Jordan Hoffman

As things go bad for Wilson, the movie, unfortunately, loses a considerable amount of steam as well.

Ti West’s pointless new film The Sacrament, an exercise in talking loud and saying nothing, isn’t just bad, it’s infuriating.

For a film that reminds use over and over that this is a whole new world, this movie feels awfully familiar.

Amsterdam is not a great movie by any shakes, although it looks terrific and all of the performances . . . are energetic, entertaining, and enjoyable.

The film isn’t a home run, but with Rudd in the lead in something so out of the ordinary for him, it’s fair to call a ground rule double.

S-VHS isn’t as pants-pooping scary as the first, but it is funnier, tighter and slicker.

It’s surprising that a film about Deep Throat could be such an anticlimax.

Hunting Elephants has its requisite scenes of planning and setbacks, but it mostly settles for old-people jokes (now I know the Hebrew for Viagra: it’s Viagra) and making Patrick Stewart look like an imbecile.

There’s not much that glitters in Gold, a lackluster caper that proves that even the priciest ore can bore.

What’s strangest about this three-hour movie, though, is that despite some deadly slow patches, it still feels like an hour was cut from it, considering how characters develop off-screen. On more than one occasion, there are scenes that suggest deep and lasting relationships between people … that must have happened while the camera was somewhere else.

Abhorrent politics aside, it’s also a terrible movie. The dialogue is atrocious, the performances rote. One could make the case that its incoherence is a grand meta-narrative statement about the fluidity of combat, but I don’t think that’s the case.

“Expendables 3” has fewer nauseating clichés than The Judge.

The Ted franchise is perhaps unstoppable if MacFarlane sets his sights a bit lower, finds a way to streamline the plot mechanics and just give moviegoers what they never knew they wanted: time hanging out with a foul-mouthed anthropomorphised soft toy.

Alas, a winning lead performance isn’t enough when it is at the center of a flawed movie. The Greatest Showman can only hoodwink for so long before the tent collapses. This is an enjoyable film, but its rags-to-riches tale in a sanitized 19th century is extremely by-the-numbers.

While I wasn’t exactly expecting greatness from the film, I did think it would contain a few thrills and maybe some laughs. Having Lara Croft leap around and avoid traps should be an easy formula—but for this crew, it remains an unsolvable puzzle.

Unfortunately the bulk of the picture is cut together like a beer commercial on poorly lit cheap video without much panache. Unless primary colors with a gauzy halo is panache.

It’s just so embarrassingly thin. The few chuckles are all the more depressing when you realize that this could have been a winner with a clever screenwriter and a competent director.

Director Ron Howard does a solid job of getting the smell of salt off the page and into the picture. The first half works quite well simply as a procedural, but when the action comes we run into trouble. The well-earned seriousness is washed away as we’re broadsided by B-movie tropes.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny isn’t so much a continuation as a Xerox copy with cheap toner.

Masterminds is a bit of an interesting case study, as it is basically a Coen brothers film but put through a mechanism that removes all the wit, visual style or excitement. In its place are tortuously dull set-pieces, rambling dialogue and banal stagings.

Despite the uncomfortable sexism and altogether predictable nature of the film, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t modestly entertaining.

By the end of the movie few won’t be rolling their eyes or checking their watch, but there’s enough that’s fundamentally good in the meat of film not to wholly reject what The Giver is giving us.

It has a nose for what's cool, but is completely inept at execution.

Johnson’s Ana squeezes believability out of one of the more silly romantic entanglements in recent popular culture. It’s all there in her face, which Taylor-Johnson frames in close-up. She’s fully aware this scenario is ridiculous, but can’t seem to turn away from its lunacy.

Though this telling has more than its share of well-worn story beats that Salinger’s hero Holden Caulfield might accuse of being phoney, there are enough occasional insights into the creative process, as well as juicy tidbits about the secretive Salinger, to make this a very agreeable, if at times shallow, watch.

Schreiber saves it to an extent with some unusual performance choices, but when you compare this ending to the emotional supernova of Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine” it comes way short.

This is not much more than a light crowdpleaser, but when you’ve got two powerhouse performers like this it is very difficult not to find oneself at least temporarily charmed.

Jared Hess, co-creator of Napoleon Dynamite and a string of other small oddball pictures, brings a fresh perspective to what could have been a lumbering IP-pallooza movie.