Melissa Anderson

Enduring a day-long session of couples' therapy is more fun (and flies by faster) than this film.

The film too often relies on rote sermonizing when tackling the city's scourge of shootings, a grave topic that The Next Cut is simply too feeble to examine with any real depth or meaning.

The handsome pooch is also the only appealing aspect of the latest tale of privileged boomer pulse-taking from Lawrence Kasdan.

The Broken Tower is sincere, amateurish, and misguided.

There is an easy camaraderie and chemistry among the central quartet, a harmony that continues when Chris Hemsworth, charmingly stupid, enters as the phantom-vanquishing squad's receptionist. Yet the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths.

Denied the opportunity to see Candy at her best, simultaneously mocking and paying homage to golden-age glamour, viewers instead get too much of Jeremiah Newton, a close friend of the actress's and guardian of her papers, personal effects, and ashes (and one of Beautiful Darling's producers).

Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.

Blunt, loud, and showboaty, Illegal suffers even more when compared with another recent Liège-set film about the horrors faced by paperless immigrants: the Dardennes' "Lorna's Silence."

Dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality.

Just as Friends With Kids compares unfavorably to Westfeldt's earlier effort, her cast members' previous projects further highlight this film's shortcomings.

That so many of the colossal yokel's mental states are literalized, as when the screen fills with thousands of rats while Margueritte reads Camus's "The Plague" aloud to her new pal, typifies the movie's antipathy to nuance.

For a film that's supposed to be rooted in such a specific time and place, Sylvia isn't really concerned with details: Costumes, hair, and décor appear to be the work of "That '70s Show" interns; William H. Macy, as Danielle's Mormon soon-to-be stepdad, continuously muffs a Sooner State drawl.

Despite the movie's title and Bening's central role, women are oddly peripheral.

An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).

All the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the stiffness of the bourgeoisie.

Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest.

Although Common and Rainey make a well-matched duo, their chemistry is frequently squandered by a script that boxes them into impossible roles in one clichéd scene after another.

In any language, the actress (Kristin Scott Thomas) does what she can to best serve her scripts, even when they're hopelessly beneath her.

The noxious self-absorption of straight white women that Schumer has sent up so blisteringly on her Comedy Central show is extolled more than it is lampooned.

Serious Moonlight has a backstory much more intriguingly dramatic than what's onscreen.

The Boss is a better film than Tammy, but it still flounders, almost capsizing in its sloppy final third.

It's dispiriting enough to witness Kunis still waiting for a comic lead role worthy of her. But the usually nimble Wahlberg - who at least has one great moment rattling off "white-trash girls' names" - suffers the most, playing second fiddle to a knee-high Gund knockoff.

Too limp and scattershot to warrant anything stronger than indifference.

Appears to have been made on a budget equivalent to the cost of a WNBA fleece hoodie. But even at that price, the first feature by Tim Chambers is profligate with sports-movie clichés.

In this densely populated ensemble piece, Reeves stands out as the only actor whose damaged character evokes sympathy and avoids cliché. Pippa, played by Wright Penn in near-permanent Stepford Wife mode, isn't much more than a vehicle for false epiphanies and forced rapprochements.

10 minutes early to the Free Fire press screening, I grew restless as “Annie’s Song” played on a continuous loop in the theater; the gimmick filled up my senses with the quickly confirmed fear that Wheatley’s film would rarely rise above the dopey and obvious.

Writer-director Talbert similarly follows formula for the overcrowded and overplotted Noel-season movie, ladling out too-generous portions of churchiness, multigenerational dance-off, and Mars vs. Venus sermonizing.

Nivola and Breslin sing and perform the original numbers, welcome interludes that provide respite from Rosenthal's lousy script.