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.