Genevieve Koski

Those willing or prone to buy into the idea of “Disney Magic” are likely to choke up at least once or twice over the course of Saving Mr. Banks, while those who resist it—the Traverses of the world—will choke on the heaping spoonfuls of sugar the film ladles onto its story.

While the setups are often laughably forced—two words: “weed baby”—the script navigates its way out of them relatively gracefully, and sometimes hilariously.

At 140 minutes, Divergent is too bloated to be consistently exciting, but it’s relatively agile between its many exposition-dumps, at times resembling an actual action movie more than a pro-forma adaptation.

While there are individual delights within Pitch Perfect 2’s 115 minutes, they don’t add up to a functional, coherent film. There’s no harmony, only loud grandstanding.

The Kevin Hart brand is clearly doing well, but Let Me Explain doesn’t seem interested in providing anything more than a surface-level presentation of the product.

The misused cast is just one of many examples of the unrealized potential of Life After Beth, a film that has good bones, but not enough meat, guts, or—most damningly for a zombie movie—brains.

Most of Cinderella’s costuming and production design takes a “glitter first, taste second” approach that embodies the film’s cotton-candy style of filmmaking: a heady sugar-rush in the moment, but empty and a little nauseating over the long haul.

The True Cost’s aim is to make it impossible to ignore fashion’s impact on the world, and it takes an admirably thorough approach to its unwieldy subject. It’s not a particularly cinematic approach, however.

There’s a germ of something interesting and different within the film’s narrative tangle, but it’s unfortunately been subsumed by Hollywood’s dedication to replicating previous successes.

Even with all the SFX overlays, it’s questionable whether any of this is entertaining enough to sustain even a svelte 92-minute runtime, but Spurlock and the boys can’t be faulted for holding back.

It’s neither consistently funny nor poignant enough to make the most of its impressive cast, all of whom are capable of delivering better than what A.C.O.D. asks of them.

More of a fawning love letter than a nuanced profile of a woman who surely must be more fascinating than she comes off here.

Delivery Man has sentiment and affability embedded in its DNA, but Scott and Vaughn don’t do enough to nurture the film to its full potential.

It’s a greeting card of film, full of platitudes and pleasant imagery, and destined to be thrown in a drawer and forgotten in short order.

First-time writer-director Tom Gormican fills his script with jabs at romantic convention, but his story doesn’t attempt to subvert those conventions in any meaningful way.

Where Ted managed a respectable ratio of clever (or at least transcendently dumb) gags to lazy/offensive ones, Ted 2 is a repetitive, self-congratulatory slog, dragged down by a haphazard plot and the same third-act problems that ultimately sunk the first film.