Eric Henderson

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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