Drew Taylor

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is a mild lark. It's odd, off-the-wall, and has enough jokes and gags that if you're forced to take your little one to the theater, you won't spend the entire time looking at your watch or planning your escape.

It also cannot be overstated what an asset [John C.] Reilly is. The moment he shows up, the movie feels enlivened and energized; his mere presence adds a tremendous amount of oddball charm and humor.

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.

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.

If anything can happen (and, trust me, it does), then there’s never a way of predicting where the next scare will come from. And for a genre that oftentimes feels threadbare and hopelessly predictable, this cannot be commended enough.

The Boxtrolls charms, in every way it can – with its gorgeous animation style that combines lo-fi with high-tech (the puppets were printed using 3D printers), with the huggable nature of the characters, and with the boldness of its storytelling and thematic concerns.

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

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.

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.

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.

Vaughn and his collaborators have taken a crude and disposable property and turned it into something more – a thoughtful, exciting, whip-smart spy adventure that doesn't let its smart-ass post-modernism overwhelm its playfulness or its heart.

While McFarland, USA doesn't reinvent the wheel (in fact, it makes "Million Dollar Arm" seem even more abstract, due to its virtual absence of actual sports), it does deliver in all the ways you expect that a Disney sports movie should: it's heartwarming, handsome, and features an exceptional Costner performance at its center.

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.

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

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the best film of the new trilogy, more entertaining and energetic and tonally in sync with Jackson's earlier, edgier work, shifting from berserker comedy to abject horror at a moment's notice (and then back again).

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.

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

A film that double-underlines the fact that Collet-Serra knows exactly what to do with Neeson's on-screen persona in what is ultimately their most satisfying film yet.

The main thing you’ll feel from Cars 3 is joy; this is Pixar at its most radiant and playful.

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

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.

It’s hard to argue with too many of the decisions considering what a fitfully entertaining and satisfying entry it really is. This is a movie stuffed (perhaps overstuffed) with moments that will make you gasp, giggle and applaud, whether this is your first “Fast and Furious” movie or you’re a longtime fan.

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.

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.

Fans of the novel might get some minor thrills from the big screen adaptation, but it's hard to understand what made the material so popular in the first place.

What's interesting about Proxy is that it plays with all of the ephemera associated with pregnancy – the way that a person's psychology can warp around it – but too often gets bogged down in B-movie clichés and an unnecessarily convoluted narrative that strives for profundity but comes across as crass and dull.

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

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.