Kimberley Jones

Perhaps Sucsy was overwhelmed by his immersion in such colorful and outré material; he's chosen for his followup, the I Can't Believe It's Not Nicholas Sparks weepie The Vow, the cinematic equivalent of a lie-down.

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.

The sights are ingenious, impressively rendered in 3-D, and the sounds – including cheeky voice work by Mr. T, Neil Patrick Harris, and Benjamin Bratt – are a blast.

Much to cheer here, from its treasure trove of early and alternate versions of songs to the triumphant finale.

Square peg, round hole. That's what the twentysomethings who drift through Margarita Happy Hour are like.

The story, alas, is colorless and flat: a terribly earnest picture of two sad people looking for somebody or something to jump-start their battery.

A pretty spot-on distillation of human weakness, but my god, must they all be so inhumane in the process?

You didn't actually think Stephin Merritt was going to cozy up to the camera and reveal his deepest-darkest, did you?

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.

Bandslam belongs to Connell. He has the unruly 'fro and endearing shamblingness of a young Daniel Stern, and he ably brings to life that rarest of cinematic qualities: decency.

All told, Pitch Perfect isn't all that good – but it's an awfully good sport.

Refreshingly anti-princess and sweet without degrading into sugary, Ramona and Beezus animates Ramona's frequent flights of fancy with DIY-like sequences that literalize, quite charmingly, how a kid colors the world.

In a media landscape that only has eyes for the sex lives of nubile young things, Hope Springs' sincere, considered, and unembarrassed exploration of mature sexuality marks a welcome exception.

In its third act, Life, Above All takes a bit of a dip into la-la land, in terms of believability – how precisely is an impoverished family supposed to have afforded an ambulance and hospice care? – but that doesn't diminish the emotional impact of Manyaka's performance and the idea that courage can be infectious, too.

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.

Canadian director Philippe Falardeau (Oscar nominee for Monsieur Lazhar) films these early, subtitled scenes mostly with a documentarian’s observational remove and slightly shaky camera – an effective way to dramatize the horror of war without exploiting it, tarting it up with Hollywood techniques.

The lion’s share of the work then is on Bening and Bell’s shoulders to flesh out dramatically thin characters. That they do.

Best yet is Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, big as a Russian bear and as ice-cool as the country’s signature 80-proof spirit. Is it unpatriotic to wish this was his movie, not the twitchy American guy’s?

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.

The film's "never grow up" refrain plays like a broken record, until, in an abrupt (but not unexpected) turnaround at film's end, it fixes itself.

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

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

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

Just because the jokes about micro-dosing, Crossfit- and social media-obsessive city folk are a little obvious doesn’t mean they won’t resonate with any townie aching for the before-days.

The real surprise is in how earnestly the director of some of the finest, spikiest romantic comedies ever made is willing to step off the gas and let heartfelt romance win the day. And it so very winning.

Medem's film is a bleached-out beauty, hitting our most commanding human emotions -- lust to love to grief to rage and back again -- while only occasionally striking a wrong chord.

This is a quest movie, with a lot of ground covered, and just as our heroes never stay long in one place or feel safe in their surroundings, neither does the audience.

The Way never arrives anywhere you couldn't see coming a mile away, but it does so with such empathy that its conclusions feel comforting rather than overly predictable.