero committing some horrible act.

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.

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.

Completely forgettable, Hellions is far less cool, smart, and scary than it thinks it is.

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.

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.

Unfinished Business is the type of movie that is so awful that as it rolls along (its 91-minute runtime feels agonizing) you get more and more restless.

Bringing someone back from the dead is one of the horror genre's oldest and most effective tropes, but with The Lazarus Effect, it just seems tired.

A movie that is, in its subtle way, as offensive and mean-spirited as anything Sandler has done, but in a way that is so cuddly, there's the possibility it could, somehow, go unnoticed.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing in Seventh Son is compelling, interesting or noteworthy, though you can feel the strain of the filmmakers attempting to set up a potential franchise.

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

The entire movie feels like a warning for women of any age: if you act on your desires, you will be punished. And there seems to be no greater punishment than having to watch The Boy Next Door.

This movie is a corpse in desperate need of reanimation.

It's just a bore, barely registering as a movie (visually, it looks more like an USA cable series), which is a shame, because with the oddball cast and somewhat notable director, it could have been fun and trashy. Instead, it's just forgettable.

Strange Magic is messy and uneven and occasionally annoying, but it also dares to be different.

It's a found footage movie that feels instantly dated, even with its supposed political undertones. It's creaky, laborious, and not, in the least bit, scary.

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

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.

Whatever Branded is selling, we aren't buying.

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

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.

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.

Stretch is a truly enjoyable oddity, a movie that was too brash, too weird, too idiosyncratic for a major release, but one that should settle into a nice, long shelf life. Stretch is a wild ride, and one very much worth going on.

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.

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.