James Rocchi

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.

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.

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."

Both Tipton and Teller are better than this material.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Honoré's made better films, and he'll make better films again; the most damning thing you can say about this one isn't that it feels like Honore doing a third-rate imitation of Francois Ozon ("Potiche," "8 Women"), but rather that it often feels like Honoré doing a third-rate imitation of himself.

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

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?"

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

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.