Eric Henderson

The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.

Despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy, the film is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered.

It's not even made clear whether the machines can feel pain. But after sitting through Fire & Rescue, interminable even at a lean 83 minutes, I sincerely hope they do.

The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.

Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.

In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.

It's no surprise that Nick Broomfield finds little use for the moments of unabashed triumphalism in Houston's life, as he's doggedly fixated on the humiliating swan dive.

If ever there was a movie equivalent of dad bod, Entourage is it.

Since “humbug” is already spoken for by Ebenezer Scrooge, “opportunistic” would be the most apt word for The Man Who Invented Christmas.

Benny’s Video is a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions.

The film spent roughly a dozen years in development, and the moronic, corporate detritus from that long time warp is strewn about like so many improbable history lessons.

The Pinkberry solipsism of this particular franchise all but requires our heroine persist as a lovelorn martyr for her audience’s benefit.

Oliver & Company is as out-of-touch as anything the studio ever made.

Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.

If Robin Hood’s charmingly sh**ty animation comes damn close to redeeming the film from utter vapidity, it’s a damn shame they couldn’t manage to supply a villain with the balls of an Ursula, a Cruella, or a Maleficent.

The film is unrepentantly cynical when it comes to the global business of warmongering, but proves unsurprisingly earnest when it comes to the lure of the American dream.

The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.

Home's exposition is a mess of forced zaniness, which leaves the rest of the film with a Swiss-cheese foundation.

Life, an incredibly square and familiar studio product, baits and switches on two disappointing propositions, moving swiftly from something expectedly cliché to something dismayingly derivative.

The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.

It only serves to validate George Clooney's devotion to showmanship as Hollywood's current reigning poster boy for blue-state morality.

The sequel to Grease is not much more than a remake, wherein every minute detail is nothing more than an attempt to pilfer the magic of the first film.

It doesn't take long to realize that Ridley Scott's adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.

The film's plot crux isn't romantic fatalism, but 2017's cutest manifestation of trendy gaslighting.

Ultimately the film is, like the Faux News programming it caricatures at face value, a deck-stacking simulation of a dialogue it isn't even remotely interested in opening.

Nancy Meyers is unquestionably committed to her auteurist signature of giving her female protagonists their cake and letting them eat it too.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the true Tower of Babel, the movie star who with each film gets closer to God and whose films always come tumbling down around him.

It's an episode of Without a Trace: Jerusalem presented with all the panache of a Trinity Broadcasting Network TV special.

It punks its impressionable audience into believing a lie, then punishes them for their foolishness.

No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.

Every Republican regime gets the ludicrous devious-baby saga it deserves.

The net effect is a shapeless would-be diversion in which things just happen independently, a string of effects missing any cause.

It hits its Red State beats so hard that its target audience likely won't notice they're being not only condescended to, but insulted outright.

Kevin Costner scowls and darts around the dubious thin line between "racism" and un-sugarcoated "truthfulness" that only anti-P.C. wingnuts actually believe exists.

The truly depressing thing about a thriller as undercoocked as Unforgettable is its failure to fly on dark fantasy.

Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.

Unlike 2014’s Godzilla, which benefited from director Gareth Edwards’s patience with the Jaws-style slow burn, RAMPAGE is all noise without crescendo.

It risks offense by putting a typically Adam Sandler-ian twist on a tired familial trope, though such risks can often be the only thing enlivening forced franchise installments like this one.

And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.

The only wish that ends up satisfyingly granted is, in Wish Upon's final and utterly predictable tableau, the audience's.

The Angry Birds Movie is a lot of things, but none of them true to the app's appeal.

If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how The Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the conclusion of Escape from L.A., you'd still wind up with a more recognizably human effort.

Though Will Ferrell has made a career out of his own debasement, the film quickly becomes too cruel to generate laughter for anyone who would empathize with him.

It's the screenwriting equivalent of Ryan Adams sucking the pop vitality out of Taylor Swift's deliriously produced tunes.

Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.

Monogamy, Passengers seems to suggest, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.

The incongruity between Melissa McCarthy's eagerness as a performer and her character's total lack of compassion makes the film somehow both restless and tedious.

If your answer to the question "When are rape jokes funny?" is anything aside from "never," the good news is that you may still find a lot to hoot over throughout the film.

The Apple is an Old Testament movie in more ways than one, and its relentless bad taste is sure to appeal to the same audience that won’t even realize they’re being slapped in the face.

The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.

Roger Donaldson embellishes an already overly plotty scenario with hollowly attractive genre superfluities.

That this retrograde "straight talk" somehow managed to emerge on screen as a reasonably genial ensemble comedy speaks to the strength of its performers.

Just as Michael Douglas doesn't have it in his guts to make Oren a real son of a bitch (a grandpa Gekko), Diane Keaton's jangled neurotic tics lack any dramatic import.

As far as shameless excuses to rehash crowd-pleasing gags from the first film go, it doesn't particularly go about its duties cynically.

William F. Claxton’s film is a radically dull riff on the nature-run-amok genre, utilizing what must’ve felt at the time like the only animal not yet exploited to scare audiences. But scares are exactly what the filmmakers didn’t get.

Whatever drugs director Joe Wright may or may not have been on when he wrestled Pan to the ground, pulverizing the material into a quivering mound of monkey-bread dough, you can trust that they were synthetic. Not a single emotional moment in this entire origin story for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and Neverland feels organic.

Right from the very beginning of Rob’s cruel cycle that sees him repeatedly returning to the floor of that elevator every time the church bells at his wedding begin to ring, Naked besmirches the reasons that Groundhog Day's Möbius-strip construction worked.

If Ice Age: Collision Course gleefully fails at being a history lesson, at least it offers an energetic recess from reality.

Father doesn't just know best, he's the only one whose knowledge or lack thereof means anything at all.

In the film, Alvin and the Chipmunks proudly align themselves not with Dr. Demento, but with Kidz Bop.

2014: Annie's America makes director John Huston's elephantine, synthetically charismatic 1982 adaptation look like a Minnelliesque model of focus and concision.

The sense that children’s attitudes toward rampant militarization are being gradually normalized is the film's objectionable given.

There's little doubt where Cormac McCarthy-bashing Sparks's allegiances lie. The Longest Ride is truly no country for old ambiguity.

Like any serving of junk food, it seems engineered to give you that initial rush of satisfaction, but leaves you in a dead zone where the only thing you want is more of the same.

The flick is an artless, puerile shadow of the likes of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Cornetto trilogy.

The whole point of Vince Vaughn's cinematic existence is that he's a paragon for reformed chauvinism. He's an irrepressible but highly tamable id. Not so here.

The filmmakers only bother to lay out comedic set pieces that are simply family-friendly big-budget variations on Jackass stunts.

Sloppy and haphazard where it should be calculatedly chaotic, it can't ever seem to settle on an appropriate tone.

The only thing that could've made Sofia Vergara's misguided contribution grislier would have been to fellate a Chiquita banana.

The film is sstrictly a high-tech spin on one of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Even permitting that the movie's setup counts almost by default as one of Nicholas Sparks's more complicated scenarios, that makes his failure to draw up compelling, flawed, human characters all the more conspicuous.

It adds more grist for the mill to the notion that studios don't hit the big red "reboot" button in any other state than a panic.

Most Nicholas Sparks adaptations say, in cinematic terms, nothing so complicated as "roses are red." This one just points to a garden and shrugs.

David Frankel's film argues that the power of miracles can be manufactured by those who can fund them.

Father Figures, which finished shooting more than two years ago before spending endless months without a release date, is both meandering and bloated, suggesting the Frankensteinian result of brutal test screenings.

Even the most desensitized, ghoulishly amoral gleaners of deviant cinema can’t just stare down the nastiness on display in Cannibal Holocaust and just shrug it off.

The really frustrating thing about Tomatoes is the toothlessness of its satire.