Inkoo Kang

A timid and slapdash musical.

No amount of self-referential jokes can make up for a lack of heart and spirit. Thankfully, Annie lacks neither.

Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service.

The romance of patriotism and pain, depicted here in lush greens and velvety blues, makes “The Imitation Game” enjoyable enough to render it a vindication of the formula. It disappoints as biography, but makes for a great yarn, even if you've heard it before.

The Babadook is the rare horror tale that's also a triumph of empathy.

Jones’ riveting Western is bleak and very nearly misanthropic, but it's also passionate, earthy, unpredictable, sensitive, and gloriously distinct.

Especially in a year so devoid of serious female-led dramas, it's invigorating to see a feminist crowd-pleaser with the force of moral righteousness on its side. But Big Eyes is good, not great. What keeps it from excellence is its reluctance to explore the very questions it raises.

The visuals remain homely and brutally efficient, the plot convoluted but the pacing brisk, and the humor often inventive and resourceful — and just as often tired or offensive (to women, people of color, gays and lesbians, old people, take your pick).

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Director Clint Eastwood‘s focus on Kyle is so tight that no other character, including wife Taya (Sienna Miller), comes through as a person, and the scope so narrow that the film engages only superficially with the many moral issues surrounding the Iraq War.

Admirable throughout is the balance that Ribeiro strikes between dewy eroticism and the contextualization of sexuality as just a single aspect of one's identity, albeit an essential one.

Unfortunately, it's just when Jessabelle looks like it might transcend its haunted-house trappings that the Southern Gothic clichés rear their tortured, screaming heads.

The dramatic weight loss Gyllenhaal endured for the role, which transforms his dreamboat looks into a bat-like mask, is startling. But the actor's performance is just as impressive, nimbly selling Gilroy's occasionally overwritten lines while Louis’ punishing optimism finds new gradations of sadism and rage. Nightcrawler is the arrival of a thrilling character actor.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

An exquisite, hand-drawn marvel and an alternatingly jubilant and heartrending epic pastoral.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

Shelton's comedy isn't just smart, but cheerfully wise; not just funny, but cleverly and endlessly so.

The four main actors, all uniformly excellent, can wrap their tongues around Simien's verbose dialogue, but some of the minor actors have a harder time, resulting in several jokes falling flat.

The Judge is tailor-made for Downey's gift for delivering a quippy, arrogant put-down like he's doing his target a favor. Hank's anti-heroism is a refreshing splash of lemon juice with an occasional spritz of sour vinegar. But much of director David Dobkin‘s cynically cloying legal and family drama goes down like a lump of aspartame.

The thing that catastrophically sinks “Him” – or “Her,” if that's the film you see second – is that the two films are enough alike that sitting through the second immediately after the first is a slog.

They're thematically richer and more tonally cohesive than their hybrid. But because the two films are so similar to one another, they fail to deliver on the promise of their unique structure, rendering the “he said, she said” complementary design of the two films a dull, self-indulgent gimmick.

Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.

The late-60's Satanic panic and housewifely ennui make for a surprisingly complementary mix of fear and paranoia in Annabelle.

Rather than the currency itself, the film's most compelling subject ends up being the separatist psychology of its self-regarding fanatics.

Bolivar is eye-rollingly romanticized as a wonderful lover and an even better fighter in Alberto Arvelo's lushly produced, dully reverential The Liberator.