Scott Tobias

Computer Chess may seem like a novelty item, but it’s that and more, accumulating insight and substance without ever losing the fun of being a lark.

Even with shaggy, semi-improvised projects like Crystal Fairy, there’s a need for some kind of conclusion, and Silva devises one that’s simultaneously terribly contrived and by far the most powerful scene in the movie.

Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.

As a buddy-cop movie, The Heat seems almost deliberately generic, with boilerplate plotting carried across with zero panache. It wagers that McCarthy and Bullock’s comic energy will make all the difference—a smart bet, as it happens.

There’s a potentially compelling story here about children of divorce and the tentative ways they set about forging their own relationships, but the filmmaking is too rudimentary to draw it out subtly.

Verbinski orchestrates complex action sequences, including two spectacular bits of derring-do on a moving train, with a precision few in Hollywood are capable of pulling off. Yet The Lone Ranger, like his last two Pirates movies, seems conceived to deliver spectacle by the bulk, which means carrying the baggage of multiple subplots for the purpose of multiple climactic sequences.

The film is less about people or this specific herding ritual than about the majesty of the landscape and the interplay between these animals, their keepers, and the dictates of nature itself.

It's glorious while it lasts, but then the film goes back to figuring out how to keep its oversized vessel from taking on water.

Scrub away the gore and the nastier bits of provocation, and Ben Wheatley's Sightseers belongs squarely in the tradition of British classics like "Kind Hearts and Coronets" and "The Ruling Class" — satires that transformed simmering class resentment into brittle, nasty dark comedy.

Bay blankets the film in a tone of smug self-awareness that obscures everything but its bald hypocrisy.

Oblivion occupies an awkward no-man's-land between escapist space adventure and heady science fiction, but it's neither thrilling enough nor intellectually stimulating enough to satisfy devotees of either.

Cross may not earn the broad recognition he deserves for his performance in It's a Disaster, a droll apocalypse comedy of exceedingly modest scale and even more modest commercial appeal. But it's still a master class in how to play the straight man right.

Still, there’s no doubt that To The Wonder is a fans-only proposition, continuing Malick’s evolution (or devolution, for some) from the narrative grounding of "Badlands" to much more abstract, poeticized notions of the human condition.

The Jackie Robinson biopic 42 operates in a box inside of a box—and not the batter’s box, either, because that would imply it has some freedom to swing away. It’s thoroughly embalmed in the glossy lacquer of conventional baseball movies, and limited further by trying to deal with the horrors of racism in that context.

The film is frequently masterful, suggesting the turbulent inner state of an American sociopath who believes himself to be a good guy.

It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.

While Raimi’s Stooges aesthetic — which was really more prominently displayed in the sequels than in 1981’s The Evil Dead — isn’t played up here, there’s enough outrageous unreality to make the brutality go down a little easier. It isn’t quite a cartoon, but it’s close enough.

After all, the documentary itself stands as a thrilling testament to the fact that art is — and should be — open to interpretation.

By showing up and not embarrassing itself too much, the film far exceeds the standards established by the likes of the Shelley Long/Corbin Bernsen team-up "Frozen Assets" and 2012’s dire sperm-heist comedy "The Babymakers."

Dickerson passes on the occasion for existential drama and goes for the race-against-the-clock urgency of an ordinary guy trying to crawl out of his predicament. It’s effective enough, but there isn’t much to it.

At times, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a sense of its own ridiculousness — Pryce seems to be having a good time, anyway — but not enough to soften the mass death, hardware fetishism, and militaristic zeal that gets in the way of its escapist fun.

Leon isn't a flashy director, but he has an excellent sense of proportion. Gimme the Loot unfolds in a series of loose, funny, naturalistic scenes, but they never trail off into improvisational vapors.

The film itself doesn’t practice what it preaches: From the typically blocky DreamWorks CGI to the emphasis on bruising slapstick over verbal wit, The Croods takes the low road at every opportunity, giving lip service to enlightenment while following a Flintstonian instinct to keep punching the clock at the quarry.

For as studiously as Griffiths avoids cheap exploitation, the film has an overall structure that isn’t as far removed from a Roger Corman “women in prison” movie as it appears.

Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.

It's the warm tenor of the film that ultimately rescues it.

All that unsavory business aside, the biggest problem with the third act is how the film discards the novelty of its own premise in order to bring its star into the action. When Berry trades her headset for a rock, it’s the bluntest metaphor imaginable for a film that’s completely lost its mind.

The overall effect is enervating, like a party that grinds on after most of the attendees have either left or passed out. And much like "Kids," the enfant terrible’s breakthrough screenplay, Korine’s film has an unintended moral hysteria, like a warning to parents of what their good girls are doing when they aren’t looking. The message: Keep them locked up. In their bikinis, if necessary.