Stephanie Merry

Wish I Was Here touches on some timely themes and does so with an artistic vulnerability.

The story often feels like a collection of (so-so) jokes, forcibly strung together in a tenuous narrative.

It’s not pretty, but it captures something that few cooking movies do: reality.

After the movie limps along for an hour and a half, Besson suddenly switches gears and does what he does best.

It’s hard to get over the movie’s haunting atmosphere. It may be just another story of kids in peril, but this one’s particularly hard to shake.

A good idea and a stellar cast lost inside a sloppy script that mostly retreads last year’s laughs.

Hart is clearly working overtime; there’s nothing effortless about his histrionic delivery, but it works.

Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.

Just a series of familiar scenes unfurling toward an inevitable conclusion.

The story takes a couple of sharp turns, ultimately revealing that it isn’t a romantic comedy after all, but a shambling drama with a few mildly amusing pratfalls.

While some of the stories are interesting, the film is much longer than it needs to be. For his part, Salerno tries to get creative with solutions for the lack of visual stimuli, but most attempts fail.

Some of the dancing really is spectacular. Scenes from the competing clubs include impressive choreography and gravity-defying moves. If only the poorly delivered, trite dialogue and predictable plot aimed as high.

It seems that Andy and Lana Wachowski have never lost that childlike ability to dream. But they also haven’t mastered the grown-up power to rein it in. The story they tell in Jupiter Ascending could probably occupy an entire television season. There’s way too much here for one movie to hold.

Along the way there’s a sprinkling of humanizing moments.

By the Sea is dazzlingly gorgeous, as are its stars. But peeling back layer upon layer of exquisite ennui reveals nothing but emptiness, sprinkled with stilted sentiments.

Every Asian character is either a ruthless murderer or anonymous collateral damage. A lot of locals have to die, the film suggests, in order for one white family to survive.

Free Birds has the colorful palette, zippy action and silly story to keep kids giggling, but it also delivers a few worthwhile winks to parents.

On paper, this is an extraordinary story. But the careless production values blunt its impact. The score is obtrusive and generic; the sound editing makes a shootout sound reminiscent of an old Western; continuity errors abound.

If anything, Baywatch is a litmus test for how low Johnson can sink while still winning us over.

With so many warmed-over jokes, you’d think that the delivery would at least be on point. But everything, including the timing, feels off.

Good camerawork only goes so far. Love drags on and on, alternating between arguments and intimacy, breakups and makeups. The movie never passes the authenticity test; if this is what sex feels like, we’ll all soon be extinct.

Like an elaborately decorated wedding cake, the kid-friendly Walking With Dinosaurs 3D may leave you wondering how something so stunning could end up being so bland.

Sometimes the punch lines land and sometimes they don’t, but overall the result is pleasantly nostalgic.

The Bye Bye Man had a relatively modest budget, and it shows in the special effects, which tend to be more funny than scary.

Pan doesn’t deliver on its own promise. The movie doesn’t so much enhance our understanding of the flying boy as it demonstrates how little thought went into crafting his back story.

A few minutes of excitement can’t compensate for an hour and a half of unimaginative storytelling and dull characters.

Cooper and Lawrence do their best, but the material consistently works against them, from the overwrought dialogue to the never-ending plot twists in place of character development.

The romantic drama is painfully contrived and insistently predictable.

Luckily, a strong supporting cast makes up for the protagonists’ tepid interactions. The brilliant duo of Kevin Hart and Alan Arkin steal the show.

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

Diana isn’t just an egregious case of rewriting history, but one of oversimplifying it.

Wondrous visuals only go so far, in a film that turns out to be lethally dull.

Lazy, scattershot and excruciatingly unfunny, the movie is a hazard to the very young, who might come away with the erroneous impression that movies don’t get any better than this.

It takes a very special director to make scenes of sky-diving, free climbing, big-wave surfing and BASE jumping something to yawn at. Yet Ericson Core must be that kind of miracle worker, because Point Break, his update of the 1991 cult classic, is basically a cavalcade of extreme sports, but with less drama than a highlight reel.

The big thrills and few laughs are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and Wallis.

For the most part, Vacation is a sad, cynical rip-off of writer John Hughes’s source material. No one expects originality, but the new movie may end up making history: It’s already looking like the worst movie of the year.

It’s hard to imagine this tale of tradition and miracles leading skeptics to contemplation, much less faith.

The heart of the movie is in the right place. And although some of the acting from the younger stars comes across as amateurish, a few performances truly shine.

There are some very funny moments in the movie, even for grown-ups, including a video of Will that goes viral. The absurd machinations of Will’s smarmy political adviser are also good for a laugh. But ultimately, Annie is so fixated on being current that it will never be more than a passing fancy.

People don’t go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In The Longest Ride, authenticity is in short supply.

The problem is quantity. There are so many action sequences related to so many story lines that midway through an epic fight, you might find yourself wondering what exactly started this particular battle and what the objective is other than destruction for the sake of it.

The plot is paint by numbers, which puts pressure on the comedy to deliver. But it doesn’t.

It’s all so plodding and grim, echoed by the blandly percussive score by Ramin Djawadi.

Each sweet moment is inevitably punctuated by some in-your-face joke that’s at least as stupid as the preceding moments were heartfelt. Blended has other problems, too, including some faulty editing and a typically predictable finale. But there are some genuinely sweet and funny moments, which are more than enough to exceed expectations.

The only thing that distinguishes this teen-magnet wannabe from its predecessors is how lazily it appears to have been slapped together.

Winter’s Tale is ambitious with its otherworldly ingredients and temporal leaps. It’s not always a success, but the movie has one thing going for it: spot-on casting.

In the world of Freedom, slaves and the people who help them are Christians, and the bad guys don’t believe in God.

The movie feels like Nicholas Sparks fan fiction.

Somehow channeling the tone of both a Lifetime movie and an after-school special, Mothers and Daughters shambles into theaters oozing schlock and melodrama, just in time for Mother’s Day. This is no way to honor a beloved family member.

The movie’s editing mishaps, unbelievable scenarios, overuse of music and computer-generated fakery distract from what should be a great ad­ven­ture.

Even as characters are tweaked and actors bring a slightly different energy than his other movies, The Best of Me is still the same mushy Nicholas Sparks adaptation with drama so overwrought audience members can’t help but laugh — at least until they’re sniffling during the closing credits.

The movie — which looks and sounds like a more brutal Bond knockoff — is at least consistently stylish, though its tone is less assured.

London Has Fallen is remarkable only because of how much worse it is than its inane predecessor.

Director James McTeigue frequently collaborates with the visionary Wachowski siblings, and he directed V for Vendetta. How the man who blew up Parliament in such memorably spectacular fashion can’t add some originality to Philip Shelby’s script is the movie’s only real mystery.

Lazy humor and familiar plotting aside, Pixels at least gets a little mileage out of its affection for the 1980s.

Mortdecai succeeds more as a talky farce than an action-packed adventure. But it would be even better if Mortdecai weren’t about Mortdecai at all.

Watching “Transfomers” is like sitting in a car that’s revving its engine while stuck in the mud. It sounds like it’s getting somewhere, even though all it ever does is spin its wheels.

Morality is hardly the main concern of The Ottoman Lieutenant. Instead, it’s content with hackneyed romance and soaring strings.

The music is catchy and sounds sufficiently Elvis-like, and The Identical occupies a neglected niche as a family-friendly movie that isn’t geared just toward kids. But living up to a legend is an uphill battle, and the movie doesn’t ever reach those heights.

The movie manages to be simultaneously superficial and heartbreaking. That’s no easy feat — nor is it a laudable one.

The intentions for I’m in Love With a Church Girl may have been noble, but nearly every part of the delivery turns out to be flawed.

A rarely funny spoof that's heavy on bone-crushing and blood-gushing.

The only thing epic about The Legend of Hercules is what a failure it is.

The whole movie becomes such a pileup of detritus, whether it’s cop cars or plot points, that even something as important as rationale becomes an afterthought.

Definitely exceeds expectations, but in the worst way possible.