Jon Frosch

It’s a quiet drama, full of unspoken hurt and free of histrionics, but it’s as raw and painful as a fresh wound.

Luckily, Elliott succeeds in pulling you into Lee's emotional orbit and holding you there even when the movie falters.

Almost nothing anyone does registers as recognizably human; it’s all just a pretext for yet another round of envelope-pushing outrageousness.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.

Luckily, Blue Jay boasts a handful of fresh, piercingly poignant scenes that cut through the cloud of déjà vu. It also has a not-so-secret weapon in the formidable Paulson, who deserves much of the credit for whatever emotional punch the film delivers.

The movie is all tease and no follow-through, letting its story leak out in dribs and drabs that fail to gather any momentum or meaning, let alone mystery.

Fast, full-hearted and graced with a beautifully modulated lead turn by Hailee Steinfeld, the movie takes the risk of playing it straight and sincere — and the risk pays off.

The film, poised awkwardly between costume-drama prestige and all-out schmaltz, is so busy sweeping us up in a swirl of music, scenery and beautiful, suffering faces that it forgets to do the actual work of earning our emotions.

Bad Moms milks the “women behaving badly” conceit with a single-mindedness that might be depressing if the movie didn’t have an ace up its sleeve: the glorious Hahn, who injects what could have been another insipid studio hack job with a bracing shot of personality.

This lugubrious indie drama is affecting in parts but never gels into a satisfying whole.

Central Intelligence demonstrates an above-average interest in story and character, and tries, if not always successfully, to craft real comic situations and action sequences. It's been made with a certain level of polish and professionalism. And it capitalizes on the chemistry between Hart and Johnson.

The director finds himself stymied by weak source material — Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1990 play about a young man who returns home to tell his family he's dying — and only intermittently well served by his starry French cast.

Mother’s Day is bad from the start, and it doesn't get better.

A flawed but affecting two-hander that intrigues and frustrates in nearly equal measure.

From the very first scene, the rhythm is off, the staging and editing graceless, and the dialogue (the screenplay is by Kyle Pennekamp and Scott Turpel) alternates between trying too hard and not hard enough.

For all its relatability, the movie is safe and sitcomishly amusing rather than sharply funny, hitting the same genial notes over and over instead of building real comic momentum.

Its rhythms are sluggish, its jokes predictable and the gags are set up with such thudding deliberateness that even the sight of Ferrell losing control of a motorcycle, careening through the air and crashing straight through his house barely raises an eyebrow.

Despite the film's flaws and missteps, there’s a low-key charm and sincerity at play in Cronies, as well as a sly recognition of fragile male egos and the way bravado can mask sexual anxiety.

A Christmas comedy of numbing tedium and tackiness.

Cooper can do this kind of arrogant-but-irresistible golden boy shtick in his sleep, but that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to watch. Flashing his baby blues and a fiery temper, the actor gives a fully engaged performance that almost makes us want to forgive the movie’s laziness. Almost.

The film boasts enough manic energy and straight-up weirdness to keep you entertained before overstaying its welcome in the final act.

We Are Your Friends is predictable, sometimes tacky, but the energy is unflagging, the eye candy plentiful and writer-director Max Joseph (making his feature debut after hosting MTV’s Catfish) brings sincerity and a skillfully modulated sweetness to the material.

Taken on its own undemanding terms and considered within its not very original framework, Joel Edgerton’s feature-length directorial debut is a pleasant — or pleasantly unpleasant — surprise, hitting its genre marks in brisk, unfussy fashion and raising a few hairs on the back of your neck along the way.

This graceful, deeply affecting movie has a soulfulness and sweep that mark it as a step forward for Hansen-Løve.

Stacy Keach provides a bit of relief from all the oppressive earnestness in his brief appearance as Mia’s grandfather, evoking a depth of feeling otherwise missing here.

Batra isn't ambitious with the visuals, but he creates an effective, unfussy sense of urban space, both indoor (cramped apartments, crowded buses) and outdoor (even leafy residential streets seem to be swarming with playing children).

The Broken Circle Breakdown crashes as frequently as it soars, but the ache at its center feels real.

A tacky corporate noir that makes you long for the leanness of Margin Call, or even the clumsy theatrics of Arbitrage.