Mark Olsen

Volume II builds on emotional foundations from Volume I, even recasting the first film's ironic humor with a darker pall.

It provides, perhaps like the experiences of love and sex, a shifting variety of insights, emotions, unexpected lightness and moments of visceral shock.

The Marked Ones is refreshingly uncynical and straightforward in its desire to simply be a movie that makes the audience jump and be scared. It's a fun fright film and wants to be nothing more.

Grudge Match never settles on the movie it wants to be, wavering uncertainly between a jokey old-guys comedy and something more dramatic and heartfelt.

Rinsch, making his feature debut, shows the shortcoming of someone coming from the image-based world of commercials and advertising. There are moments of genuine beauty and a few terrifically eye-popping effects, but no feel yet for storytelling.

Perry can now knock these films out in his sleep, and with “Madea Christmas” he certainly seems to be dozing at the wheel.

The movie has a fan's heart, a sense of loving every goofball moment, but as directed by Mike Mendez it also seems perpetually caught between being a spoof or playing it straight and winds up falling between the cracks rather than rising above.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is not a missing masterpiece; rather it is a small, tightly coiled spellbinder.

Machete Kills winds up a slightly camp, tinny parody of bad action movies, playing out with the same sense of tedium as a genuine bad action movie.

Serving mostly as a strong calling card for star Jaime Camil, the film has an appealingly loose, slightly ramshackle charm.

The effects may be cheap and unconvincing, the sets spare, the costumes from some unwanted back rack, but Argento still brings enough moments of kinky madness to his not-great "Dracula" to indicate there may yet be greatness lurking within him.

A messy brew that is a bit too slack to get all the way to actually being good.

One Direction: This Is Us is not the raw confessional that title might imply but rather both a primer and new product presentation.

Audacious and witty, The World's End is a strange brew.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is just a sloppy rag bag of ideas cobbled from other stories.

There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days.

Kick-Ass 2 is a lesser version of what it appears to be, an uncertain jumble rather than a true exploration of outrage, violence and identity.

Anyone who longs for the old, weird films of John Waters or the psychotronic freak-outs of New York's Cinema of Transgression school should be able to get their fix from Pig Death Machine.

Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.

Breaking the Girls isn't exactly a throwaway, but more an extended act of teasing foreplay, a movie that is fine for what it is but also never really shifts into something more.

Just as with the 2011 film "The Smurfs," the new The Smurfs 2 is a passable mediocrity.

Drumming is able to swing from lighter comedic moments to dramatic insights while making it seem effortless.

The entire film has an oddly underdone quality to it, as if aiming not for greatness but to simply be passable.

Solidly done if somewhat unremarkable, there is nothing particularly wrong with "Broken," nothing that needs fixing exactly, and yet it never fully comes together.

Grown Ups 2 looks like it was a lot of fun to make. And the last laugh is on us.

With continued arguments and legislation over fracking, this follow-up seems inevitable and necessary.

The movie feels like a flakey, off-the-cuff blog post that somehow transmogrified itself into a feature-length documentary.

Painfully lugubrious, any sting Copperhead might contain for its contrarian's view of history is undone by its wayward sense of storytelling.