Jeff Baker

What is special about The Good Dinosaur isn't the characters...but the backgrounds.

Makes the case that Fischer's chess prowess and his mental illness were inextricable. The chess fed the paranoia which supported the chess which drove Fischer deeper into madness, and so on.

That "The Hunger Games" movies lost momentum is hardly a surprise: even "Star Wars" and "The Lord of the Rings" slipped after the second installment. The end feels like a relief for all concerned, and it does feel like the end.

Writer-director Patrick Brice is interested only in his male characters; Alex and Kurt work out their issues while their wives serve as support or comic foils. The laughs stop about halfway through, and the 79-minute running time feels about right.

With such actors at work and with locations including a first-time use of the Houses of Parliament, Suffragette should look and be a richer experience than it is.

What Ruffalo brings is a gravelly voice, soulful eyes, and absolute commitment. He's a little aw-shucksish in a Midwestern way but never corny and with a strong backbone. You like him and wouldn't want to cross him. Frank Capra would love Ruffalo. So would Hitchcock.

Ant-Man wastes the regular-guy appeal of its star, Paul Rudd, on a bland, by-the-numbers story that starts small and keeps on shrinking, a metaphor for the movie itself. Its modest ambitions are admirable and unrealized.

When the reenactors start to talk, In Country gets more complicated and interesting.

Good Kill deserves credit for framing these important issues in a credible, visually challenging drama, but writer-director Andrew Niccol doesn't take his material anywhere interesting.

Laverty gives the scenes between Jimmy and Father Sheridan a sharp edge, and Ward and Norton do the rest. Ryan shot on 35mm and makes the whole movie glow.

It's like watching a high-school football star trying to squeeze into his old uniform after a decade: funny at times, but kind of embarrassing.

Magic Mike XXL might be a good time on a summer evening, a one-night stand best forgotten before the sun rises, but it is not a good movie. It's boring, repetitive and lunk-headed.

OK, got it. It's a spy movie spoof, "Austin Powers" with more violence and less camp, a Bond parody that zeroes in on the Roger Moore era, when the sets and gadgets got bigger and the stories got dumber.

Not bad, no need to wake Roger Moore from his mid-morning nap and bring him out of retirement, but not special.

Harris, crinkly and laser-eyed, has enough gravity to hang with Neeson. Their scenes together anchor a movie that gets away from itself at times and relies on the tired family-in-jeopardy final act.

It turns out bigger is not better. Bigger is louder, you bet your pounding eardrums it is, but it's not smarter. More teeth aren't sharper. They're dull, and so is Jurassic World.

It's very meta and only mildly interesting. The actors are attractive, the countryside moreso. The plot is silly and threadbare; when tragedy does strike, it has about as much impact as a summer shower.

Ultimately, it is nothing more than a souped-up, intermittently interesting take on some familiar material. [24 Oct 1997, p.22]

What happened in Chile really was a triumph of the human spirit, as cliched as it is to write that sentence. The miners deserved a better movie, but that's not how it works.

A genre movie like this one depends on pacing, and Focus hits at least three dead spots in the final act. Writer-directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra get so much right -- the sleek look, the plot set-ups, those montages in New Orleans, the supporting cast -- that it's painful when they can't maintain Focus and land it, before and after the big reveal.

Green is onto something with this paper towns metaphor, but it's nothing Rush didn't say better in "Subdivisions."

It's a comedy with an easy message, and it's sort of sweet. Not too raunchy, not too challenging. A good date movie for sophomores.

Looks great, sounds great -- what's the problem? Everything else.

The Visit is not a head-scratcher, like so many of Shyamalan's movies. It's more of a shoulder-shrug. That's it? That's all you've got?

Wahlberg's The Gambler is California Lite.

The movie is slow, dreary, clumsily staged, and lacks a compelling lead.

Sorry. The sight of the 66-year-old Streep gyrating her way through "Wooly Bully" has a way of blocking out rational thought. It's frightening but temporary, like a bad dream. Or this movie.

The camera tricks, the pacing, and the superbly choreographed set pieces are all there, in the right order, primed and timed like a string of fireworks. But what's holding Blackhat together is a dopey, ham-fisted script that plays like it's plucked from the bottom of the James Bond slush pile.