Jaime N. Christley

The Cabin in the Woods, regardless of its many genealogical links to prior Whedon creations, is an ideal Hollywood film in the Age of Pixar: spectacle for spectacle's sake, but infiltrated by intelligent commentary and an atmosphere of generosity and inclusion.

What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.

As funny and batshit insane as the movie often is, the fact that 22 Jump Street knows it's a tiresome sequel doesn't save it from being a tiresome sequel, even as Lord and Miller struggle to conceal the bitter pill of convention in the sweet tapioca pudding of wall-to-wall jokes.

In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible. Zemeckis teaches us the same lesson.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.

The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles.

While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.

Like many almost-great comedies, 21 Jump Street is frontloaded with the best go-for-broke gags and lines.

The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.

Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut takes a done-to-death story template and revitalizes it with intelligence, maturity, and tenderness.

Caters almost exclusively to the remedial, Duplo Blocks demographic, leaving parents and guardians bored to distraction.

Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories

Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.

Glides from a mildly off-putting opening across several scenes that waver between sitcom superficiality and sudden, unexpected gusts of feeling, ultimately ending on a note of perfectly judged emotional ambivalence.

One successful set piece in 135 minutes, and it involves very little running, no parkour, and no genetically enhanced superheroes from clandestine government projects.

In spite of its lazy, cookie-cutter screenplay, simple narrative mechanics are only dutifully observed to the extent that they step aside to make way for numerous flights of madness.

David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.

After what seems like an eternity of inanity and incompetence in the realm of Cats & Dogs and Squeakquels, the Farrelly brothers' direction is downright classical.

It's only natural that Abel Ferrara's vision of the end of the world should take corporeal form as a quasi-autobiographical hangout movie.

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.

There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.

Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey’s mugging.

While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.

At this point in the franchise, Anderson is content to alight the saga on a perpetual rewind loop, ever-ending, ever-rebooting, all subsidized by his nonpareil compositional sense.

Made possible by the half a billion dollars Clash of the Titans garnered worldwide, Wrath of the Titans sputters and coughs on the fumes of its own inevitability.

It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.

It's all very "found footage," Impolex by way of Discovery's The Colony, only with a lot more in the way of familiar consumer products.