Drew Taylor

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.