Kimberley Jones

Product placement aside, there’s an admirable, even sweet, message about fellowship and misfit pride shot through the whole script, and Vaughn is rather touching as a kind of cuddly uncle figure to his fellow interns.

If you shy away from that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes when watching good people make bad decisions, then best to steer clear of Manito, a low-budget indie that reaches near-Greek proportions of tragedy brought on by lousy decision-making.

A startling beauty who radiates both intelligence and a teenager-like surliness, Mackey is Hot Milk’s main point of interest and its stable anchor. She makes a meal of the scraps meted out about Sofia’s backstory, her inner thoughts, and motivations – which is what makes the film’s final moments so rankling.

Glory Road really isn't a bad show – it's just an obvious one – and one wishes material of this historical import had received a more refined rendering.

Scooby's just so dang cute, what's the point in grousing?

It IS consistently funny. Its trash-can humor is tasteless, no doubt, but hey, that doesn't make it unpalatable.

Hard truths: Popstar’s jokes land pillow-soft.

Paul is offensive solely for being so underachieving.

Anyone who watched (and probably wept his or her way through) the swoony 2004 melodrama "The Notebook" knows Cassavetes is not a man to leave a spot of sap untapped, and in My Sister's Keeper, he pulls out a very big drill indeed.

Counselors and campers' moms tend to tear up when they talk about the lessons these girls are learning, lessons that go way beyond how to tune a bass, but this isn't exactly a "rah-rah" film.

The movie can be funny in fits, but too often the scripters go for the obvious and uninspired.

It’s not like Monsters University is a bad movie. It’s just not a terribly interesting one.

Little girls will love it. I used to be a little girl once, too. I didn’t care much for the Top 40 glossy coat slathered over every song, but this heart will never harden to a spunky kid who’s certain the sun’ll come out tomorrow.

Uneven, ineffective mash-up of sex comedy and artillery-heavy action.

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama.

It goes down easy, with likable performances and a laudable emphasis on love and compassion.

Fact is, good looks will go a long way in masking mediocrity, and Hollywood Homicide capitalizes on that fact doubly so: Co-writer/director Ron Shelton’s latest boasts two pretty faces, and all across the country, mothers and daughters sigh alike.

Lucas and Moore aren’t savvy enough, or brave enough, to truly plumb the gallows humor embedded in their premise.

The film is by no means a disaster. Possession is prettily performed, prettily put-together. Yet, for a story set so firmly in the center of a fire, LaBute and his players have suited themselves in some mighty flame-retardant threads.

The love match is cringing; as a rom-com’s raison d’etre, their limp connection pretty much sinks the thing. But when the script settles down and stops feeling quite so much like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thesis project, it has its bouncy moments.

Phillips and co-writer Scot Armstrong waste too much time on a silly love-interest subplot for Wilson; that time is much better served by the frat-boy idiocies, like Frank beer-bonging himself into streaking.

Yes, this is the stuff of fiction, where individuals can drift in and out of another's life and make extraordinary, unbelievable things happen.

In The Grinch power rankings, this one trails Theodor Geisel’s original 1957 storybook and Chuck Jones’ cheeky 1966 TV special by a long mile.

It runs the stopwatch on a chase sequence to a comical extreme and takes way, way too long to take its final bow, in the process burning off any residual goodwill.

White Christmas endures – despite not being a very good movie.

Morning Glory had the capacity to be a smarter, tarter picture, though it's not bad as is: well-acted and ingratiating, with at least one howlingly funny sequence.

What's translated to film feels like a rough draft, with bullet points at beginning and end, demarcating Lola lost, Lola found. And in the middle? A vast, vague maw.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.