Susan Wloszczyna

Everything about the romantic comedy What If is cute. Utterly cute. Undeniably cute. Uber–duber cute.

What is harder to achieve than building a hospital? Producing a realistic movie about coping with grief by helping others – at least for the filmmakers behind Louder Than Words.

All in all, Very Good Girls is a very bad excuse to subject those of us who have enjoyed Fanning ever since 2001’s "I Am Sam" to seeing her flash her bare fanny, fondle herself provocatively and cavort in her underwear for no dramatic purpose. Yes, she should be allowed to grow up onscreen. But without a story that justifies it, it just feels sad and desperate.

One glance at the static camerawork that plagues the entirety of Happy Christmas and you might also discern that this is a minimalist mumblecore production, a kitchen-sink-style indie genre that apparently outlaws long shots or close-ups.

Surprise, surprise. This "Planes" quickly grounds itself with a story that at least offers an emotional hook (if not ladder) that most adults and even kids can appreciate.

Honour, for good and bad, is nowhere near as gruesome and downbeat as its subject might suggest.

What ultimately should have been borrowed from Spielberg’s oeuvre but isn’t is a sense of wonder and achievement whenever characters come in contact with the unknown or overcome a great obstacle as a team. Imitation should be flattering, not flattening.

With its cast of extremely likable performers, the perfect summer-in-the-city backdrop—in this case, New York — and a soundtrack stuffed with catchy, well-produced hits, Begin Again makes for easy-breezy entertainment.

This layered melodrama strains for emotional impact with only occasional success while eventually blurring into an overlong and contrived parlor trick.

If anyone is concerned about the way women are presented on the big screen these days, just look at how an evolved male like Hiccup respectfully treats his girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera) and the portrayal of Blanchett’s Valka.

It's as messy as a teen’s bedroom and packed with all manner of distracting clutter that needlessly burdens a plot.

This supposedly uplifting true-life baseball tale never quite strikes the necessary emotional sweet spots that these types of inspirational sports movies shamelessly if effectively milk, despite a pitch with great potential.

This is comfort comedy, pure and simple.

No one holds the screen like Mac and Kelly’s big-eyed darling of a daughter, played by twins Elise and Zoey Vargas.

This is one of those movies that parents will have to ask themselves if they love their child enough to sit through it. At least "The Nut Job" is off the hook as the worst indie-made animated feature of the year.

The bloody fingerprints of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers — among other violence-prone auteurs — are smeared all over his tidy and tautly-told Blue Ruin.

Instead of focusing on gastronomic nirvana, this listless culinary drama feels and looks more like a glossy European travel commercial.

It is just plain fun to observe Frost as Bruce while he happily shimmies and shakes his way to regaining his once-renown "feet of flames."

Like most of Jarmusch’s films, the emphasis is not on action but interaction—especially the verbal kind. And atmosphere.

Rio 2 has exhausted its limited amount of charm. Most regrettably, Rita Moreno appears in her first movie in eight years as Jewel’s overbearing Aunt Mimi but is barely allowed to make an impression.

Rarely do I find a movie that is so appalling if not outright insulting to all of humanity (and particularly, in this case, womankind) that it gives me a stomach ache.

Mistaken for Strangers was a group effort. And also an act of love.

It is never a good situation when a subtitled foreign release is highly dependent on words to get its point across—especially when those words are supposed to make you laugh.

When Michell is on his game, as he definitely is with Le Week-End, he unearths small, invaluable and even profound truths about the human condition that are often as inspiring as they are devastating.

At least it's admirable that Donohue manages to do almost all his shooting with either web cams, phone cams or surveillance cameras. But that does not translate into an entirely enjoyable viewing experience. Plus, there are almost no real shocks or scares to rattle you out of the stupor that inevitably develops from observing someone else fiddle with their laptop for much of the running time.

A tidy and tension-filled exercise in terror that takes stage fright to literal extremes.

If Nancy Meyers ever decided to dabble in gothic romance, it probably would turn out to be something like The Face of Love.

If I wanted to read my way through a film that features words dancing around the screen as if they were waltzing Post-Its, I would have sat through a foreign movie with subtitles instead.