R. Kurt Osenlund

There's tremendous dramatic value to the aching and sometimes devastating scenes that home in on these kids' private torments.

The film's chief misstep is taking its title too literally, and ultimately depicting Louie as an indestructible, and thus largely inhuman, superhero.

This may be the year's best superhero movie because, for a sufficient amount of time, it doesn't feel like a superhero movie at all.

It works too hard to keep matters on an even, we're-all-more-alike-than-different keel, which is just one part of its chief problem of forcefully conveying information and intent.

The latest collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson is made with far more care and visual detail than you might expect.

The film's empowering themes of feminine strengths and bonds eventually flourish in novel fashion.

With the foul-mouthed dramedy Friends with Kids, writer/producer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt is juggling so much, it's a wonder there aren't more jokes about balls.

The script is teeming with informed jargon about the business of supermarket pricing, and with actors like Posey as its vessel, the dialogue rings with an unlikely blend of fascination and farce.

It places regurgitated ideas into the mouths of gifted actors, then drops them amid a kooky story that plays like an elaborate distraction from what little the film actually has to say.

Mothers and sons deserve an amiable comedy they can share, but this one proves to be faulty long before the requisite freeway breakdown.

Outside of Felicity Jones's work, the film, directed and co-written by Drake Doremus, usually feels like it's soullessly connecting dots, a far cry from the Before Sunrise-style substance its Yank-meets-Euro chattiness might suggest.

This frothy 3D concert doc often plays like a Perry ad campaign, assuring viewers that their "Teenage Dream" diva is a good, fun-loving person, and that, by God, she's doing fine.

Shana Feste's film seems blissfully unaware that great fights require truly substantial conflicts.

No matter how much Bertrand Bonello varies his split screens, triptychs, and geometric screen divisions, he forgets that one of the most fashionable virtues is knowing when to leave.

This Means War seems so concerned with being the best product, it doesn't even know how to be good trash.

Writer-director Paul Weitz's proudly boisterous star vehicle for Lily Tomlin has about as many ambitions as it does delusions.

James Franco's general aesthetic is ugly and ambling, not so much because of its brownish-gray monochrome, but because it registers like the jerky result of a college kid wielding a DV cam.

Viewer/character solidarity only holds up for so long, and the film falls hard into twisty, nonsense territory, skipping over its stronger themes in the process.

Sofia Coppola seems curiously unmotivated to bring full analysis or provocation to her themes, leaving the film feeling like a disappointingly toothless satire.

The film gradually reveals a lot of unsavory motives, which ultimately deflate the buoyant virtues on which the film had blithely coasted.

A once-precious franchise's weakest installment, which forgets these adventures' magic was never conjured by bells and whistles.

Not even when the doomed Juliet reaches for Romeo's dagger do you feel a single vicarious pain in your gut.

It doesn't play like reality, but like boilerplate filmic fantasy, and its novel setting and inception struggles seem positioned as a beard--or veil, if you will--to mask its mediocrity.

The movie blasts by for a while as an odd and busy slice of highly watchable garbage.

Jamie Dornan somehow manages to render his sculpted beauty moot, which throws a major wrench in the gears for a film dependent on eroticism.

We may have all wanted to know the story behind those famed horns, but the mystery was far preferable to having Maleficent de-fanged and de-clawed in the process.

Nearly a year has passed since the release of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood, and Amanda Seyfried is still crying wolf.