Steve Persall

The first half is nothing but silly setups for a stretch run that admittedly has its moments of wacky pandemonium, just not enough.

There are cheesy pleasures found in Left Behind's ineptness.

Movies about cooperating Africans and Americans often take a condescending risk of great white saviors making everything better for poor black folks. The Good Lie isn't that sort of movie, except in its marketing.

Gone Girl is a terrific movie, everything the book and its fans deserve.

It's easy to see why neither Home Depot nor Lowe's chose to go the product placement route. Too many cleanups in the power tool department.

The Boxtrolls is a visually repellent pile of stop-motion animation, populated by grotesques and filmed in the palette of an exhumed casket's interior. It can frighten small children and bore anyone, with its cracked, cackled British wit.

Everything plays out brutally, and the acting's not bad. But it's unsettling for external reasons beyond its control.

There are strange, midnight movie pleasures found in Smith's movie.

This Is Where I Leave You is packed with familiar regrets and lost-time makeups but these actors make every recycled moment count for something.

Director Wes Ball makes a solid feature film debut, without any noticeable video game envy to his action sequences.

The problem isn't entirely Lehane's script... It's the way Belgian director Michael R. Roskam, making his English language debut, is so visually uninspired by all this meanness.

Even in strained moments, there is a sincerity to Dolphin Tale 2, an ambition to be more than an easy sequel, making it satisfying.

The movie veers between disapproval, farce and something uncomfortably close to envy, with a trio of game performances barely holding things together.

Despite its unsavory aspects, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is always a pleasure to observe, so artfully artificial with its green-screened backdrops and CGI props.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner makes a troublesome filmmaking debut, wasting a dream cast for a comedy in a fitful story of family tension, mental illness and corrosive self-absorption.

Calvary becomes a lurid Agatha Christie yarn with something important to say about the church and Ireland that McDonagh can't fully articulate. Pulp keeps getting in the way.

Ultimately, the movie's energy rises and falls on the presence of Adam Driver as Wallace's libido-on-legs friend, who can make you believe sex can solve anything. Except this movie.

It feels like a rush job, needing another draft or two for cohesion's sake, or for Allen to decide what sort of story he's telling.

Taylor's movie is overly episodic, but a number of those episodes are marvelous.

Guardians of the Galaxy is fun but forgettable, or perhaps Gunn crams so much onto the screen that memory is crowded out. Definitely worth a second look, just to figure out what in the name of Buckaroo Banzai is going on.

Life Itself impressively covers the elements of Ebert's memoir.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time.

Corbijn keeps the intrigue uncluttered, guided by Andrew Bovell's economical adapted screenplay.

The junk in Lucy doesn't entirely eclipse the moments when weird is fun.

It's just an exhausted idea coasting on the charm of its stars.

Yet for all of the technological genius at work here, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes maintains a remarkably human core, even under digital makeup.

If anyone could harness McCarthy's dynamo presence while protecting her from looking bad, it should be Falcone. Instead, Tammy suggests no one had the heart to tell this hot Hollywood couple that it wasn't working.

The fourth episode in a saga that didn't need a second, Age of Extinction, is 2 hours and 45 minutes of numbing dumb and dull end credits listing the artists cashing in. It is exactly what moviegoers who made this franchise thrive deserve.