James Rocchi

The Internship delivers what it promises, no more and no less, and faulting it for not being a rougher, tougher, smarter film about how much we all seem to live our lives through our work today would be like yelling at a spoon for not being a knife.

The film’s so inflated with moral importance that it becomes ridiculous, a Lifetime movie shoved into a cage and fattened with sermons and platitudes until it is ready to be served up cold and bland.

A perfect example of how lame, lazy material strands good actors, resulting in a movie that looks great and feels less so.

One of the most tedious apocalypses to come down the chute in recent years, this series gets lamer, and lazier, with each entry. The only ‘Trial’ offered by this film is the ordeal of watching it.

Shyamalan has had some difficulties as a director of late, and it’s understandable to hope that by placing him back in the realm of lower budgets and more manageable expectations he could impress us yet again; that turns out not to be the case this time.

The action’s accent on Russian rogues, lethal ladies and Rivera-set car chases makes The Transporter Refueled feel less like a film and more like the world’s most violent Vanity Fair fashion spread, all poses and pouts instead of the two-fisted, rough life of the originals.

Anyone looking for an introduction to Gibran’s poetry can find it in any bookstore; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is achingly well intentioned, but not especially well executed, and its failings as a film can’t be overlooked.

Made of equal parts mourning and melancholy, mystery, and possibly madness, the striking Tom at the Farm showcases Dolan’s abundant talents at turning seemingly simple material into a taut, tough film.

Even with the film’s mild flaws and arms-wide-open approach, it tells a powerful, engaging and compelling story of how America challenged and changed five young black men, and how they in turn challenged and changed America.

Nothing here feels cheap or hasty, which is why the horror, when it comes, is all the more chilling and grim. Slick, sharp and legitimately terrifying, The Gift is a truly brilliant thriller — and, one hopes, the first of many features from Edgerton to come.

Mr. Holmes may not be the biggest or boldest recent updating of Sherlock, but McKellen’s performance alone is almost reason enough to see it on the big screen.

Disturbing, honest and compelling, The Stanford Prison Experiment turns a well-known story into must-see storytelling, depicting the ugly truth through gorgeous filmmaking.

Jenny’s Wedding isn’t ill-intentioned or actively bad; it’s just a little too familiar, a little too safe and a little too satisfied with itself.

Boulevard consistently evokes the road not traveled, but doesn’t particularly stand out alongside other dramas that have explored the same terrain.

The stunts and CGI and attendant action scenes are all simply fine; there’s nothing here with the stark simple power of “The Terminator” or the strong-but-strange brilliant inventions of “Terminator 2.” Instead, it’s all less-than-spectacular “spectacle” and plot convolutions twisting around themselves at the whim of the summer’s least interesting killer artificial intelligence.

Escobar: Paradise Lost plays more like Greek tragedy than the kind of drug-war tale we’d get in a broader, bigger film, and that is no small part of the many reasons it works.

Watching Madame Bovary, you find yourself wishing that Barthes had done something, anything with Flaubert’s novel other than slap it up on the screen as yet another tale of woe from long ago.

The thing that wrecks The Human Centipede III isn’t how the film is disgustingly, degradingly unclean; instead, Six’s work is ruined by how his film is desperately, depressingly unclever.

With superb, nuanced comedy performances from both White and Marsden, The D Train is a great, out-of-left-field star vehicle with tough laughs and real regret in it.

By taking the mob film back to its basics of land, family and death, Munzi’s film strips away artifice, cliche and gun-in-fist glamor to make a story of family and fury that burns cold and slow.

While initially playing like a fish-out-of-water (or, more specifically, into-the-water) rom-com, Hunt’s Ride winds up being surprisingly satisfying, a film with the guts to talk about the things that really matter underneath what could have been a glib, shallow version of the same tale.

There’s nothing here that actually digs deep enough into any of the films’ surface-level concerns — maturity, responsibility, parenting, siblinghood — to snap the movie out of its own slumber.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s Child 44 turns a best-selling period-piece procedural into a slow, tedious thriller almost totally devoid of thrills. While the cast is full of exemplary performers — Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman and more — the fault here is not in the stars, but in the material.

While The Barber may be a first-time directorial effort, it’s tense and taut enough to make an impression thanks in no small part to the steadying, strong presence of Glenn.

There’s nothing in Home that you haven’t seen before, but there’s a lot in it your kids haven’t; as animated sci-fi for small fry, it’s a success whose modest but well-executed ambitions are no small part of its charm.

It’s too bad that neither the philosophy nor the pyrotechnics on-screen in Chappie can distract you from your own sinking feeling that you’ve seen almost all of this before.

The action is shot far better than it is in most Marvel movies, with clarity in the framing and a fluid skill to the cutting.

The Lazarus Effect is a smart, unsubtle chiller that should leave even a dedicated horror fan shaken and spooked from its opening scene’s revelations to its final scene’s implications.

Like a perfect cocktail mixes the sour with the sweet and the bright with the boozy, Focus combines seamless, superbly-crafted filmmaking with the fizz and fun created by its leads.

Unrepentant, uneven and unique, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus proves that Lee can still make a film worthy of the arguments it will most certainly start.

Seventh Son tells a story of dragons, witches, ghosts and ogres, but the most fantastic thing about it is the idea that someone thought this lumpy, bumpy and swollen sack of tired tropes and cluttered CGI would attract audiences.

A feel-good movie that earns all those good feelings, McFarland, USA might be running on a predetermined track, but the heart it shows along the journey is what makes it a winner.

Delivering boredom when it promises mayhem, Wild Card is a bad bet that doesn’t pay off for either the film’s makers or its audience.

It comes across less like an actual documentary you would show to a curious audience than a good-job-everyone piece of internal documentation you’d screen at a company party or to potential outside investors.

Even with all the teen angst and temporal alterations, the film stays fleet, funny and fast, especially as our leads figure out, through trial and error, how they can take advantage of their new abilities in ways large and small.

It’s a bit of an irony that The Voices doesn’t have much to say, but the fact of the matter is that it’s the tone and the tenor of the film that make it most watchable; a truly hilarious film about truly horrible things, the real artistry in Satrapi’s direction of The Voices speaks for itself.

Gripping, smart and genuinely thrilling, Black Sea elevates itself above most other thrillers by how wisely and well it brings you down to the depths alongside its crew.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a startlingly enjoyable and well-made action film leavened by humor and slicked along by style, made by, for, and about people who’ve seen far too many Bond films.

Top Five is that movie precisely so good and yet still so flawed that you can watch greatness slip out of its ambitious but awkward reach right in front of your eyes.

There's an extraordinarily tough and smart delicacy to Still Alice, and it stretches far beyond the writing or Moore's performance or even the sympathy of the circumstance.

The Circle has a sincerity and an honesty that shames far more expensive but over-polished dramas. Plenty of movies have happy endings; The Circle shows you both the happy ending and the incredibly hard work it took to get there.

Selma is one of the best American films of the year — and indeed perhaps the best — precisely because it does not simply show what Dr. King did for America in his day; it also wonders explicitly what we have left undone for America in ours.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

Mr. Edwards has given his film a strong narrative spine — depicting years in the life of young Abraham Lincoln as his family suffers and strives to succeed in Indiana — with such committed actors bringing life to the tale that the audience can't help but be engaged even as the staid, stark visuals keep viewers at arm's length.

Before I Go To Sleep‘s combination of talents on both sides of the camera means that while it may not rocket you to the edge of your seat as quickly and cruelly as the recent “Gone Girl,” it's hardly a snooze.

Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you’ve never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you’ve seen all too many times before.

The bad news is that no matter how charming or fizzy the chemistry between the actors might be, they're still trapped in the dead, fake melodrama and brainless coincidences of a Nicholas Sparks story.

This isn't disposable popcorn entertainment, or a winking “war” film like “Inglourious Basterds.” Ayer's aim here is a film that will stick, and stick with you. And he achieves it.

The material swings between the sensual and the puritanical with whiplash-inducing speed; the dialogue all too often has the flat, dead sound of a first draft.

It works as well as it does precisely because of an intelligence, humanity and restraint we rarely see in Hollywood films.

Reitman clearly wanted to create a mosaic of sharp-edged shards held together by the mortar of art; with Men, Women and Children, what he's delivered is a group of broken bits mired in the morass of pretension.

The Boxtrolls is a swing-and-miss for Laika; when you move forward with revolutionary techniques while standing still in terms of your themes, stories and settings, no amount of technical trickery or animation genius can bring the boring to vivid life.

Both Tipton and Teller are better than this material.

A closer, richer examination of a slice of time as specific as it is short.

Not only brutal but also brutally funny, Gone Girl mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you're still watching the blade go past before you notice you're bleeding.

The film's look and feel are far more purposeful and propulsive than the story and script, but even so, Space Station 76 has more than a few laughs inside its brazen bizarreness.

The humor and drama don’t neutralize each other; in what’s perhaps Stewart’s most successful achievement as a director, the changes in tone work in a harmony, not at cross-purposes.

Willfully empty but wildly entertaining, The Equalizer stands out from its peers like a wolf among lapdogs, as Fuqua and Washington bring out the best in each other for the benefit of the audience.

Heartfelt and haunting, sympathetic while still aware of the limits of sympathy, Wild incorporates beautiful direction, smart writing and brave acting.

This is not a film in need of creativity, passion or energy; what it needed was restraint, consideration and direction. This is not saying that Birdman is awful, or a debacle; there are superb scenes here, as well as excellent performance moments, but they get drowned out in the flood of Iñárritu’s ambition, energy and fantasies.

Strong, stirring, triumphant and tragic, The Imitation Game may be about a man who changed the world, but it’s also about the world that destroyed a man.

At the climax of Into the Storm, colossal tornadoes make noise, blow things up, and go around in circles; that's pretty much all the film does, too.

Perhaps the best thing about What If, the new romantic comedy from director Michael Dowse (“Goon”), is that for all of its banter and batted eyes, from its awkward introductions to its inevitable climactic declarations of love, everyone in it feels like a real human being.

Unlike the stiff-jawed heroics of the other Marvel films, this feels a little looser and lighter, with Pratt as charming, amoral accidental leader Peter Quill, an earthling among the stars who, as he will tell you, is also known as the roving brigand “Starlord.”

This movie hardly rates as first-class animation, but it gets in, gets the job done, and moves on both swiftly and well.

It would be one thing if D'Souza had an idea, or any idea, he could stick to as a through-line in his project. But America isn't a documentary; it's more like the badly-filmed version of a badly-written, meandering op-ed piece from a paper that lacks fact-checking or proofreading.

Attractively made, good-hearted, and more than a little redundant even as it's trying a little too hard, Earth to Echo nonetheless will hit the sweet spot for parents looking for innocent PG-rated entertainment for their kids in a summer full of PG-13 spectacle and mayhem.

It’s an American film that talks about race with strong feeling, common sense and good humor; it’s an indie screenwriting-directing debut as polished as it is provocative; it’s a satire that also lets its characters be people; it’s a showcase of clever craft and direction as well as whip-smart comedic writing brought to life by a dedicated, charismatic cast that also conveys real ideas and emotion.

The Love Punch gets by in no small part thanks to the individual charms and collective chemistry between leads Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.

Cold in July never actually turns into the film you think it's going to, and even if that means there's a few unanswered questions ricocheting around your head as the credits roll, it also provides real, rich pleasures as it zigzags into the darkness.

The best thing about this new Godzilla is that it spares no expense or effort to deliver big, burly IMAX-ified action... The worst thing about this new Godzilla is how that’s the best thing about it.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is just good enough to make you painfully aware of all the ways it's not good at all.

Obvious Child is well-made and wickedly bold, but I still found myself wishing for a little more subtle maturity on the part of its characters and creators.

It knows how to mock cliché big things, like jokes about set-dressing and music video montages; it’s also wise about small matters, right down to the font and the framing device.

Forbes’ script simply cannot make the things she lived through alive for us in anything but the most glib, shallow and contrived way.

Murdoch’s film is fraught with ambition and aspiration, but a little thin on talent and technique.

The Raid 2 brings the noise, but length, repetition and too much space also make it a slightly reduced echo of its predecessor.

The quest to be the best is a familiar film story, but if director-writer Chazelle has achieved anything here, it’s a deeply and richly different take on that journey—not only examining the cost of struggle but the reward of it, showing both what it takes to be great and what happens when you don’t have it.

Calling Love Is Strange a great gay love story is both precise and inaccurate; I doubt I’ll see a more finely performed and beautifully crafted love story, with or without any mere modifiers, up on the big screen this year.

Drive works as a great demonstration of how, when there's true talent behind the camera, entertainment and art are not enemies but allies.

Black Rock isn't going to become the sort of classic that "Deliverance" was, but if you like your scares smart, and like them to happen to people you actually care about, then Aselton's island of friendship and fury is a nice place to visit.

Sightseers homicidal holiday isn't just a pitch-black comedy made with skill, will and brains; it's also another demonstration that Wheatley is, to use an all-too-appropriate phrase, going places.

Muddled, muffled and mixing empty comedy with empty dramatics, The We and the I is an abject failure.

The End of Love is hardly a work of revelation. At the same time, it's surprisingly well-executed, nicely performed and manages to combine a warm and gentle sense of the rhythms of life with a cold and bright-eyed look at the world and its lead's flaws and character.

If there's one thing that wounds On the Road, it's that the film is full of things -- having sex, doing drugs, being free -- that are far more enjoyably experienced by one's self as opposed to watching other people enjoy them on screen.

Nature Calls demonstrates yet again that the real question for any bad script is not "Who wrote this garbage?" but, rather, "Who read this garbage and thought it would make a viable way to spend time?"

Sorrentino's very title suggests someone who doesn't have the most well-defined sense of where they ultimately want to wind up; as goes the Talking Heads song, so goes the movie.

Two things make The Sessions stand out. One is the level of acting...The other is that, while we all know sex is more than boobs and bits and butts, it also does include those things, and The Sessions does not hide behind euphemism or gentle cutaways, montages or misty light.

With both Garner and Shahedi providing voice-over, the small-town stakes and the big thematic ideas, Butter feels like someone trying to create the lemonade tang and quenching zest of, say, Alexander Payne's "Election."

Ponsoldt, Paul and Winstead make a remarkably effective team for this film's points and purposes, and Smashed burns long after it goes down smoothly.

A lurid, florid, humid, flaccid and insipid waste of time and money for the audience and for everyone who made it.

Warm and funny, real and raw, Hello I Must Be Going deserves a hearty welcome from moviegoers looking for an honest and frank comedy that never forgets to help us care about its characters.