Drew Taylor

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.

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

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

At its heart, Raiders! is an underdog story, and as with any underdog story, it becomes even more compelling as the stakes are continually raised against our heroes.

If DreamWorks Animation is hoping to get back on track with this movie, a lavish sci-fi comedy based on a recent children's book, they're pretty much doomed.

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

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.

Feig's commitment to the genre, and some truly wonderful set pieces, make Spy as lovable as its main character.

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.

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.

Between the charming Copley performance, the ingenious visuals, the absolutely incredible all-electronic Hans Zimmer score (seriously, this is one of his best ever), and the propulsive narrative thrust (Blomkamp is rarely singled out for how swiftly he moves things along, plot holes be damned), there is a lot to appreciate and even love about Chappie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A limp psychosexual thriller that takes a promisingly trashy conceit... and does absolutely nothing with it, and saddles it with wooden performances, poor staging, and a complete lack of conviction. It reaches a nearly operatic level of ineptitude.

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

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.

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

There are so many interesting ideas and concepts that could have been spun from this framework. Instead, it's the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.