Randy Cordova

The film feels overlong and a bit repetitious, but it’s obviously a complex subject that deserves a thought-out treatment.

The effect is initially giddy but it ultimately wears the viewer down.

The Finest Hours is set in the early '50s. But did it really need to feel like it was made during the Eisenhower era?

Cate Blanchett gives a ferocious performance as the steely Mapes, and she mines some genuine emotion out of the material.

There might be a decent movie in here somewhere, if the focus had been on the right character.

The cast is excellent, anchored by the one-two punch of Colunga and Yañez.

Nothing feels believable in “Big Stone Gap,” a bungled, charm-free look at small-town life in the South in the late '70s.

Roth's tale is fairly twisty, as the behavior of the women grows increasingly violent and more outrageous. The two are not simply nut jobs; Roth presents them as a form of avenging angels who target philandering husbands. That's an interesting premise, but the movie lacks the depth or layers to make that truly compelling.

If you’re a major fan of the "Love Live!" world, this is possibly enjoyable. If you’re not, it is shrill, garish, confusing and badly paced, with cheap-looking animation and characters that resemble Walter Keane’s big-eyed waifs.

A scary fun-house ride that expertly blends jittery tension and laugh-out-loud humor.

It's mindless entertainment with enough thrills and chuckles to make the time pass painlessly. Just don't examine anything too closely.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau never made a movie called Grumpy Old Men Go Camping. If they had, it surely would look a lot like A Walk in the Woods.

Director Craig Zobel (he made the creepily effective “Compliance”) lets the story unfold in wonderfully hushed fashion.

Newbie director Aleksander Bach handles the project with a competent precision. The film doesn’t rise above the genre and the plot is muddled, but he pulls off the basic elements with a distinctly chilly European style.

Pat and silly, the movie offers a wheezy moral that a buttoned-up American just needs a sensitive Latino and some ethnic cuisine to end the blues.

People Places Things is filled with that kind of heart-piercing comedy that makes a viewer cringe and laugh at the same time.

At first, it’s fun and shiny, then you’re left with a crumpled mess on the floor.

Stark’s turgid approach feels both pompous and cold, and the film never connects emotionally.

A LEGO Brickumentary feels like one of those cheerful corporate videos that gets screened at team meetings, designed to rouse employees into a rah-rah fervor. The down side: Most videos of that ilk don’t last for 90 minutes.

The visual effects are impressive, and there is a certain kick to seeing the human characters dodging barrels in a life-size Donkey Kong. But we don’t really care about the humans; here, at least, Q*bert is more endearing than Adam Sandler.

Director Eran Riklis starts the film off with a playful, whimsical tone that grows increasingly darker as things progress. It reflects the life of the movie's protagonist, which finds him facing challenges that would make most people bitter.

The club scenes, initially exciting, are ultimately wearying, and the movie meanders about much of the time.

Visually, the film is sumptuous and the costumes are suitably wow-inspiring, but the humans are a blah bunch.

It actually is quite funny. It is also warm and empathetic, though a viewer's reaction to the film might vary depending how they view the subject of assisted suicide.

Everything feels pat and oversimplified, with no gray areas. That's not uncommon in films of this nature, but Christensen is unable to make the movie feel like anything more than propaganda.

Ultimately, the whole affair is forgettable. The original film was promoted with the tagline "It knows what scares you." If there was a truth-in-advertising law regarding films, this movie's ad copy would read: "Poltergeist: Meh."

The movie is fascinating when it looks at the mechanics of Big Bird, which are physically challenging.

The movie, like Jackie, loosens up a bit, and her relationship with Ian adds a nice bit of warmth. Hunt directs the film, and at times its tonal shifts are a bit jarring.

It is clean, crisp and passionless. You almost wish for some Bravo sleaze to add a little edge to the proceedings.

If you like a little bit more in a movie — say, characters that are mildly interesting or a plot that's a wee bit logical — stay far away.

Above and Beyond is a straightforward, rah-rah documentary.

Supporting turns by Philip Rosenthal and David Alan Grier as two pals in the business are fun, but they can't prevent the movie's rather aimless nature or self-indulgent feel.

Written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolen, who gives himself a small role, the movie fails as both a comedy and morality tale.

The movie makes some observations about the worth of human life — the title refers to the monetary value put on the life of the injured waiter — and the economic class system, but they're not terribly interesting or surprising.

It's no surprise The Boy Next Door is junk. What is disappointing is that it's not fun junk. It doesn't even merit a good hate-watching, because the whole thing is so meh.

There are some poignant moments in the movie's latter half, as well as a couple of genuine laughs. If it never achieves the heft it wants, it at least manages a sitcommy kind of charm, like an extended episode of "The Golden Girls." Perhaps more importantly, it gives Rowlands a lead role, which is never a bad thing.

Olivier Megaton (he helmed "Taken 2") starts things off at a sluggish pace and never picks up speed. Even the action scenes, which often are filmed in jittery fashion, don't generate thrills.

Everything is lathered with a syrupy, string-laden musical score designed to gnaw at a viewer's tear ducts. It's about as subtle as having an off-screen narrator yell "Start crying!" before big scenes, and probably as effective.

This is a wonderful movie.

Freeland does a fine job, waiting for her characters to converge in a way that doesn't feel overly forced, though there is a bit of that "Crash" tidiness in how things fall together. Still, the film is moving and human.

First-time writer-director Peter Sattler keeps things glum and unsentimental, then tosses it all up in the air with a syrupy ending that derails everything. On another movie, the high-corn finale might have worked; here, it just feels patently false.

The movie is not uninteresting, but a viewer isn't breathlessly waiting to see how things will wrap up, either. By the third act, you even start to get impatient with the characters. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The characters flutter about, argue and flirt, but they are simply too bland and vacuous to make much of an impression. It doesn't help that half of them serve no purpose other than to fill the camera frame.

Elvis Presley made some bad movies, but let's give the King his due: He never made anything as outright awful as The Identical.

Granted, all the fine elements don't add up to make the deepest or most compelling film. Instead, it's a series of self-contained scenes that don't always hang together as a whole. But like a good hotel, there are enough comforts to make the stay worthwhile.

Director Michael Dowse (from the underrated Topher Grace comedy "Take Me Home Tonight") fuels the story with atmosphere, with lots of nighttime activity and bustle. He keeps things grounded in reality, though little touches (Chantry imagines her drawings coming to life) add an extra — and, perhaps, excessive — sweetness.

There's comfort food and there are comfort movies. In Lasse Hallstrom's The Hundred-Foot Journey, you get a full helping of both. And guess what? It's all very comforting.

Writer-director Amat Escalante was named best director at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for this project, and although it obviously is made with some skill, it also is unrelentingly dire.

Although everything here works for the most part, there is also a definite lack of oomph as the movie pushes toward the inevitable climax.

Gregg really reaches far, scattering in bits of magical realism and an art-house ending that is simultaneously wondrous and a trifle heavy-handed. The finale may be a bit much for some, but movie buffs will likely give Gregg the benefit of the doubt.

The filmmaker's seeming lack of skepticism makes for rough going if you don't buy into Kenyon's vision.

Documented is obviously a bit of advocacy filmmaking, which is fine, but most of the time it's not compelling enough to reach beyond the converted.

Although the visuals are spectacular — a barren Colorado River looks like a landscape from a science-fiction epic — there's not much else here to grab on.

Because the film is unable to settle on a tone, it's hard to get invested in much of anything.

The movie boasts a tricky structure, but director Jonathan Teplitzky ("Burning Man") does an expert job of sewing together the World War II moments with sequences set in the '80s.

The project drips with sincerity, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. What doesn't work is the tin-eared dialogue and the utter lack of momentum, both in the script or the direction by Nikita Zubarev.

The film is nakedly candid, but Stritch is also a ham who is almost always aware of the camera.

If you had to update the film for the Instagram generation, you could do a lot worse than what director Shana Feste (“Country Strong”) has come up with. She has crafted a stylish, evocative journey into overheated-teenager territory. For a good chunk of the time, it works.

The film is based on a popular series of young-adult books (big surprise), but one figures only die-hard fans will enjoy the result. The movie is slow-witted and moves at a glacial pace.

First-time writer-director Tom Gormican keeps the dialogue moving at a rapid pace, which doesn’t obscure the fact that most of what is said is dopey and witless.

Most of the time, it simply coasts along at the level of a typical Lifetime TV movie.

Although it won’t win any points for originality, it is a fast-moving little chiller filled with creepy atmosphere and convincing performances.

The whole thing is a total bore; even the supporting players aren’t motivated enough to attract attention. That’s good news for Lutz; he can’t be blamed for torpedoing the project, because everyone is doing subpar work here.

The whole thing is sentimental corn, which isn’t bad if it’s handled with conviction and sincerity. But the direction by John Stephenson (better known for special effects than directing) is resolutely stiff and hollow. That’s murder for a movie dealing with miracles.

One reason the movie works so well: Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee returns from the original, so the characters feel true to the first film. Secondly, most of the cast is back, and they have the kind of comfortable chemistry you can’t fake. It’s easy to believe these people have a history together.

It feels like a filmmaker’s exercise rather than an involving motion picture. Although you may never be bored with All Is Lost, you are rarely fully engaged.

Nick Ryan’s documentary looks at the disaster by using interviews, actual footage and re-enactments. The latter move undercuts some of the movie’s authenticity. Granted, there probably wasn’t another way to film it, but it muddies the film’s sense of truth.

The movie’s best moments are the small ones.

It’s not that this slight, good-natured comedy is going to set the world on fire. But the movie boasts an understated sweetness, largely fueled by Camil’s movie-star charms.

The movie ultimately winds up falling between two stools, failing as both a biography and an action film. Martial arts fans will naturally be drawn to the story, but the film does nothing to open up the world to outsiders.

A brittle, pompous drama.

The gags are stale, the characters uninvolving and bits meant to titillate don’t.

It’s hard to imagine another comedy coming along this year that is this abrasive and free of laughs. It’s like everyone involved intentionally tried to create a horrible movie.

White House Down aims to be a low-brow slab of mindless summer fun. Most of the time, it comes pretty close to hitting the bull’s eye.

Ultimately, At Any Price isn’t terrible, but you can tell that’s hardly the endorsement the filmmakers were seeking.

The movie is a pretty humdrum affair when it focuses on humans, even when actors are playing characters based on real people.