Jen Chaney

You and your kids could probably craft a richer, more exciting polar bear adventure using nothing but Klondike bar wrappers and the power of the imagination.

Even McAvoy’s reincarnation-obsessed Frankenstein can’t breathe vitality into this shallow adaptation, which careens from moments of horror to serious drama to attempts at comedy that don’t quite land.

East Side Sushi includes a number of moments that are a little too on-the-nose in their eagerness to convey the obstacles.... But Lucero compensates for such missteps with subtly persuasive visual choices and narrative restraint.

Love the Coopers is one of the most jumbled, tonally misguided holiday movies in recent memory. It is an insult to tidings of comfort as well as joy, and a complete waste of the time and talents of its ensemble cast.

Big Stone Gap suffers from some hokey moments, including an ending that’s both implausible and too heavy on the sap.

With its appealingly conflicted hero and generous sense of humor, Meet the Patels has the breezy touch of a scripted romantic comedy.

Riley doesn’t merely make a fine nonfiction film about the life and legacy of the late conflicted artist. He virtually resurrects him.

Perhaps Sneakerheadz needs a sequel, one that more directly interrogates the shoe manufacturers themselves about the hazards of pumping up so much hype about their product.

Paquet-Brenner has assembled a talented cast.... Yet he elicits mostly unmemorable performances from just about everyone involved.

As with other Aardman productions, the greatest delights derive from relishing the details of the clay figures and intricate sets, crafted by the studio’s master model builders.

After spending time with all nine of these sometimes-gutsy, sometimes-conflicted women and men, it’s impossible not to feel a deeper appreciation for their struggle to feel like the skin they live in is genuinely their home.

Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.

Sunshine Superman, a portrait of BASE jumping founding father Carl Boenish, effectively captures the irrepressible energy of a man who never tired of taking flying leaps. But it also does something even rarer for the documentary genre: It demands to be shown on an IMAX screen.

Unfortunately, this procedural/character study unfolds in a manner that feels more generic than genuinely deep.

I Am Big Bird breezes by a couple of opportunities to dig deeper into thornier subject matter, but those minor oversights don’t hurt the film in any significant way.

As illuminating as that article may have been, though, Emptying The Skies, a documentary based on Franzen’s story that borrows its headline as its title, ultimately makes a more searing imprint on the psyche.

These guys are so fascinating, in fact, that it feels like In Country could and should have gone longer than 80 minutes so that the movie could delve more deeply into their psyches and provide more context behind how these reenactments were born.

Yes, the whole movie feels overstuffed and overlong, and the non-action scenes are often dragged down by stilted dialogue. But Furious 7 buzzes with a frenetic energy so contagious, there’s no sense in resisting it.

By building the documentary around an ensemble cast, Lears and Blotnick demonstrate, in terms of content as well as filmmaking, that the voices of a few can galvanize the voices of many.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is like the family movie equivalent of a Krabby Patty: It tastes fine and will satisfy some cravings. But it’s ultimately a product cranked out to make money and keep our consumer-driven society, much like Bikini Bottom’s, chugging along without significant disruption.

What’s truly regrettable about The Wedding Ringer is that, at certain moments, it almost succeeds as a heartfelt comedy about male friendship in which its two stars, Josh Gad and Kevin Hart, get to demonstrate that they can act.

What transpires in this adequately acted, uninventive film fails to add any fresh twists to the cash-vs.-conscience formula.

My Old Lady isn’t the tart slice of dessert that its initial scenes suggest it might be. In fact, it only becomes truly compelling in its second half, as Horovitz drives toward darker material and farther away from the light.

The prevailing tone throughout Innocence is as somber as the onset-of-twilight blues and grays that dominate the movie’s color palette. All that seriousness ultimately doesn’t blend well with a narrative that marinates in the preposterous.

It becomes clear that this isn’t just a documentary that seeks to demystify green burials. It’s one that tries, and largely succeeds, to demystify the process of letting go of life.

What is often surprising in this entertaining and fluidly acted portrait of females in flux is the specific way things get messy.

One could describe Boseman’s performance in Get on Up as electrifying, and that would not be wrong. But it’s more accurate to say that watching Boseman transform into James Brown, who died in 2006 at 73, is like watching a dude invent electricity while the idea for electricity is still occurring to him.

As a tightly constructed look at the more serious symptoms of Peter Pan syndrome, The Almost Man mostly works. The fact that it departs from the usual vehicles for good-natured, non-threatening Vince Vaughn jackassery is refreshing, albeit in an often jarring, disturbing way.