Sheila O'Malley

The film tries to pack in a little bit too much in its running time, and there isn't a comedic moment until well into the film, a strange choice in a movie for kids, but The Wild Life has its moments of charm, hilarity, and slapstick that worked really well.

For the most part, A Farewell to Fools rollicks along on its own bizarre and not successful path, comedic moments falling flat, emotional moments running shallow, but in that moment we can feel something else striving to break free.

The movie comes to life any time the actors are given space to mess around. It's just not enough to hold the whole thing together.

The dialogue creates an arch and artificial mood, never sounding like real talk despite the clearly talented actors (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman) playing the roles. The film itself seems to be in denial about its own story.

It's not the most original of concepts, and writer-director Liz W. Garcia struggles with the tone throughout, but The Lifeguard is often saved by Kristen Bell's sensitive and complex performance.

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

The opening party represents what is best about the movie: it's pure mayhem and it's entirely silly.

Films don't have to feature likable people to be successful. Far from it. But a film has to let us know why we want to watch these people. Like its lead character, In Stereo does not want to do the necessary work.

Even if you allow for the the fact that the film is geared towards the 5-year-old set, it's still a pretty dreary experience, made even more so by screamingly vivid colors, uninspiring animation and grating songs.

There's a lot of inadvertently hilarious stuff in Fifty Shades Darker.

The 5th Wave is Dystopia-Lite.

A lot of grappling happens. The community grapples. The characters grapple. People grapple alone, people grapple together. Grappling is more interesting to watch than certainty, any day of the week.

Addicted is supposed to be erotica, so perhaps thinking about it too much is unfair, but the film is so uneven (it's both hot and preachy), as well as way too long, that thinking becomes inevitable.

Cats suffers from a problem common in contemporary filmed musicals. The musical doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust that the dancing in and of itself is exciting enough to hold our interest.

The characters are not people, but rough drafts of simplistic character-traits, and the actors (game as they all are) cannot create something out of nothing.

Unfortunately, Mary's concept - and it's a good one! - doesn't blossom into the truly spooky, the truly eerie, even though it's given countless chances to do so.

The Single Moms Club is almost good.

It's a vast understatement to say that Vonda McIntyre's book deserved way better treatment than this.

The problem is there's not enough sex and too much ... everything else.

Winter's Tale probably won't please anyone: neither fans of the book nor those who have never read it. It lacks visual splendor (except for one or two scenes). It lacks emotional depth. It lacks scope and magic.

Affluenza thinks it is deep when it is merely trite. It illuminates nothing.

Without an establishing tone or style — the first scene sits there on the screen like a void — it can come off as trying to jump on some already-long-gone bandwagon.

The plot of Mad Women is ridiculous, unmotivated and "shocking," but that wouldn't be an issue at all if there had been some attempt at style, or mood, or a point of view.

The Right Kind of Wrong is the kind of comedy that asks an audience to find borderline-stalking behavior charming.

There are some interesting things going on, and some insight into New York's economic hierarchy, but the film veers off into a hard-to-believe crime heist, and, ultimately, none of it really hangs together.

It's "Eat, Pray, Love"-lite, and "Eat, Pray, Love" was already "lite."

Despite some game acting (and one truly superb moment from David Strathairn), Maladies remains on too low a boil to communicate any sense of stakes for the various characters. It seems to be trying to say something about creativity, and living one's life on one's own terms, but it's a muddle.

The Bag Man is so sloppily executed it feels like they didn't have enough light fixtures to get the effects they wanted. But that's only one of the problems.

When Madea is onscreen, at least you know what universe you are in, and there is something interesting and insane to watch. Otherwise, you are thrust into an abyss of meaninglessness and plot-heavy maneuvering overlaid with Christian propaganda that wears out its welcome with the first line of exposition.

A wild whirlwind of a mess, without any coherence, without even a guiding principle.

Edward Hall’s new adaptation of Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit is so aggressively un-funny it might make audiences unfamiliar with the script's successful track record wonder why it was ever a success in the first place.

It's just a frantic, flash-cutting frenzy. Even the slower, more intimate family scenes feature so many swooping-up-from-below shots and so many sudden inserts that moments (emotional or physical) are never given a chance to land.

One positive thing about The Identical is that it will make you want to bust out Elvis Presley's early Sun and RCA recordings, songs like "That's All Right," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "My Baby Left Me," or "Good Rockin'" just to remind you that no, it didn't happen the way it did in The Identical. Thank goodness.

Through the playing of the game, the real life characters' true personalities emerge, and we can see that this is a pretty heartless bunch.

The fact that a woman has Crohn's disease is meant to be hilarious, in a nudge-nudge wink-wink "You know she's not giving her husband any sex" kind of way. It's wretched.

There are serious movies about the Christian faith, about the persecution of the faithful, and about the intolerance that goes both ways. God's Not Dead 2 is not one of them.

So poorly done, its tone so lackadaisical and uncommitted, it's not clear half the time what you're even watching. If it's supposed to be a comedy, it's not funny. If it's supposed to be a satire, it doesn't know what it's satirizing. The biggest problem is that the stakes are never high enough to invest in any of it.

Faith of Our Fathers doesn't work, and not because of its Christian message. The main problems are the obvious script (every plot-twist can be seen coming from miles down the road), the bad acting, and the cheaply-done, unconvincing Vietnam flashbacks.

What a grim experience.

There are two scenes in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's Best Night Ever that work: they are screwball and goofy which, unfortunately, only serve to highlight the fun film it could have been.

The film is appalling from start to finish.

The film is shot in a pretty stock manner, with jokes falling flat (when one does land, it feels like a miracle) and musical cues guiding us toward appropriate emotional responses.

The French farce aspect of the film is its true heartbeat. These characters are not really serious people, and it is difficult to take any of them seriously. That’s fine, it gives Three Night Stand its special lunatic edge.

City of Joy is devastating and enraging, but the strength of the women profiled, their will to survive, to lay claim to their own bodies, is inspiring, although that's not quite the right word. It would have been better if they had not been brutalized at all.

Clichés are already shorthand, so when you shorthand the shorthand, assuming audiences will just take the leap into whatever "reality" you are trying to create, you end up with a cop-thriller like Darkness Falls: a bizarre series of cliché after cliché, with no real work done to fill in the blanks with complexity, nuance, or even basic human reality.

Agenda-driven films make for dreary viewing and Infidel is never dreary. Aided by excellent performances across the board by its international cast, "Infidel" works best when it's an old-fashioned thriller.

It's a very insightful insider-baseball look at the creative process.

There may be one too many obstacles placed in Prerna's way (the pet goat is a prime example), stacking the deck against her so there will be an even bigger payoff. But overall Skater Girl is so gratifying it doesn't matter.

Burns' filmmaking is confident and his attitude is anti-sentimental. He captures the atmosphere of a town where a person can leave for five years and come back to find that nothing much has changed. A visit to a local pub means you run into half your high school class. I grew up in a beach town like this. Burns gets it right.

Borrego, an awkward thriller pasted onto a moody strangers-forging-a-connection drama, doesn't allow itself to be what it so clearly wants to be.

We Are as Gods works best as a history lesson as seen through one man's journey: from Haight-Ashbury bacchanals to early computer labs to the Siberian steppe.

Not enough happens in The Loneliest Boy in the World. There's not enough conflict. The film relies too heavily on cliche and hopes the audience won't notice.

The film might have benefited from a lengthier treatment and more exploration of all the themes at work. As it is, "Barber" is a fairly rote crime drama but a fascinating glimpse of a world in transition.

Clocking in at 51 minutes, the film is all mood, all rhythm, with a kaleidoscope structure and undulating ever-shifting visuals in a constant state of flux. It's not a "story" so much as a tone-poem collage about technology, knowledge, innocence/experience, and the potential end of the world.

Muzzle is filled with intriguing aspects not explored meaningfully. There are so many different threads, themes, and plots, even Scotch-taped together in the hopes it will come together. It doesn't.

Goldilocks and the Two Bears is probably supposed to be "provocative," "shocking," and "playful," the title being what it is. The film is none of these things.

Watching it is like being trapped in a nightmare and finally wrenching yourself awake.

Amber Alert sometimes works as a thriller, but it has serious aspirations. It wants to “say” something. These two things don’t come together.

Uppercut feels like it’s two different movies, or maybe two short films, jerry-rigged together into a feature.

Electra‘s subject matter is heavy (the title should clue you in), and the emotions are very dark. Still, the film itself shimmers with a kind of free-floating hilarity, and the team’s sense of creativity and pleasure is catching.

Sew Torn marks an auspicious debut for MacDonald.

Come Closer is a unique take on grief, containing insight into projection and transference, as well as the way obsession is almost a relief from having to face the unfaceable. Nesher’s script belabors the point at times, but as a director, she captures the rhythms of Tel Aviv’s social swirl, the alcohol-spiked bell jar of clubs and dancing and music, all the things that make up the manic nightlife of a lost twentysomething who has no idea the party is already over.

Traditions are people’s stories, connecting them to their ancestors, to this patch of ground. Knowledge is passed down literally—recipes, sewing patterns, hand-drawn truffle maps—but also symbolically; myths, fables, fairy tales. You can’t put a price on any of it, and that, ultimately, is what Trifole is all about.

There’s strong emotion in “Holy Days,” but it results entirely from the talented cast. The story’s structure is so phony and over-determined that there is no real suspense, and, even more deadly, the tone is artificially “comedic.” True moments of unfettered humor are nowhere to be seen.