Kimberley Jones

I suspect it's that spirit as much as the injustice of her incarceration that drew so many people to her cause and inspired this labor-of-love documentary about her journey to hell and back.

Subtle it ain’t, but there’s an undercurrent of palpable rage that pokes through the (very funny) banter-banter gloss of the thing, and the actors rip into it with relish.

The Descendants is beautifully shot (by Phedon Papamichael) and compellingly performed, especially by its young stars, and it has moments of startling tenderness. If only it didn't feel phony to its bones.

Once a crucial piece of backstory is revealed, the picture becomes more rewarding for it, emotionally and aesthetically, but that doesn’t temper the feeling that half the film was wasted on arty misdirection.

If Love Me wants us to consider the inner life of inanimate objects, that message gets muddled when we’re mostly looking at these two very alive actors.

This pandemic-made feature teems with fertile ideas and observations – about social media, California Goopiness, reproductive trauma, feminist porn – that don’t always feel fully formed – more like purged – and her essential glibness undercuts the potential for real catharsis.

All told, it’s a likably misfit little movie, even if you can imagine it better suited as a lengthy short film or as a superior installment on one of those midcentury television playhouse series.

Manages the neat feat of feeling sweetly inevitable rather than boilerplate predictable.

By trying to give these women happy endings, or proposing fake reasons for how they came to produce indelible works, these alternative histories only achieve the opposite. They rob them of the truth of their lives.

Cornish, in her first film seen stateside, is astonishing.

Screenwriters Andy Paterson and Frank Cottrell Boyce (who wrote many of Michael Winterbottom’s early films) adeptly shift the action back and forth between these two timelines, and the drama – exterior and interior – is engrossing in both tracks.

The overall vibe is JV-squad swashbuckling, evoking "The Goonies" and the "Indiana Jones" films for a tweens-and-under demographic, and all without the exhausting quippiness of the "Lego" franchise.

It’s an ugly place to be stuck for two hours: a credible depiction of human nature at its worst, sure, but not an especially illuminating one. Still, there’s nerviness here, and undeniable skill. I’d like to see what Domont does next.

[Keaton's] lost none of the spunk, sass, and ditzbomb charm of her "Annie Hall" days. She, quite simply, is marvelous. Too bad her similarly iconic co-star is such a toad. Jack never stops being Jack, to great distraction.

Provides no revelations and left this viewer, at least, puzzling over whether the picture Cunningham has allowed to develop of him is completely transparent or utterly impenetrable.

It's all vastly superior to Brett Ratner's scorched-earth "X-Men: The Last Stand," of course.

After the recent rash of superhero end-spectacles as long-winded and self-serious as a term paper, the limited ambition of The Dark World’s climax is a relief. It scuttles all term paper aspirations and instead humbly lobs a thesis statement-slash-open invitation: Let’s have some fun, shall we? And so we did.

You can’t read one of Clooney’s endless People profiles without hearing the Cary Grant comparison, but here, he’s all Gable – same rakishness and stubble and tanned-leather basso profundo.

Snyder has cast Man of Steel with dramatic actors, not action stars, and it pays off.

Franklin injects life into a flat format and has in the process done something nearly unheard of in Hollywood as of late: He's brought class back to the genre film.

The former mayor is an alert onscreen presence, but the film surrounding him is not always so lively.

Ao relentlessly, gleefully dumb -- without being the slightest bit sardonic -- that you just can't help but guffaw … or groan … but probably both.

Filmmakers nicely mix the historical and the tributary, honoring both Bennett's cultural landmark and the dancers who dream of joining its ranks.

With the documentary Ballet 422, Lipes’ first return to dance after notable narrative cinematography work (on TV’s Girls and the upcoming Trainwreck, among other projects), he’s somewhat boxed himself into a corner with the cinema verité directive to capture the moment and keep out of the way.

Movingly captures the terrors and delights of being lovesick at 17. Would that it hadn't felt constrained to target only the 17-year-olds.

Tonally, it all makes sense, but there’s such a thing as overmuchness. Gibney laudably launches a withering attack here on the pay-to-play relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers. But this viewer felt withered, too, by the end of his battering ram of a movie.

The filmmakers no doubt had a hell of a time whittling the material down; unfortunately, what they came up with was something long on the mundaneness of GovWorks.com and short on the personalities behind it.

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.

This latest offering continues a trend toward increasingly mature moviemaking from the actor/writer/director.

The sensation that dogs Hope Gap is that they forgot to roll camera on the most dramatic parts. What’s left over isn’t bad, only underwhelming.

When the action shifts to Bill’s childhood home – an islet along the Thames, downriver from the legendary Shepperton Studios – some of the magic of that place rubs off on Boorman’s picture: It becomes lighter on its feet, moves with the breath of life and not just the strength of memory.

The stripped-down title gets at what we're really here for: the cars. Are they fast? Check. Are they furious? Yep.

This is Jackman’s show entirely, and he’s as forceful and charismatic as ever as the walking, talking hurt that is Wolverine. If only he had something more interesting to do here.

There are momentary pleasures, to be sure – a corker of a kiss here, an Otis Redding-backed barroom slink there – but frankly, I'm a little weary of Wong wearing "that same old shaggy dress."

The supposedly epic battle the entire film builds toward – the single action set-piece – is a ho-hummer. Fire and ice, turns out, was an oversell: Think tepid tap water instead.

That's the ultimate cheat in this pleasant, but trifling affair: Allen has cheated himself out of an actress (Leoni) that could have been Diane Keaton's heir.

The Girl Who Played With Fire's chief frustration is in how removed Salander and Blomkvist are from each other.

I’m coming down harder than I meant to. If you’re a fan of the series – and I am – you’re still going to fan. (There’s no entry point for newcomers; it’s too in medias res.) The scenery is lush. There’s ever the pleasure in Steve and Rob’s company. I just wanted to feel by film’s end like I’d arrived somewhere new. Like the journey had been pulling me somewhere inevitable but still enlightening.

The Help may be more interested in the moral at the end of the story than the story itself, but what saves the film from its meticulous one-dimensionality is that nuanced, deeply moving cast.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among Janeites, that we’ll spend long hours scouring every streaming service out there, hungering for a corseted drama to watch. In that respect at least, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is fresh meat, if a tough cut.

Isaac and Olsen are both mesmerizing actors, and Lange and Felton also do very good work in supporting roles, but their collective gameness – all that acting their pants off (sometimes literally) – is underserved by the film’s script and direction.

Still, when The Yellow Handkerchief finally hooks into the meat of Hamill’s source story, the narrative tension puts enough wind in the film’s sails to arrive at its corny but sentimentally satisfying conclusion.

The subject itself – the musicians, the music – and the spirit of the thing – one son’s obvious devotion – transcend the film’s technical shortcomings.

The familiar faces inject instant warmth, but I’m not sure it’s entirely earned. By the time Jay Kelly arrived at its last line – buffed to a bland sheen, as if the whole film was reverse-engineered to land there – I had cooled considerably.

Rather born to wear a frock coat, Dancy shares the stammer-blush, winning-grin methodology of countryman Hugh Grant, only with more probity and better posture.

Digging for Fire fails its title’s own promise: It has the capacity for startling insight and artistry, but mostly it’s just a toe listlessly pushing dirt around.

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

There is much to recommend this earnest and enraged film.

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

Chbosky surrounds his hurting characters with the cinematic equivalent of a hug circle – which is sweet, but rather antithetical to tension-building.

I COULD do without "Dancing Queen" stuck in my head, but that will unstick soon enough, and with any luck so too will the memory of Streep noodling on an air guitar.

A grinning but toothless comedy, this Christmas-themed outing pales in inventiveness compared to the original, which brought sweet, silly anarchy to its one-thing-leads-to-another plotting.

The Duplass brothers have an exceptional eye for microexpressions (yes, they're still zoom-happy), and there's something to be admired in this new interest in a macro lens on the universe's workings. If only it didn't take wading through so much drear to get to that divine.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a very pretty production – pretty colors, pretty scenery, pretty bromides – and a busy one, too, which helps distract us from the sad fact that the movie is generous and humane but not all that interesting.

Life at least deserves a nod for supplying the mostly dramatic actress with her first starring comedic role.

Early Man is wanting: of a cleverer narrative, of memorable characters. It’s not bad, necessarily. It just feels like an early draft of a better movie to come.

The landscape and the lovers are pretty to look at, but two households divided should really pack more of a punch.

Never thrills on an emotional level the way the best of sports films – a "Hoosiers," say – can, but it's a satisfying entertainment nonetheless.

Two Eighties genre staples – Disease-of-the-Week and Poppin' the Cherry – meet, shake hands, and mostly play nice in this sweet, if overly earnest feature.

Cornpone caricatures abound (witness "Hoedown Throwdown," in which Miley sunnily urges us to "pop it, lock it, polka dot it"), but so do worthy messages about responsibility – to family, community, even Mother Earth.

Luhrmann wants it all – comedy and tragedy, bombast and wet-eyed sentimentality. When it works, his kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness is infectious. When it doesn't – when he goes from silly to turgid in 60 seconds flat – he punctures Australia's proportions down from epic to simply overwrought.

What it does have in its favor are two sit-up-and-clap supporting turns from Skarsgård, all barking bear in tacky gold chains, and Lewis, who wears the sour mouth of someone who just underwent a prostate exam. Collectively, they’re the film’s fail-safe: Whenever Our Kind of Traitor threatens to go completely inert, they show up and give it a good goosing.

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

The film's best stretch, wherein each American gal is romanced by an international lover, faintly recalling the Fifties' sudser "Three Coins in the Fountain."

The jokes hit about half the time – the best bits have an off-the-cuff feel – and it’s pocked with the kind of rom-com clichés that are practically written in stone (screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna's script for "The Devil Wears Prada" was far sharper).

Frozen can count in its favor visual grandeur, two energetic young women as co-leads, and a couple of plot twists that place the film a cut above your average princess fare.

Genial and unbothered, Confess, Fletch never climbs higher than mere adequacy.

It comes as no surprise that the film is less about fandom as it is about the community fans create with one another – who else to turn to when the object of your affection, your enduring obsession, blows big chunks? – and Fanboys, a likable, shaggy picture, pays nice tribute to that community.

Teetering toward made-for-TV in its facile depiction of Walter’s many wives and veering tonally from too broad to totally mawkish (the score wants to arm-wrestle tears out of you), The Friend is all soft edges.

Ambling, just-passable picture.

Occasional animated inserts inspired by Chantry’s work as an illustrator, while accomplished, inject an off-note of whimsy that doesn’t quite square with the script’s stabs at edgier humor.

This “one crazy night” taps out at lightly kooky; there’s nothing here that gets within striking distance of the sheer weirdness of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" or the darkness of "After Hours", to name two genre stablemates.

This con artist caper from the writer/director duo behind "Bad Santa" and "I Love You Philip Morris" bears some superficial resemblance to the 2005 romantic comedy "Hitch."

Gondry’s well-meaning but too soft, too structure-less picture.

In his short career (The Station Agent, The Visitor), McCarthy has established himself as a craftsman of conventionally quirky pictures that are ENTIRELY about ingratiating themselves with the audience.

Wright is terrific – sensitive and alert – in the live-action opening. But that opening runs more than 45 minutes long, a way too heavy-handed preamble to the crazed animation to come, and the actress’ vocal delivery – soft-spoken, gently bewildered – is too soporific to pull off lines like, “Look at me, I’m your prophet of doom.”

Oliver and director Ry Russo-Young (Before I Fall) cherry-pick a few of these digressions and give them an artful, collage-like treatment; they don’t go far enough to mask the skimpiness of the story, which has been whittled down to Natasha and Daniel almost exclusively.

It has a basic goodness of heart that counteracts, if not entirely cancels out, the film's broadness and busyness.

The exceedingly silly Super Troopers is an earnest, mostly funny spoof.

Far more interesting than Juli and Bryce's banal budding love is Reiner and co-scripter Andrew Scheinman's sensitive exploration of how parents shape their children.

The film never recovers its initial fizzy-pop charms, owing largely to pacing that turns positively molasses-slow in the second act.

Two hours pass painlessly enough, thanks to the affability of its trio of leads, Hathaway, Andrews, and Elizondo.

For every zinger, there are two flat jokes around the corner.

Mostly Legend just lurches.

Forbidden love! Terrible betrayals! Decades-old repressed truths! The plot elements are all there for something emotional wrecking, but Grandage and his cast approach it with such enormous restraint, the oxygen is cut off completely. This is bloodless filmmaking.

Although the filmmaker’s presence in her own film is never remarked upon, I imagine she felt compelled by a feeling of kinship with the artist; Dyrschka, a first-time feature director, is the first filmmaker to profile af Klint, which is a notable achievement. But I don’t think we’ve had the definitive film portrait yet.

Imagine "Little Miss Sunshine's" dark materials (and superior craftsmanship) diluted with a Hannah Montana-like sunny silliness – which is to say: sometimes funny, often broad-stroked, ever sweet, and landing shy of its potential.

Despite his character's fondness for mugging and mouthing like Michael Corleone, Spacey (and by extension, his director and writer Norman Snider) can't quite catch the operatic wallop of Corleone's arc, possibly because the film is played top-to-bottom like a caprice.

Goldstein, better known for his comic work and coming off a wincing dramatic arc on Shrinking, has limited range but nestles into his sweet spot here, a combination of smirking and sincere, and the underrated Poots is magnetic. The script – witty, anemic – only gestures at her character’s chronic depression, but no matter. Poots bodily fills in the blanks, transforming an underwritten part into a complex, rounded person. She’s an original.

Scaffolding his story on an illogical foundation, Braff (Garden State, Wish I Was Here) continues to be an aggravatingly unsubtle filmmaker, over-relying on totems of profundity (a train set, a tattoo) and showboating with the camera in ways that distract rather than enhance the drama.

Terrio's technically proficient film is mature, modern, and minus the all-important passion and risk.

I suspect a second viewing would uncover more information embedded in the mise-en-scène; had Trance – tonally a jumble and disorienting to the point of distraction – rewarded the audience with the pure perfection of a Keyser Söze-like reveal, I’d be more inclined to make the return trip.

The cast seems to have been assembled primarily for its blinking resemblance to the stars of the original Eighties TV series about a renegade group of former Army Rangers now for hire.

There's no denying the dazzling effect, but a fireworks sequence midfilm only underscores the sad fact that there's no lasting illumination here, only the fast-burn spitzing of bang snaps.

There are no hard answers in Room 237, a feature-length, sporadically engaging exploration of the latter (The Shining).

Feels like a Fincher film: It possesses the same smarts, the same visual panache, the same violence. But not the same heart.

The disappointment in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare lies in how much potential it had to be something more.

The Death Cure is at its absolute best when something’s getting blown up, or a plan is being hatched to blow something up: Series director Wes Ball is aces with action, and almost as effective with the procedural steps to get to said action.

Sparks, an acting novice, falters when her character must muster gumption or sexual heat. She saves her best for last in a barnburner singing performance, but it's too little, too late – especially with the memory of Houston's one song – a heart-stopping gospel number – still ringing in the ears.

It's impossible to shake the feeling that these are merely actors -- albeit good ones.

Fairly uninspiring, but it still manages to ingratiate itself, largely through the efforts of Krasinski in a secondary part.

There’s never any doubt that redemption is the end-game for Jones, but the claim for his saving is weak sauce; the case against him has been too emphatically, if unintentionally, argued.

It's unclear where the buck stops in terms of creative authority – at one point, Clayman complains that "the only thing I feel in control of is the money" – which renders OC87 at once a remarkable achievement, and a fatally compromised film.

“Freely inspired by a true story.” That’s the filmmakers’ cunningly phrased hand-wave acknowledging the gap between actual history and the moony-eyed imagined romance proffered here. Still, it’s a curious deployment of the creative license: You’d think the construction of one of man’s greatest monuments would supply sufficient drama on its own.

Frustrations abound with this limited film, but Wild Horse, Wild Ride does one thing exceptionally well, and that is convey the emotional bond between trainer and horse.

If I may presume: Thatcher probably would have preferred more action, less talk.

The movie lumbers on some more, reiterating the obvious and relying on overfamiliar imagery. Audiences have a long year to wait for Part 2. Would it not have been better to leave them breathless than heaving a sigh?

Failed feminist statement or not, Coyote Ugly is a likable, if confused film.

Big, dumb, and fun.

The final conflict is so protracted as to comfortably accommodate a bathroom break. Don't worry. You won't miss anything you haven't seen before.

Yes, the 84-year-old Maggie Smith is back as the Crawley materfamilias, and as ever she’s the MVP.

For better or worse (and I'd argue the latter), the aliens are as monolithically evil, unformed, and un-individuated as characters as Native Americans once were in the earliest of Westerns.

Perfectly passable film.

Has a heart bursting with good intentions, something that goes a long way in dimming from memory its inherent routineness.

Once the film gets cooking, the questions never stop. For instance: When you find the dead body of someone you love, isn’t your first call to the cops?

The real tension of the piece lies in the sound design, with its layering of heavy breaths, inexplicably compromised frequencies, and invasive thwackings of no known origin to the ship hull.

An actor most at home playing devilish, Keaton’s got the last-reel Machiavellian shrug down cold. But neither he nor the filmmakers do much to illuminate the neural pistons fired from brain to bodily shrug.

Hopelessly old-fashioned then, but not the aggressively bad picture you might have anticipated.

Gilroy zings the film with tantalizing bits of absurdity (one wonders, wistfully, what the Coen brothers would have done with this material), but too often he returns to his darker, more ponderous instincts.

Until Hollywood stops being a boys club, and America graduates beyond short pants and its embarrassingly pubescent attitudes toward sex, I suppose one can only hope that all male adolescent fantasies will play as goofily sweet as this one.

I suppose when you make a movie, however tangentially, about Viagra, you're required to insert at least one scene of its side effects, but the broadness with which Zwick plays it out is like a stake to the heart of the film's hard-earned but fast-lost authenticity.

Fletcher demonstrates, as with her second film, "27 Dresses," that she can put together a funny, able romantic comedy that is a cut above, but no more. Still, those leads are awfully likable, the Massachusetts-for-Alaska landscape rather picturesque, and if The Proposal doesn't reinvent the wheel, merrily we roll along nonetheless.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

Eden shows humanity at its worst, but without reflecting much on the why of it all – a Lord of the Flies analogue that concludes not with a gut punch but a tidy historical coda.

This Native American romantic comedy, which won the Audience Award at the 2001 Austin Film Festival, arrives in theatres four years late but seasonally right on time.

Size matters, too, in Live From New York!, a portrait of SNL at 40, but in inverse: 82 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to consider every angle – or even many angles – of a cultural institution.

There’s a surprising – and truthful – melancholic undercurrent to Definitely, Maybe – the one commonality between the three women is the heartbreak they induce – but Brooks undermines that truthfulness with a dogmatic insistence upon romantic mythologizing. No maybes about it: The reality is far darker, and more interesting.

Roberts, wearing that beatific half-smile of hers that suggests inner peace and wisdom before she's even begun her journey, is too open-faced with her emotions to signal the complexities of Gilbert's distress – over her divorce, her control issues, her rootlessness, and inability to live in the moment.

On film, goosed along by Thomas Newman’s jaunty score and a generically weepy power ballad co-written and performed by Hanks’ wife and producing partner, Rita Wilson, the effect is hollow, placating. They’ve turned themes of great love, loss, and the will to keep going into … easy listening.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

While the Occupy Wall Street rage supposedly fueling this thing is flimsy, what’s left is still solidly entertaining.

A crowd-pleasing portrait of boys-who-will-be-men-who-will-be-boys.

Brothers is too depthless to dredge up any tears.

Magic Farm feels more like a work-in-progress than a final draft.

A romantic comedy, too, but this time the romance is between two women, and one of them, truth be told, is a dud.

Wanderlust is flawed, too, but for its exploration of financial ruin and alternative lifestyles, it shows once again that Aniston, at the very least, knows which way the wind is blowing.

There is a plot – a pretty clunky one, jerry-rigged with character motivations that amount to one long “huh?” and dialogue that might as well have been chunked out of a cliche generator – but who needs plot when we can have mayhem?

The elements are all here for something spectacular – and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it – but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.

The action is constant, often pointless, definitely gratuitous, and breathlessly fun.

The very best animation can excite the senses and inflame the imagination. But Chico & Rito's charmless line drawings just made me wish the film was live-action instead.

This is in fact the end – it is what is. We’ve had some good laughs. Let’s part amicably.

It's like 90 minutes of teasing foreplay, and then, just when it's about to get really good, your partner rolls over and goes to sleep.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

Ambrose owns this crawlspace between being fierce and being fragile. But she can't escape the fact that her role is underwritten; the script suffers from an excess of subtlety.

Well, we're not in "Chicago" anymore, or even its soundstage approximation, but that hasn't stopped Oscar-nominated director Rob Marshall from fashioning another epic spectacle out of two squabbling women in (a sort-of) show business.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about scratching at real feelings, it comes off as phony as a perfume ad.

“Caution: Contents may induce brain bleed.” That is, if you think too hard on the logic and mechanics of its time-travel conceit.

If anything, Daniela Forever feels overly familiar. Calling to mind other life-of-the-mind films, it suffers by comparison, falling short of the wowee-zowee visuals of Waking Life, the satisfyingly intricate mechanics of Inception, the soulfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

There are a million reasons why couples break up. If only We Broke Up had landed on one, they might have really had something here.

It's kinda funny and pretty cute. Sometimes that's all it takes.

It’s all supremely silly stuff, and amusingly so, as long as you don’t stop to think about all those blameless officers and agents cut down in the line of mindless entertainment.

Overall, Just Married doesn't really take -- it has a shelf life about as short as the disastrous honeymoon -- but in the moment, it's cute, if corny. It'll do.

Something is terribly amiss when the American actors sound like English is their second language.

Alas, the younger actors in the Sixties stretch are no match for the senior set, weightless and blank next to the gravitas of Broadbent, Walter, and Charlotte Rampling.

It's a Big Idea movie that comes out only half-baked.

The film is less successful at exploring the chinks in her armor – the stuff that makes her human, and a person of interest. Chastain is great – she’s always great, right? – and the brittle braininess she radiates is the film’s crowning seduction.

The bestselling first book in yet another dystopic Young Adult series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent is engrossing enough to devour overnight, and flimsy enough to forget by morning light. Neil Burger’s film adaptation faithfully reproduces the same effect.

The film holds its twists too close to the chest, and there's little to chew on till the ambitiousness of its plotting is revealed late in the film.

Instantly forgettable but intermittently funny movie.

For the first 30 minutes I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching a really promising pilot for network TV.

Morris has found a real character in McKinney, but to what end, I couldn't say.

We have pretty much all the information we need within the first half-hour, which undercuts the supposedly climactic reveal of the contents of Maruge's letter and renders the torturous flashbacks unnecessary for narrative purposes. And not a little bit sadomasochistic, too – an ill fit for a PG-13 family film.

Die-hard Downton fans aren’t going to grumble at the chance to spend more time with well-loved characters, and there are plenty of bright spots along the way.

Sugar is a curiosity – too somber for a picaresque, too arm's-length for much emotional effect – and while it's interesting, it's never truly absorbing.

Tilt your head and you can catch the ghost of combustive screen trios past: Design for Living, Band of Outsiders, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But Amsterdam’s three leads – individually charismatic performers all – collectively can’t sell the film’s sentimental, facile idea that love beats all, even those pesky fascists. And that breaks my heart a little.

Sausage Party glints of greatness, but this is half-cocked comedy at best.

The story – two guys, one girl, much deceit – is eternally contemporary. Sometimes gigglingly so in the hands of ever-erratic Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pan), who injects horny, corny musical theatre-kid energy into this latest iteration of Rostand’s doomed love triangle.

What surprised me about Petzold’s latest is how ultimately straightforward, even slight, it felt upon conclusion, even with certain questions left aggravatingly open-ended.

What I learned from Monrovia, Indiana is that I – personally – am bored by mattress shopping, City Council arguments over fire hydrants, and high school band concerts I am not obligated by shared DNA to attend.

It’s just too much drama for one modest film to service adequately. In an effort to cram it all in, scenes abruptly jump from one to the next with nary a smooth transition in sight, relationships evolve far too quickly, and certain subplots drop out of the mix only to resurface, jarringly, much later.

The ideas are there, hints of genius, but no one ignites them. Add Osmosis Jones to that list of universal enigmas, and, more specifically, how the Farrelly Brothers could have done so little with so much.

The questions being probed here about how to be vulnerable, what it takes to connect – y’know, the big stuff – aren’t exclusive to romance, after all. And I so admired the movie for having the daring and openheartedness to try to tackle the big stuff. I just wish I liked it more.

Midway through, there’s a truly riotous set-piece involving Bruiser’s gay love affair with a Great Dane, but not even a Chihuahua in leather bondage gear can zest up a franchise that has degraded from sleeper to snoozer.

In all his misguided enthusiasm, Parker has mustered enough bluster to fill up a zeppelin, blowing harder and harder, for something more and more fanciful. But with so much hot air, the bubble is bound to burst, and so it does in Parker's blundering adaptation.

Luhrmann has always had a knack with the fever of passion, but here he only catches high fever’s empty gibberish.

A decent enough spot of silliness.

Kit Kittredge is a dutiful bore. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if, in the face of all-out market collapse, it might serve a dual purpose as primer for kiddies on economic depression – because food stamps always taste better with a side order of spunk. Or is it pluck?

Exuding direct-to-Redbox energy, Fuze has enough plot twists to make it watchable. You’re just not liable to remember much of it afterwards.

Saving Christmas will hold little interest for anyone not already a believer. It’s too single-minded in its instructional purpose, too averse to multidimensional characters, too youth-pastor-like in its dorky humor.

In the end, we know Andie and Ben will kiss and make up -– how could too alliteratively aligned pretty people not? -– but first we must wade through the protracted and wholly unwarranted period in which both huffs about the other’s deceptions.

The music so wholly engulfs the second half of the film, there’s no room left to expand on characters that feel less than lived-in or on the film’s more ambitious ideas.

This isn’t Nicole Kidman’s first dalliance with witchcraft, and it is one of Bewitched’s unfortunate achievements that it actually makes one pine for Kidman’s 1998 dud, "Practical Magic." That witch at least had some sass; this cardigan-clad witch, alas, is an altogether more benign being, and by "benign" I mean boring.

The actors are all game, but the job’s beneath them – Hemsworth, a pro, and a real champ at faking enthusiasm for this dud; Theron, still doing camp but this time with no tempering complexity or empathy; Blunt, stuck playing a frost-bitten Mommie Dearest.

Amusing enough, but weirdly joyless.

To say the least, the chemistry is lacking; equally unconvincing is the all-British cast’s attempts at American accents.

A lot of gunk: dance-offs, sing-alongs, awkward exes, and a dirty-talking White blasting through, I'm afraid, the last bits of her novelty. That again?

Wouldn't it make more sense on basic cable? Plum screen incarnate (and film producer) Katherine Heigl got her start in TV, on Roswell and Grey's Anatomy, and her public persona – a combination of prickliness and adoration-seeking that has famously grated on viewers' and critics' nerves alike – has historically played better there.

In manipulating its many disparate characters to bump into each other and set plot lines in motion, Intermission walks a fine line between clever and contrived, with the scale tipping more often toward contrived.

As the songs pile up and the plot putters along, Romance & Cigarettes wears thin, like a moral for the titular addiction: Sure, there’s the sweet dream of that first drag, but a whole pack’ll do a body bad.

Leaves me wanting to watch Tomei and company in something more worthy of their abilities.

A lightweight, intermittently engaging comedy.

The promising-sounding football movie would turn out to be a movie about men talking on phones.

There's some funny stuff here that doesn't involve degrading its female protagonists, and the cast, by and large, is appealing.

Saint Laurent gets across how isolating celebrity can be, how exhausting it is to keep a toehold on top of a mountain that keeps shifting underfoot. But the film is allergic to insight: It’s as numbed-out as its hero addict.

A bright idea, disappointingly dulled in the execution.

The first act is very nearly unbearable, leaden and doomy and generically plotted.

As is, it's simply too much information crammed too haphazardly into a running time that at times borders on interminable.

I’m all for ambiguity, but Dear Frankie’s multiple dangling threads indicate incoherent storytelling, not profundity.

It takes only moments into the film, when star Timothée Chalamet first opens his mouth to sing, to discover Wonka’s two fatal errors: The songs are not good, and the guy singing them is even worse.

Wimpy Kid's filmmakers have gone off-book, so to speak, to inflect Greg with a surprising cruel streak.

Sure, it's nifty enough to see dust particles swirling or hands swooshing at you, but mostly the 3-D muddles the invention and exquisiteness of the film's raison d'être: the dancing.

Either you like your movies to be, well, movie-like: imitations of life, with musical accompaniment and artificial lighting and tracking shots and looped dialogue; or you like them to be re-creations of life, sans the artifice. The King Is Alive clearly falls into the latter camp.

But being Charlie – what’s going on inside this angry kid’s head, what made him turn to drugs, and finally turn away – that is more elusive. And that is the film’s great disappointment: that something so clearly conceived in earnestness and from real-life, first-person experience ends up feeling, well, kinda fake.

Oh, how I rued my failed foreign-language skills in the opening moments of Gemma Bovery. Who wants to read subtitles when a French baker is rolling out such pliant, such pokeable, such heavenly looking dough?

The story never drags – it’s too frenetically paced for that – but it’s still kind of a drag.

Inelegant but not uninteresting, Ramen Heads is a bronze contender at best.

Warmed my heart about as much as the cold cream Angèle slathers all over her wrinkling clients.

A clever idea that never stretches beyond just that -- a caterpillar that never blooms into a butterfly.

For such a deft wit, Jane Austen sure has inspired some nitwitted entertainments. Actually, the Austen influence here is negligible.

Liberal Arts is not unlikable: There are some intelligent observations about how humans woo, and the film is so suffused with sincerity you want to give it a pat on the head just for trying so hard.

Not a man, but the romanticizing of him. A lot of jive-shit.

Alexander's script considers context anathema, leaving us to wonder, among other puzzlers, why these two jerks are friends to begin with – and, perhaps, on what bad breakup or neglected childhood one may blame the film's dispiriting misanthropy.

For a comedy, The Sitter is frightfully spare on full-bodied laughs.

Much of the original film's geniality – and all of its pro-environment stumping – has gone missing; what we have instead is a watered-down likeness that curiously turns disaster flick in its too-scary third act.

If A Thousand Words' formula seems familiar, that's because writer Steve Koren has tripped down this quasi-metaphysical path before in "Bruce Almighty" and "Click."

It’s a shame, with this much talent in front of and behind the camera, a more precise picture couldn’t emerge from material so obviously close to the heart.

Doggedly mediocre actioner The 355 is the cinematic equivalent of gathering together Formula 1’s finest drivers and tossing them the keys to a Yugo. With two Oscar wins and four Oscar nominations between them, Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o are gonna do some pretty nifty work with a Yugo. Still, actors this capable deserve better gear.

The only thrill here comes from the adrenaline kick of the chase. Alas, it's an empty, Pavlovian kick at best.

It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.

Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.

Bell steals every scene she's in, and her abrupt dismissal feels all the crueler for so much charisma wasted: She shoulda been a contender.

Perhaps there was some confusion – should we play this as a lark or a lesson in geopolitical unrest? – or maybe there was some studio involvement to defang the politics; whatever the case, the noncommittal Charlie Wilson's War treads a good-natured but yawning in-between.

Starts out as a lark, but veers into grittier, more emotionally complex territory -- just like a real relationship -- that the film doesn't have the chops to sustain.

Book of Secrets isn’t so much a romp as a long trudge through American history factoids and conspiracy-theory gobbledygook. Cool car chase, though.

Short to short, it’s a Russian roulette.

Their travelogue-ready romance is utterly doofy but not disagreeable, and this sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy will strike the right chord with Moore’s fan base of preteen girls.

This is fussy filmmaking, overly made-up (the costume mandate seems to include the buzzwords "coffee filters," "croquembouche," and "Day-Glo paint") and bereft of wit.

It’s an impossible standard, maybe, but in 42 minutes, TV’s "Friday Night Lights" delivered all-star-level emotional complexity and action. When the Game Stands Tall is strictly JV squad.

By fashioning itself a thriller above all else, Foe obstinately opts for the no-man’s land in between both tracks, in the process wasting its tiny, mighty cast, and the opportunity to say anything impactful.