Kimberley Jones

Select another critic »
Austin Chronicle
For 1,017 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kimberley Jones' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 All the Real Girls
Lowest review score: 0 My Boss's Daughter
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 569 out of 1017
  2. Mixed: 311 out of 1017
  3. Negative: 137 out of 1017
1017 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    A Complete Unknown
    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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Youth in Revolt
    It’s an enjoyable enough exercise in teen angst triumphing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Oh, Hi!
    There are worse accusations to hurl at a filmmaker than that she has too much empathy for her characters, but in the case of Oh, Hi!, it stymies the potential in its provocative premise and holds a pretty good movie back from greatness.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Lee
    A model and artist’s muse turned photographer who shot unforgettable images of Europe at war, Miller was then largely forgotten by the establishment, until her son revived her work after her death in 1977. Underappreciated in her time, one wishes better for her than this underwhelming biopic.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Pop & Me
    Everybody likes to watch the messy guts-stuff of other peoples' lives, if only because we know then we're not alone in our weird ways.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Duchess
    It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Austin Powers in Goldmember
    The latest installment in the Austin Powers series has stopped making much sense at all, but it sure gets its giggle on, and good.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Veronica Mars
    Marshmallow nation, you may now exhale: Rob Thomas did ya right.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Yellow Handkerchief
    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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Bait
    Bait equals bad.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    My One and Only
    Perfectly passable film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Finding Forrester
    A nice-looking, nice-feeling exercise in conventionalism that sure could use a couple of transvestites and maybe a house falling from the sky.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    The Claim
    The characters in The Claim suffer under the weight of very big things -- betrayal, abandonment, disease, death -- but they do so quietly, stoically, until, by God, they just can't take it anymore.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Carrey is a bit of a conundrum: He's the best and worst thing about Lemony Snicket.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    All the Old Knives
    If tradecraft is what you like best about the espionage genre – the dead drops and dead-of-night tailings – then All the Old Knives will feel comparatively pokey, especially put up against the kind of spry spy entertainments long-form television so capably produces.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Dumbo
    If Dumbo 2.0 does have to exist, then you could do far worse than this sweet and occasionally quite nifty revamping.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    One Fine Morning
    Admirers of Hansen-Løve’s previous film, her English-language debut Bergman Island, may be surprised at how straightforward One Fine Morning is, how resistant it is to delivering a capital-letter Cinematic Moment.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Saved!
    While Saved! initially gets in some good gags at the expense of religious hypocrisy, it eases off, opting not to skewer religion but rather to poke it gently with a stick to see what happens.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Rachel Getting Married
    The upshot to a ticking bomb is that it only explodes the once, but Rachel's sister, Kym (Hathaway), goes off again and again.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Five-Year Engagement
    Stoller and Segel don't shy away from rational, relatable adults, which may be an unsexy selling point for a romantic comedy, but that attention to authenticity elevates the likable, low-stakes The Five-Year Engagement.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    About Last Night
    It’s the funniest, friskiest date movie in a good long while.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Help
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Girls Rock!
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Names of Love
    What is so surprising – even exhilarating – about The Names of Love is that it shucks off the desultory roadblocks that engine the modern romantic comedy – all that razzmatazz of missed connections and dunderheaded misunderstandings.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Funny, bewildering, giddy spectacle.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    2 Days in New York
    A manic, lithesome thing, 2 Days in New York flexes between broad comedy and a beautifully observed portrait of family life – especially life after death.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Harmontown
    As much a portrait of a community as of its brilliant, de facto mayor, Harmontown is a stirring tribute to the restorative power of finding your people.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Crazy/Beautiful
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Big Miracle
    Big Miracle is all formula, but with just enough savvy to temper the gentle-spiritedness and qualify it as that rare family film with an emotional manipulativeness that doesn't leave a sick slick in the mouth.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    For a Good Time, Call...
    While its heart is always in the right place, the humor – especially in the sludgy first act – is hit or miss.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Ice Age
    Has a heart bursting with good intentions, something that goes a long way in dimming from memory its inherent routineness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Wackness
    A crowd-pleasing portrait of boys-who-will-be-men-who-will-be-boys.
    • Austin Chronicle
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    This One's for the Ladies
    Graham’s film teems with fascinating characters – ultimately, too many for the abbreviated running time.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Secret Life of Pets
    Crafted by much of the same creative team behind the "Despicable Me" franchise, The Secret Life has wit, for sure, but it could use more balls.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Matchstick Men
    You can easily lose five minutes making sense of it - and another 10 poking holes in it - but what of it? The preceding 100 minutes pass so pleasurably, the few false moves barely register - maybe the biggest con of all, but consider me happily snowed.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The To Do List
    Maybe someday there will be a better commercial comedy about a girl taking charge of her sexual education, but for now, this is the only one we’ve got, and it’s a filthy-fun charmer.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Sense of an Ending
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    Fine to look at, but good luck feeling anything.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie. It’s a bachelorette party, or a book club, or any other safe space where women gather for some of that “you go, girl” good feeling. It’s an amusement-park ride. Fasten the safety belt, secure your purses, and get ready to scream.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Vice
    McKay has made a protest film, plainly seething – a primal howl from a guy who used to just goose howls of laughter.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Laurel Canyon
    Authenticity is strangely lacking in Laurel Canyon, although Cholodenko’s exquisite eye for framing remains uncorrupted. Laurel Canyon is often visually captivating.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Blue Crush
    The script also takes the occasional dip into hokeyness, but even that is buoyed by its ballsy leading ladies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Fast & Furious 6
    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?
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Hamlet
    The final takeaway isn’t tragedy. It’s histrionics.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Carnage
    The script is chockablock with al dente amusements – obvious targets still make for wickedly funny one-liners – and the German actor Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is terrific as the only parent unburdened by decorum.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Trance
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    All I Can Say
    From the most generous angle, All I Can Say functions as a found footage précis of the perils of fast fame, illustrating Hoon’s deepening addictions as the band’s profile rises.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Bourne Legacy
    And yet, it works, so much so that after two and a quarter hours, I was startled – and not a little disappointed – when the closing credits kicked in.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Wolverine
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Past Life
    Ultimately, it’s the kind-of mystery that undermines Past Life’s emotional kapow. You can hardly fault writer/director Avi Nesher for trying to tease suspense out of the story, but he establishes early an ominous tone and stubbornly holds steadfast to it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Saturday Night
    If the cast blurs together, the expert costume and production design, filmed in lusciously retro 16mm, give the eye plenty to enjoy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Funny People
    Funny People – sensitive, shaggy, a little bit draggy – is as much about the maturation of Ira as a performer and George as a man as it is about Apatow’s maturation as an artist.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Digging for Fire
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Ghostbusters
    The actresses are so quick and so supple, the force of their individual personalities and their irresistible camaraderie hoik the film up from its middling story and scripted jokes. I would have happily stayed in my seat another two hours to continue keeping their company. Just in a better movie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Jeff Who Lives at Home
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Trumbo
    Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Importance of Being Earnest
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Exception
    The Exception’s line is not an easy one to walk, this marriage of soapy melodrama and real-world events, and with Courtney leading the parade, it’s destined for failure.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Warm Bodies
    With "50/50," his last stint in the director's chair, Levine upended convention to make a feel-good cancer movie. He's still defying expectations: In animating the inner workings of the undead, he's made a movie that is both clever and heartfelt.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Heat
    More often than not The Heat is just stupid-funny, which circles us back to McCarthy, motor-mouthing four-letter fury like an operatic aria. She sells Mullins as delightfully unhinged and fairly radiating with rage, and it’s irresistible.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Magic Farm
    Magic Farm feels more like a work-in-progress than a final draft.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Rules Don't Apply
    Either way, Beatty has taken an object of enduring fascination and made him … not so much.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    My Blind Brother
    Goodhart’s film is a winner – sweet but not sentimental, tart without turning sour. The studio-produced romantic comedy may be flatlining, but who cares, so long as snappy indies like this one step up to fill the void?
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Parker has cast credible young versions of all the original players, although in most cases vintage outperforms new grape.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Mystery Team
    The twentysomething talents behind Mystery Team are still in the comedy minors, but this nerdy, nutty, perfectly pitched first swing suggests there are major things to come.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    Diane
    That spiky aunt is played by Estelle Parsons (Bonnie & Clyde); one of the pleasures of Diane is the rare platform it gives older actresses, including Andrea Martin, Phyllis Somerville, and Deirdre O’Connell.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Fuze
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    A Home at the End of the World
    Three actors play Bobby at different ages, and none of them quite jibe with the other – 16-year-old Bobby seems far savvier than the twenty-something version (who is played by a defanged Colin Farrell).
    • 59 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Best Man Holiday
    High spirits mark the first half of the film; quite simply, these guys are just fun to be around – most especially Howard, all half-lidded, cat-who-got-the-cream coolness.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Tower Heist
    To a one, they nail the humor, all right, but they also, quite crucially, humanize the high concept.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Happenstance
    A clever idea that never stretches beyond just that -- a caterpillar that never blooms into a butterfly.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Stoker
    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?
    • 59 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The spirit of the thing – the way it champions intellectual curiosity and critical thinking – warmed this nerd’s heart tremendously.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Railway Man
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    For a film that gets right up close to a musical genius, it’s when he’s walking away, hands jammed in his leather jacket, that you can see the resemblance most clearly.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Ice Age: The Meltdown
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Bridget Jones's Baby
    Is this latest outing as bold or bracing or funny as the original film? Certainly not. We’re well settled into our seats now, but there’s some comfort in how the cushion already knows a body’s grooves.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Legally Blonde
    Somewhere in that chirpy half-pint frame dwell some meaty comic chops. Goldie Hawn may have found her successor.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Moonlight Mile
    An admirable effort, but too many words, words, and more words, and not enough of the ache of that half-smile.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    Together
    For his part, director Stephen Daldry synthesizes the predominant beats of his film work, which has vacillated between feel-good awards bait (Billy Elliot) and feel-bad awards bait (The Hours, The Reader). Feel-good/feel-bad is Together to a T. It feels wonderful.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Confidence
    It all boils down to trying too hard, when everybody knows a good grift is one that appears effortless.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Drama
    A Rorschach test of a movie that reveals more about the audience than the characters onscreen. The Drama doesn’t just invite judgment; it’s coded in its DNA.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    The Shape of Things
    If LaBute wants to plumb the depths of human unkindness, have at it -– only dig deeper next time.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    LaBeouf plays Jacob as no naif – he can be as slippery and savage as the next suit – but there's also real tenderness in his scenes with Mulligan and Langella (in a small but significant role as Jacob's mentor).
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Heights
    Terrio's technically proficient film is mature, modern, and minus the all-important passion and risk.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Miss You Already
    Director Catherine Hardwicke doesn’t need that easily-cut path through long grass; she already has a willing cast and story to get to the guts-splaying.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Learning to Drive
    By the end, I was moved. Not floored, but moved.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Definitely, Maybe
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Carmen
    What the film itself is trying to communicate proves more elusive; whatever meaning Millepied meant to impart by tethering this “entirely new and unique artistic endeavor” to a century-and-a-half-old opera never quite made sense to me.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    What If
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    This Is 40
    Does Apatow understand his heroes are assholes?
    • 59 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Wimbledon
    Terribly tender, good-hearted picture.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    After a sparky first half greatly aided by Kristin Scott Thomas' devilish turn as an unsentimental press secretary, Salmon Fishing grows soggier. It's such a pretty, witty gloss of a picture, it hardly knows what to do with real-world terror, hence the Snidely Whiplash-like limning of Muslim extremists.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    God Help the Girl
    God Help the Girl is not so perfectly crafted, but the promise – oh, the promise is irresistible.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    One Life
    There’s something a little pious about how resistant the film is to portraying Nicky not just as an admirable character but as an interesting one, too.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Brown Sugar
    With all its emphasis on beat, Brown Sugar can't maintain a steady one, yet when it finds it, the film surely soars.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Sisters
    Sisters has a patchily funny first act but unleashes pure comedic chaos once the party gets started.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Solomon & Gaenor
    The landscape and the lovers are pretty to look at, but two households divided should really pack more of a punch.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Wicked Little Letters
    The title seems engineered to ride the tailwind of a Liane Moriarty suspense, but constitutionally, Wicked Little Letters is more of a cozy British mystery goosed with eye-popping profanity.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Safety of Objects
    The terrific ensemble acting and Troche’s genuine, nonjudgmental interest in exploring the weird places wounded people go, both internally and externally, amount to an insulated but moving portrait of the real nuclear family.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Brothers
    Brothers is too depthless to dredge up any tears.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Eden
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Ramen Heads
    Inelegant but not uninteresting, Ramen Heads is a bronze contender at best.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Hope Gap
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Somm
    Somm doesn’t try to write the book on wine connoisseurship, but it does give good CliffsNotes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Night Before
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Glory Road
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Gemma Bovery
    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?
    • 58 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Stone
    Mostly this is a tense, portentous, and provocative piece.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Invention of Lying
    If anything, The Invention of Lying is too soft for the satirical promise of its premise.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    It's a Disaster
    Berger’s low-key, likable ensemble film flares with brilliance in its framing concept.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Daybreakers
    It’s a little bit silly – as is Dafoe’s Kentucky-fried cowboy mechanic named Elvis – but silly is fun. In fact, one wishes it were sillier still.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Paul
    Paul is offensive solely for being so underachieving.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Osmosis Jones
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    The climax, like the film itself, is big, loud, and looks cool enough, which is what we’ve come to expect from summer movies … but not from Robert Rodriguez.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Happy Endings
    Happy Endings is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Broken Hearts Gallery
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Our Kind of Traitor
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Human Stain
    The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Chimpanzee
    By film's end, you'll wish they tossed Allen in the rainforest and left him for the leopards to snack on.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    The First Monday in May
    The whole film is a delicious excuse to gawk – at the magnificent costumes, at the diplomatic dance of museum personnel and party planners, and at the sumptuous squish of so many egos sharing space.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Madagascar
    Forget life lessons: I much prefer a lemur king doing the robot.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    The Fall Guy
    Bouncy with enthusiasm and freely tapping their generous reserves of movie-star charisma, Gosling and Blunt perfectly embody the rhetorical question at the heart of this genuinely tender ode to the industry and its undersung practitioners: Aren’t movies the best?
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    But most damningly, Shut Up Little Man! fails to convey what was so hypnotic about the original tapes, and Bate's decision to re-enact the transcripts with actors seems weirdly contrary to the spirit of the thing.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Snow White and the Huntsman
    Ambitious, brutish, ruthlessly unromantic – has the right idea casting its heroine as a Joan of Arc-type crusader and its evil queen a dissertation (albeit first draft) on beauty as the most direct path to power for the disenfranchised female.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Lorne
    Any SNL fan, and I am one, is still going to get a kick out of the close access and cavalcade of stars like Tina Fey, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, and Paul Simon giving testimony. By dint of that access, Lorne is by definition revealing. Revelatory? Not as much.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Morning Glory
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    War Dogs
    Whenever War Dogs plods, close your eyes and count the seconds. Hill’s next deranged little giggle will be along shortly to pick you up.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Branagh might as well have opened a can and dumped it on a plate, the ridges of a factory-line production still perfectly hatched on a gelatinous cylinder of crud.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    White Christmas
    White Christmas endures – despite not being a very good movie.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The First Grader
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Migration
    Thrillingly airborne and a riot of color, Migration’s many scenes of flying are an absolute joy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    A Knight's Tale
    Smirking at the audacity of it all is part of the fun, and if nothing else, A Knight's Tale is a hell of a lot of fun.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Million Dollar Arm
    The filmmakers have cast their underdogs well: Madhur Mittal plays the anxious, upright Dinesh; Suraj Sharma is the loose-limbed, pizza-loving Rinku; and they’re both funny and endearing, two words that apply to the whole of the supporting cast.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Family Stone
    There are just too many damn characters, with the best ones taking a backseat to the dullish love quadrangle.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Glass Castle
    The film’s third-act reach for a redemptive arc plays hollowly, and Harrelson teeters over the line into hillbilly affectation. Still, it’s not enough to erase the memory of Harrelson’s subtler moments, or to ruin what is an altogether worthy adaptation.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Genius
    When it’s Law reading aloud in his awful cornpone accent, it sounds like curdled grits. But when Firth narrates, low and measured, the prose springs to life. I wouldn’t call Genius inspired, but not for nothing it inspired me to pick up "Look Homeward, Angel" for the first time.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Adam
    This is the kind of movie in which every other line of dialogue feels like a metaphor – and from there on, the film seesaws between the uncomfortable extremes of glum and twee: an overwrought dirge keyed to a xylophonic ping.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Focus
    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."
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Leatherheads
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Fate of the Furious
    What sets apart this eighth outing is its giggling bouts of male henpecking, all puffed feathers and nyah-nyah taunts.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    The DUFF
    An adaptation of Kody Keplinger’s YA novel, The DUFF is exponentially dumb.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Minions
    Best yet, there’s a mid-film bedtime story, made to look like stop-motion, that’ll take your breath away.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Unknown
    This is no more (but no less?) than what we have rather oddly come to expect from Neeson in his late period (Taken, The A-Team).
    • 56 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Ramona and Beezus
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Christmas in the Clouds
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Anniversary Party
    Some of The Anniversary Party's titillation factor rests on the awareness that these are actors playing actors, in roles written specifically for them that at times appear awfully close to home.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Monsters vs Aliens
    The misfits, as ever, must take a back seat to the morality, and the result – while in no way migraine-inducing – traffics in rote truisms.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Man of Steel
    Snyder has cast Man of Steel with dramatic actors, not action stars, and it pays off.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    The disappointment in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare lies in how much potential it had to be something more.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Brothers Bloom
    Never achieves the satisfaction of a real crackerjack con movie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Money Monster
    While the Occupy Wall Street rage supposedly fueling this thing is flimsy, what’s left is still solidly entertaining.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Greatest Game Ever Played
    Never thrills on an emotional level the way the best of sports films – a "Hoosiers," say – can, but it's a satisfying entertainment nonetheless.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    This latest offering continues a trend toward increasingly mature moviemaking from the actor/writer/director.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Truth About Charlie
    As an experiment in mood, as a love song to Paris and to the French New Wave, as a fun, flirty little number, Charlie provides a giddy satisfaction.
    • Austin Chronicle
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Hot Milk
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Legend
    Mostly Legend just lurches.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    About Time
    The movie moves episodically, leisurely, through roughly a decade, and that feels like a gift: to nestle in with these extraordinary, ordinary people and get to know them.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Uneven, ineffective mash-up of sex comedy and artillery-heavy action.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Hundred-Foot Journey
    The Hundred-Foot Journey is elevated comfort food. The flavors aren’t complex, but it’s nourishing nonetheless.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Croods
    A spirited and eye-popping stealth charmer.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Ice Princess
    Mercifully, the frosted icing-icky title bears little relation to the film's actual content.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Love and Other Drugs
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Wildcat
    For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy – cinematographer Steve Cosen’s painterly framing, exuberant scenery chewing (Linney makes a meal out of one vignette’s rotted teeth) – but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost when you’re only working off the reenactments’ CliffsNotes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Romance & Cigarettes
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Liberal Arts
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Great Gatsby
    Luhrmann has always had a knack with the fever of passion, but here he only catches high fever’s empty gibberish.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Old School
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Men Who Stare at Goats
    There is Clooney’s deceptively layered performance, some startling bits of laugh-out-loud absurdity, and the not-at-all-negligible pleasure to be had in a cockeyed point of view.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    To Rome with Love
    Ambling, just-passable picture.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Bee Season
    Myla Goldberg's novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Thor: The Dark World
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Thanks for Sharing
    It’s a bold and certainly credible move, but the execution is something of a belly flop. Thanks for Sharing isn’t really about a disease, only the cure, and that bias makes it a plausible picture of the Friend of Bill community-based recovery, but kind of a sham as a portrait of actual human beings.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Memoirs of a Geisha
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Ricki and the Flash
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Sparkle
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Melinda and Melinda
    These days, Allen's pictures are more like snuff films, in which the viewer must suffer both gifted actors committing screen hara-kiri and a once-brilliant filmmaker soldiering on with his long, bullheaded decline.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Made of Honor
    What this really comes down to is the film's central lie. Made of Honor pins its hopes on a character who acts utterly without honor, and on an actor who has only two settings – sensitive or smarmy. The smarm wins.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Mid-August Lunch
    These women are marvelous, with ancient, creased faces and the kind of admirable f...-all attitude that comes with age. I couldn't take my eyes off them.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    The Critic
    McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Draft Day
    The promising-sounding football movie would turn out to be a movie about men talking on phones.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The problem in adaptation here is that Collins’ source book accessed Snow’s inner monologue, a churn of competing emotions and priorities at odds with his unruffled outer self. Without that insight, Snow’s evolution from war-scarred orphan to what Donald Sutherland is playing in the original quadrilogy is rendered as blank as, well, snow.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Rock Star
    It's a goofy, tongue-in-cheek, my-gawd-how-could-we-be-so-dumb shrine, but a shrine nonetheless.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Notebook
    What a glorious weepie The Notebook might have been if they’d just found a way to get rid of the damned notebook.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Jet Lag
    Jet Lag's romantic fluffery is somewhat beneath these old pros, but they make its meet-cute scenario work, mostly -– and most especially when crusty, grumpy, grizzled Jean Reno announces he's "totally in love."
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Alice in Wonderland
    The first act is very nearly unbearable, leaden and doomy and generically plotted.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    A Wrinkle in Time
    The opening act, I’m sorry to report, is a mess.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Big Year
    The Big Year's biggest disappointment is its inadequacy in elucidating the passion of the birder. What ardency, and what an exceptional, impenetrable world they move in. I for one wanted a better look at it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    It Ends with Us
    It Ends With Us pours most of its nuance into the beginning, middle, and harrowing climax of its central relationship.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Blind Side
    It’s not an altogether convincing portrait, but it is an entertaining, even moving one, and the forcefulness of Bullock's presence goes a long way in pulling the film back from the brink of cuddliness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Delicacy
    Comedic actor François Damiens mines but never mocks Markus' awkwardness, thereby creating a winning portrait in decency. His tracing, with the ever-luminous Tautou, of the slow bloom of new love is a thing of understated beauty.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Aline
    There are no insights here, only lavishly budgeted cosplay.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    Sex and the City
    In its cinematic incarnation, Sex and the City has lost none of its bawdiness yet gained a more profound sense of soberness. Parker, especially, who in the last season of the show bordered on insufferable in her affected squeaks and shrieks, is allowed to go to very dark places – to be, in fact, quite unfabulous.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    While Man on a Mission doesn't precisely neuter Garriott's weirder ways, it does push them aside for a more boilerplate message of the father/son bond.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Lost and Delirious
    Isn't much more than a self-indulgent picture about the feeble delirium of a lovesick girl -- lightweight stuff that labors to seem terribly important.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    De-Lovely
    Affectionate but uninsightful biopic.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    We Broke Up
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Hysteria
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Penguins of Madagascar
    A merry entertainment that never pretends to greatness, Penguins of Madagascar is all about antics, verbal and visual.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Sharp Stick
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 11 Kimberley Jones
    Gnomeo and Juliet
    Novelty alone does not a good idea make, and in the case of Gnomeo and Juliet, it's rather a disturbing, even fetishy one.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Wanderlust
    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.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 0 Kimberley Jones
    Zookeeper
    I'm not gonna sugarcoat this: Movies don't have to be this bad.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Australia
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    40 Days and 40 Nights
    Doesn't do much to further distinguish Lehmann's career. As for those of us waiting for the year's first worthwhile date movie, the wait continues.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    All together, it is a wearying display of defensiveness from a man who – by any barometer, not just his own – is wildly successful.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Fly Me to the Moon
    It’s smart enough to gesture at current-day concerns – most especially in the dangers of a flexible relationship to truth – but not incisive or insightful enough to land a punch.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    In Time
    They have some fun playacting at class warriors on the lam – and Seyfriend, it must be said, rocks a killer bob – but it's all just big-budget dress-up in a futurescape that reeks of phoniness.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    A Love Divided
    The actors do a fine, if unsoulful, job, but the real problem with A Love Divided is its unwillingness to unromanticize its heroes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Barenaked in America
    Makes for a playfully enthralling hour and a half.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    Down with Love
    Sexy, sophisticated comedy that only occasionally falls short of its admirable ambition: that is, to be a fun, fizzy, razzle-dazzle thing. Straight to the moon, indeed.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Love Me
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Get Over It
    Ao relentlessly, gleefully dumb -- without being the slightest bit sardonic -- that you just can't help but guffaw … or groan … but probably both.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    The Next Three Days
    Maybe taking a cue from his namesake dish, that much-maligned Scottish pudding concoction made with sheep innards and root vegetables, Haggis presents a mishmash of genres in this redo of Fred Cavayé's 2008 French film "Pour Elle."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Murder on the Orient Express
    Turning Poirot into an action figure with a gun is simply heresy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Possession
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Serendipity
    It's kinda funny and pretty cute. Sometimes that's all it takes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Anyone But You
    I will never understand the internet’s fascination with Sweeney, who appears to be scowling even when she’s smiling, but she and Powell both bodily throw themselves into their parts. The effort is there. It’s just a shame the material they’re working with isn’t better.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Sun Is Also a Star
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Iron Lady
    If I may presume: Thatcher probably would have preferred more action, less talk.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Arlo & Julie
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    After the Hunt
    It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 89 Kimberley Jones
    Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    On the strength of this sequel – a dense yet deft return to the high standards Yates set with the Potter films – count this Muggle’s heart and mind all in.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Kiddos: I'm sighing, too, but only from relief it's all behind us now.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Kunis and McKinnon don’t exactly set the screen on fire with their chemistry, and there are only the most perfunctory shadings to their characters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Be Kind Rewind
    Gondry’s well-meaning but too soft, too structure-less picture.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Eiffel
    “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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The King Is Alive
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Water for Elephants
    No one would mistake the Benzini Bros. Circus for the greatest show on earth – the Depression-era traveling troupe is a junker compared to the gold-standard Ringling Bros. – but still, a film has to try pretty hard to render lions and tigers and trapeze artists so uniformly underwhelming.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    The bland script and direction are spruced up by a likable cast.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Peeples
    The all-around excellent cast swings with aplomb from silly to sweet.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Saint Laurent
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Intern
    Playing a 70-year-old seeking renewed purpose as an intern at an Internet start-up, Robert De Niro is gentle as a kitten. Is it disrespectful to want to greet this icon of American cinema with a snuggle and a tumbler of warm milk?
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Golden Compass
    There are significant stretches of talky tedium, more than a few “huh” moments for neophytes – especially whenever anyone starts nattering on about Dust with a capital D – and the ending plays abruptly, but there’s plenty here to hang a franchise on.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Cherish
    The soundtrack is a boisterous blast from the past, and there's a quiet pleasure to watching Zoe and Daly let their composure loose like scrambled eggs, but there's little else to hold dear here.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    In practice, and played as farce, the characters are one-dimensional cutouts kept at a dogged remove. Their miseries are a bore – maybe to Allen, too, who abruptly ends the film, after so much inaction, when it finally catches some dramatic traction.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    How to Be Single
    I like the declarative clarity, the strength of conviction in the title. I wish the movie itself bore the same certainty, or sturdiness.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Baxter
    The film never recovers its initial fizzy-pop charms, owing largely to pacing that turns positively molasses-slow in the second act.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Death at a Funeral
    Slight but agreeable picture.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Live From New York!
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Le divorce
    There are flashes of wit and flair here, including two stylish sequences detailing the French obsession with food and scarves, but they are but brief respites from the film’s near-pathological drear.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Mamma Mia!
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Casino Jack
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    The Grinch
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    A Man Called Otto
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Me Before You
    Me Before You isn’t going to win any awards for sophistication in storytelling or direction, but it tenderly reproduces the book’s most iconic scenes, and their tearjerking effect.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    My Blueberry Nights
    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."
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy
    Funny and friendly and all-inclusive and unremarkable.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    My Mother Likes Women
    It goes down easy, with likable performances and a laudable emphasis on love and compassion.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    Wimpy Kid's filmmakers have gone off-book, so to speak, to inflect Greg with a surprising cruel streak.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    My Sister's Keeper
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Super
    There are kernels here of a thoughtful and provocative picture, but they never pop – or POP!, for that matter.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    No Strings Attached
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Eat Pray Love
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    A Good Person
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Prom
    These are boys and girls on their very best behavior, which doesn't sound like any prom you or I remember.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 78 Kimberley Jones
    Jungle Cruise
    Dwayne Johnson may not be the world’s most nuanced actor, but he’s a marvelous showman. His and co-star Emily Blunt’s combined “it” factor transcends the sillier stretches of this somewhat forgettable but still chuckling good-times ride.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    My Policeman
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Letters to Juliet
    Is Gary Winick atoning for his sins? If “Bride Wars” was an acid spill -- and that’s putting it generously -- then Letters to Juliet is like the safety shower in your high school chemistry class, delivering an unsubtle blast of sanitized sentimentality.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    My Mother's Wedding
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Cowboys & Aliens
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Alfie
    Perhaps the more appropriate question to put to this remake would be "What the hell’s the point?"
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Kinsey
    Kinsey is too tasteful by half, and while it may have its gentle charms, it never thrills.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    New York, I Love You
    Short to short, it’s a Russian roulette.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Miracle Club
    Alongside Kathy Bates and Laura Linney, Smith is one of three grande dames of acting headlining The Miracle Club. Disappointingly, director Thaddeus O’Sullivan doesn’t put any of them to good enough use in this featherweight Irish dramedy set in 1967.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Boxing Gym
    Far more engrossing are the long, dialogue-free stretches that fix on, say, bobbing feet or curled fists on a speed bag. The soundscape, too, is endlessly fascinating, a layer cake of squeaks, grunts, gasps, and rattling chains that, combined, catches a rhythm that sounds an awful lot like song.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Daniela Forever
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Amsterdam
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Tristan and Isolde
    Screenwriter Dean Georgaris gets a hell of a pass here – the story is canon, and, in terms of emotional wallop, does all the heavy lifting for him – but he still manages to gunk up the works with dialogue that is dull-witted at best and outright howling at its worst.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Lola Versus
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Live by Night
    Before a foot of film was ever shot on Live by Night, Affleck had already made a decision that would be the film’s undoing. He cast himself as the lead.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Run, Fatboy, Run
    This British rom-com is all soft and plodgy, a by-the-numbers redemption tale that careens uncomfortably from sentimentality to stomach-turning sight gags.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Banger Sisters
    The resultant film is all surface and plush, with nary a hard edge or demanding note. Despite the movie's well-intentioned heart, its head is out to lunch, neglecting its responsibility to provide these powerhouse actresses with a script half as smart or compelling as they.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Charlotte Gray
    Undone by Blanchett's dull, wooden delivery. She's the pap that kills the pulp the rest of the film is bellowing out to be.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Kimberley Jones
    Kingdom Come
    A succession of shrill overacting jobs.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Bush's Brain
    Clearly the film is archly trying to connect the dots between Rove and the supreme mishandling of Iraq – and a compelling case might be made – but it isn't made here.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    The film restages the greatest hits of the show's many musical numbers, to greatly diminished effect, with lackluster choreography and all the narrative appeal stripped away.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Divergent
    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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Sugar & Spice
    For every zinger, there are two flat jokes around the corner.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Kimberley Jones
    Hit and Runway
    The fictionalization of their journey is simply not that engrossing, nor are their alter egos, with their tightly scripted character arcs.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kimberley Jones
    Super Troopers
    The exceedingly silly Super Troopers is an earnest, mostly funny spoof.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 67 Kimberley Jones
    Lockout
    The space prison set-pieces get the job done; only in the film's terrestrial bookends does this nuts-and-bolts action film show its rust.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    The Girl on the Train
    It’s a tedious watch, inferior in every way to David Fincher’s slick, grinningly grim "Gone Girl." Any chance for lightning striking twice is going, going, gone.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Kimberley Jones
    Angels & Demons
    The only thrill here comes from the adrenaline kick of the chase. Alas, it's an empty, Pavlovian kick at best.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »