Tasha Robinson

Everything Everywhere’s multiverse is a remarkably flexible metaphor. It’s equally suitable for expressing some common frustrations the audience may relate to, about botched choices and wasted opportunity. But it’s just as suited for setting up a series of ridiculously kickass action sequences where literally anything is possible, because the characters aren’t bound by reality or causality.

The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.

It's artless, obvious, and at times insultingly exaggerated. And yet the real-life story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin, based on his autobiography, is often dramatic enough to win its way past the silly trappings.

All this experimentation is enjoyable enough in the moment, but it's disappointing when Tykwer drops it in favor of a conventional, obvious ending.

Weisz makes for a vivid, charismatic Hypatia, but the script lets her down.

Breakin' 2 turned out to be pure, laugh-a-minute cheeseball entertainment. Granted, it's utterly terrible, with stiff, amateurish acting, enough vivid Day-Glo to blind an army of sunglasses-wearing Corey Harts, and the thinnest and hoariest of thin, hoary old plots. But the camp value is through the roof.

It's a low-key actor's showreel, harmless and toothless and sleepy. It'd go pretty well with a glass of warm milk.

Episodic, detached, and lacking in drive, but packed with amazing, hallucinatory dream-imagery that makes real dreams look flat by comparison.

From the maudlin musical cues to a senseless romantic subplot that's only barely tacked on, every aspect of Evelyn stabs blindly and insistently at emotional buttons -- Beresford has made the feel-manipulated movie of the year.

Sometimes the actors lip-sync, but more often, they're singing along with the original vocal tracks, trying to out-belt Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen, like a cadre of enthusiastic shower singers joining in with the radio. The resulting cacophony is generally harsh and sloppy, and the film follows suit.

This movie is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from a thousand different parts and lurching into disturbing life. The Bride! seems like it was meant to be discussed, analyzed, and unpacked at length, with different fans seizing on different elements as the key to the whole shambling creature. But like so many of the Frankensteinian creatures that preceded it onto the screen, it’s a bit of an unwieldy monster.

Early on, it feels like it might become one of Allen’s best. Then the narrative direction becomes clear, the possibilities narrow, and the film shuts down along with them.

Iron Lung is an immersive experience. It traps the audience in a close, suffocating space with Simon and the seeming inevitability of his death, and the sense of terror is palpable and thrilling. It’s a slow-burn horror movie, but it certainly isn’t lacking in scares.

The script is always shakier than the performers trying to bring it across, and by the third act, it lets them down completely.

Puncture excels in the smaller touches, from Shaw's quiet performance to the woozy, unrushed motel idylls where the hard-driving Weiss finally slows down for a few breaths.

It’s a sleek and effective thriller, often scary and usually visually impressive. But too often, its reasons for doing absolutely anything amount to “because this is the way Alien did it.”

The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.

It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering viewers intensely glad that they weren't.

Between the high-gloss, desaturated prestige-picture look of the film and the visibly fakey soundstage sets of the Jersey boys’ hometown, Jersey Boys feels plastic and artificial throughout. There’s no sense of authentic urgency or intensity to any of it.

A film that veers between caustic comedy, melodrama, and heartstring-tugging, without finding the spark of sympathy that would hold the film together around its disparate tones.

Story remains Vanguard's weak point.

The problem is that both as a director and as an actor, Okuda never makes a particularly convincing case either for sex or for deeper commitment as a road away from the abyss.

War Machine hits all the right spots for this kind of movie. It’s lean and propulsive. The practical stunts are impressive and immersive. And Ritchson, even playing a man so throttled by his own past that he doesn’t want to feel anything, is a compelling screen presence.

While several of the characters seem to be making obvious choices for obvious reasons, as the story unfolds, the script gets progressively deeper into their psyches.

Sheen is often the saving grace of Music Within, thanks to an aggressively profane wit that gives an otherwise tapioca-bland story a little edge.

Despereaux at least has too much ambition rather than too little, but its curiously intellectual pleasures suggest a quaint puzzle rather than a passionately loved fairy tale.

It’s a pretty take on the story, but it’s also a frustratingly safe and squishy one. It’s infinitely well-intentioned, full of warm self-affirmation and positivity, and absolutely nothing about it feels emotionally authentic enough to drive those messages home.

Anyone who's been closely involved with a wedding knows exactly how these beleaguered schmucks feel. Those who haven't may just take Confetti as a lighthearted but convincing argument for elopement.

Unique as an inspirational personal-achievement film in the way it focuses on the protagonist not merely as a bastion of strength, but as part of a supportive community and family.

The Book Thief crams story after story into such a small space that it can’t realize any of them in depth.

For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form--it's more a return to "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers" director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious.

The film feels clumsy, hurried, and above all, like an admission of creative defeat.

Weitz's sense of play and the Badly Drawn Boy soundtrack each give Being Flynn an enjoyable lightness; meanwhile, the curdled, hidden rage lurking within both Flynns gives it an equally enjoyable edge.

As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.

They essentially replace the book's blank spaces with gaping plot holes and laughable clichés.

Far too much of the film is devoted to eye-rolling pop-culture gags and long montages set to recycled Elton John songs.

Older viewers are more likely to see a muddled film full of one-dimensional characters and insultingly strident politics.

To some degree, it's trying to find the magic in the everyday, but the attempts to ground it are cringe-inducing and problematic.

Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.

Sky Blue is never subtle about its images of loneliness and isolation, or in fact about anything else. But as clichéd as its images are, they're still visually and tonally stunning.

The movie is a tepid botch on pretty much every level.

It’s a modest, reserved character piece that doesn’t push an agenda. The problem is that it comes across as if it lacks opinions, rather than holding them back.

Tries tremendously hard to win audiences over with manly derring-do, exciting action, and impossible-obstacles-overcome uplift. And it's undeniably compelling for minutes at a time

Much like Niccol's "Gattaca," in which genetic perfection rather than time was the weapon a small group of snobby, unworthy elites used to hold down the meek masses, In Time is a chilly, stiff movie where clever ideas are delivered as self-righteous sermons.

Taylor makes the most of his tiny budget with creative editing and shooting, though his New York City is anemic, narrow, and underpopulated, and his constant repetition of the same damn 60 seconds of music becomes excruciating.

It's unclear whether Frederick's an awful actress or a tremendous one pretending to be awful, but either way, it's hard to pity her nasal, pushy, babyish Iowa girl.

Edgar Wright has built his reputation on steering his movies into unlikely, exciting places. In The Running Man, it rarely feels like anyone’s hand is on the wheel.

It’s a daringly weird debut, executed with real style and vision.

It’s a frustratingly oblique film where few events connect, and fewer moments matter.

Cuban Fury feels overpadded and distracted, with no time to establish its leads, let alone the bare connection between them that might give viewers a rooting interest in their future.

The surreality is distancing, but authentic, believable performances and a low-key affect keep Running From Scissors from turning shrill.

Strangely, this Thatcher biopic might have been far more worthwhile if it wasn't about Thatcher: The aged, dotty stranger hanging out with her dead husband is a more compelling subject.

For the serious fans who this series is meant for, the promise of at least six more hours of Fantastic Beasts action likely means a lot more thrilling beasts, barriers, and beats to explore. Everyone else may find that all the little personal bits of character business and frantic complications aren’t much of a substitute for a clear and compelling plot with a single meaningful protagonist.

Part of the fascination of the Thermopylae story is that it really happened, and it helped define real heroism. There's nothing remotely like reality to be had in this film.

If Forman is trying to communicate that art isn't an effective way to change American society, he's proved his point neatly with this muddled, wandering dud.

It's a tastefully managed, passionless melodrama, full of brooding looks and reasonably sweet moments, but typified by a scantly characterized central couple who bring no sense of engagement to their relationship.

Not all superhero action films need the MCU's banter or Deadpool's smarm. But you can't play a symphony with a single note. With Apocalypse, Singer never gets around to varying his single, gloomy, dreary tune.

Beautiful Creatures is an oddball creation: a morality play with no basic understanding of morality.

Even when the film isn’t dealing with women, it’s contemptuous of the world in a way that rapidly becomes one-note and tiresome.

The heavy threat of sexual assault, physical consumption, and predatory control hangs over the film's treacherous first hour, but once the threat resolves, Neon Demon loses its tension and its power, and then just keeps going.

The extra shading is nice, but it doesn’t change the degree to which Jack The Giant Slayer feels like a paint-by-numbers story.

As trivial as the micro-budget documentary My Date With Drew may seem, it has novelty on its side, and even when that flags, it coasts along on sheer personality.

It's a shallow, treacly movie for children too little to question its many pointless puerilities. But do kids that young really belong in a theater? Keep 'em at home and wait for this to hit cable.

Director Simon Curtis and first-time screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell constantly push too hard and too forcefully, laying on schmaltz where none is needed.

It’s a brutal story and a heady high-concept idea, but it plays out through characters with no identity other than their symbolic ones, and through shouted, simplistic arguments that repeat the same points over and over.

It's Macbeth by way of “The Covenant,” all brooding pretty-boys with emo eyes and hipster hair, standing around in gauzily decorated rich-kid boudoirs in the dead of night, and at times, it's too overblown to take seriously.

Jack Reacher isn't much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn't the story of a man. It's mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.

In some ways, it's a more grown-up story than Happy Feet, with more complicated messages delivered in subtler ways.

While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.

Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.

Reeves rigid delivery makes Constantine's occult backstory sound pretentious and silly, and converts Constantine himself into a repressed cipher. The film's biggest revision isn't in not making him blonde, or not making him British. It's in not making him human.

Unfortunately, Canet's 2010 film Little White Lies feels like "Tell No One" minus that inciting incident, and therefore minus the plot.

Shou focuses on a meaty subject, and he has an insider's access to the world he's exploring. But his behind-the-scenes film doesn't spend nearly enough time behind the scenes.

It isn’t just that Gilliam’s ragged, wild style is easily recognizable after nearly four decades of feature films, it’s a sense that Zero Theorem recycles its tone, visual design, and plot points directly from his past work.

The film looks terrific, all Vermeer-style light/dark interplay and sleek design. And Portman is fantastic as the tempestuous Anne.

The ending is a bold play in a movie full of bold plays, but it seems designed more to whip up discussion than to draw the narrative together, or to give viewers either a horror-movie catharsis or a marriage-drama resolution.

A grating muddle.

Maybe Stiller just seems stilted because he's the only one here who isn't playing to the rafters.

For a film that takes place in such a cold locale, it all feels awfully warmed-over.

It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.

It's a daring, even mildly challenging mixture for a superhero film, and while the pieces don't entirely add up, the puzzle is at least original.

Opaque acting, excruciating dialogue, and flat, affectless direction certainly don't help, but even in brilliant hands, Flannel Pajamas would still be a movie about two horrible, unsympathetic people doing dreadful things to each other, and learning nothing in the process. Why should anyone else have to endure it too?

It's all good-natured enough. It just isn't actually good.

Riddick taps into a primal well of audience wish-fulfillment, but over the course of its unrelieved, monotonous length, it does its best to suck that well dry.

It's a polished, beautifully shot story, and it acknowledges the messiness of real life. But like real life, it's often baffling and frustrating.

Ultimately heads into a standard mismatched-buddy drama that would nestle nicely into a Hallmark movie of the week.

The story itself is so charmingly dense, fractious, and complicated that it frequently leaves the obvious good-guy-fights-bad-guy groove, and noses toward Terry Gilliam-esque randomness and ebullience.

As it is, the film perpetually teeters on the edge between a functional vehicle and a train wreck, and whenever Allen opens his mouth, he pushes it violently in the latter direction.

[Bay's] tremendous sentimentality is a major issue, bogging down his efforts at realism in flag-waving, tear-jerking scenes that try to make every heartfelt emotion land with mortar-fire force.

One amusing disadvantage of the crystal-clear, you-are-there 3-D cinematography, and the focus on the audience experience is that in practically every shot, it's easy to pick out off-message concertgoers who are bored, tired, or otherwise disengaged.

Given the talent on display in Sinbad, and the winning brio it dredges out of questionable material, it's easy to wonder what Dreamworks' animation department could accomplish if it stopped following Disney's lead and started forging new paths of its own.

Turning brief fairy tales into sweeping mini-epics has long been Disney's hallmark, but even for a fable, Chicken Little is thin stuff; it's a brief cautionary tale against alarmism, essentially "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" without any of the poetic irony.

If this is a documentary, it's a profoundly embarrassing one, in which Affleck has exposed Phoenix's soul and found it shallow and damaged. If it's a mockumentary, though, its greatest value is in pointing out the media's gullibility, and reminding audiences that even in an age of limited privacy, they still have to question what they're told and even what they witness themselves. It's cruel either way, but riveting nonetheless.

At half the length, and with half of Hanks' sneering pretension, this would make a pretty terrific action film.

The ultimate end of the story reveals that it's all about Sturgess' suffering, which just isn't that compelling a topic. Given its lack of center and balance, the film might more appropriately be called "One Dude."

First-time director Mark Palansky is trying for a deft, hip, modern fairy-tale feel, but the odd material, sprawling story, and complicated tonal balancing act get away from him, and the film winds up as a poorly paced tug-of-war between sweet quirk and sloppy camp.

While Black Nativity often lacks polish and restraint, at least it never lacks for soul.

This is a familiar tale: man creates monster, monster runs amuck, man regrets playing God. It's just never remotely clear what Scott and Owen found so compelling about this story that they wanted to tell it again, without meaningful variations, and in the immediate wake of better, smarter, more thrilling versions.

In Columbus’ hands, it once again all breaks down into a series of rushed, breathless special-effects setpieces, in a thrill ride that isn’t headed anywhere new.

The focus is much more on Sarah, Frank, and their repetitive, ugly dynamic than on the giddy elements that made the first film trashy fun.

Where the too-rarefied style and the too-simple substance meet, a compromise is reached, and something uniquely haunting is formed.

Greyson does a terrifically empathetic job of putting viewers firmly in the moment, by making it irrelevant exactly when and where that moment takes place.

Howard shows his viewers what happened to these sailors, but he rarely offers any sense of who they were, or what it felt like to face their situation.

Cluttered, flavorless Choke, which crams the novel's nervy narration into an irritating voiceover, and leaps around in time and space with all the attention span of an ADD-addled child.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are at least films that dress up old tropes in new ways. This isn't one of them.

For people who just want more stories told in this world, and don’t mind leaving Bird Box’s initial characters behind, the spinoff’s small mysteries and shocks may be enough to occupy a Friday night or a lazy Sunday afternoon. But for people who want more depth out of their sad-dad-found-family horror stories, The Last of Us is already out there. Bird Box Barcelona just feels a little late to the game.

It’s a curiously specific movie, a gag aimed at fans of joyously culty, messy nonsense like Guns Akimbo or Crank — at least, until that final fight suddenly starts taking the narrative seriously. Even then, though, it’s best to watch Boy Kills World with the same snarky detachment the rest of its run time encourages.

It's a little unfair to any sequel to use its predecessor as a yardstick rather than considering it on its own merit, but in this case, it's impossible to put the original movie aside. Not just because of the title, but because Sword Of Destiny mimics its predecessor in so many clear and frustrating ways.

The story is still mostly fabulous, and its novelty helps carry the film, but this still comes across like a poor high-school stage version: sincere and kind of sweet, but endlessly clumsy.

Sayles' version of reality is grim, but it provides an enlightening, grounding reminder that there's a far more crucial world of politics going on behind the headlines.

Mostly the problem is that every aspect of The Giver feels both painfully familiar and like an awkward, unsupportable stretch. For a film about the deep, hidden dangers of enforced sameness, that’s almost hilariously ironic.

Hotel Transylvania is occasionally the kind of fast-moving, gag-a-second film that relies on quantity of humor rather than quality.

There are good ideas in Around The Bend, but they're presented in outline form, as the bare, dry bones of what could have been a living body.

Many of Flowers' individual performances and scenes are striking and masterful, but taken as a whole, it's less a film than a rallying cry of "Our people feel more deeply than yours."

The handful of songs are catchy, and the whole film feels pleasantly airy. But this is a dark story with a heavy message, and it's been transformed into a harmless, pretty confection. In defanging it for comic effect, the filmmakers have done Seuss as much of a disrespectful disservice as if they'd laid on the fart gags.

As mythic spectacles go, it beats "Clash Of The Titans," particularly in the areas of intimidating villainy and actual Titan-clashing. Nonetheless, it isn't any smarter than its inspirations, just prettier.

All of Mirror Mirror is visually striking, even when it works on no other levels. But the humor is erratic, the heroism isn't necessarily compelling, and the whole thing feels like a grab bag of bits that don't entirely cohere.

While both actors have been hammier and more hilarious, and neither one overdoes things enough to be notable, they at least seem to be having loads of flailing fun as they conjure up CGI scenery to chew on. And when Apprentice limits itself to their battle, it's generally fitful dumb fun.

It’s depressing, in more ways than one, given its cynical take on what makes life worthwhile, and what we have to do to preserve it. But it’s also refreshing to see science fiction this aware of how actively we’re careening toward a terrible future, and how our response to it is likely to be specific, personal, and just as selfish as the behavior that gets us there in the first place.

The first two movies are packed with “I can’t believe that just happened!” moments. The third one instead chains together a series of “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before” scenes.

The kids Hoot is aimed at weren't around to see all the previous films it echoes, particularly the toothless Disney live-action films of the '70s. They'll probably like Hoot fine. Everyone else in the audience is likely to nod off and have genial, bland, easygoing dreams.

Choosing to ignore any conventional sense of drama, progression, or resolution is, in its way, a memorable choice. But while Fifty Shades Of Grey is a memorable and society-shifting cultural event, it’s in no way a memorable movie.

The Da Vinci Code isn't terrible. Brown's novel presented its concepts seriously, as food for thought; Howard's glossy version is more of a snack, designed to be taken only slightly more seriously than "National Treasure," and with the much the same sense of a puzzle-based thrill ride.

Purists could well complain at how far Howl’s Moving Castle departs from Jones’ terrific story in order to wedge in Hayao Miyazaki’s longstanding personal obsessions, like flight, the destructive and horrific nature of war, and the way courage conquers evil and love saves lives. But at least the film has a point of view, and the benefit of its creator’s highly specific and recognizable voice. Earwig, by contrast, often feels generic.

C7J isn't as cutesy as "Batteries Not Included" or "Short Circuit," or as grim as "Gremlins," though it resembles them all in its jerky, semi-comic look at the havoc and helpfulness of weirdo artificial life.

Its attempts to force comedy, tragedy, farce, action, and melodrama into the same story never quite fit.

It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.

Where the first two films maintained a breathless tone and found new ground in the zombie genre by linking a physical virus to demonic possession, [REC]3: Genesis runs out of ideas early, and becomes a slogging massacre spiked with callbacks and visual gags.

The film is crammed with treats for old-school "Dragonball" fans, from the inclusion of all these characters (who don't actually do much) to the moment when spiky-haired Goku dons his orange gi. For everyone else, this amounts to another seen-it-before, probably-willing-to-see-it-again distraction.

There's no getting around the fact that it all looks like a cutscene from a kiddie video game. It's a great showreel. Now someone give these folks a real budget so they can make a movie that looks as good as it sounds.

The film closely follows the pattern of 1992’s "Lorenzo’s Oil," but with fewer filmmaking risks, visceral emotions, and colorful, outsized characters.

Surprisingly realistic for an animated film of the time, but it's also as visually stiff and staid as any cut-rate sword-and-sorcery film, and just as formula-bound.

While the film's gags don't always jibe with its sincere interviews of Middle Eastern citizens, or its worrisome encounters with the soldiers serving in dangerous territory--the constantly shifting tone provides as many hit bits as misses.

Because the film goes in so many tonal and narrative directions, it feels like a grab bag anyone can reach into and fish around in for something to their personal tastes, from dramatic themes to offhand banter, from mindless pummel-fests to thoughtful conversations about heroic responsibility. Justice League isn’t an entirely coherent film, but it’s certainly an egalitarian one.

All that character development goes out the window when everyone’s just focused on surviving the grueling ordeal ahead, but the creators never find a way to vary the action enough to keep it from being grueling for the audience, as well.

Everything here is a known quantity except one question that could have been inspired by a Tootsie Roll Pop commercial: How many twists does it take to finally, at long last, get to the predictable ending?

Finding Joe feels like a homemade quilt: It's warm and comforting, but visually busy, with a repeating pattern that some will find stuffy and overwhelming.

It was made fast and cheap, which shows in every none-too-slick frame.

Apart from Cruz, who throws herself lustily into her tough-seductress role, the actors give negligible performances, with McShane, Rush, and Keith Richards in a repeat cameo all playing nigh-identical smug glowerers.

Moment for moment, Upside Down is the most embarrassing, hilarious, obliviously stupid movie since M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Happening," and its constant pursuit of a striking image over any other consideration undermines it at every turn.

What's the excuse for dumbing down Snow White to moron level? Are there really people out there who thought the original version just didn't have enough toilet jokes?

The filmmakers try to innovate largely by making the movie as toothless and easily digestable as possible. Nothing in the film is real enough to care about past the moment, or serious enough to trouble audience’s sleep. Maybe in a world that’s already full of real-life disasters, it’s innovative enough to make monumental destruction this much dumb, lightweight fun.

Like so many underdog movies, Joyful Noise will go over best with those who show up hugely eager for it to be exactly what it looks like, and to tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Still, the central mystery remains effective and compelling for most of the film, until it becomes clear that it's all image and no intent.

Waltz is the perfect villain in this setting: He's played this exact role before, as the smug, drawling, creepy aesthete who rarely stops smiling. But he's also capable of pivoting on a dime between real menace and garish, performative evil, between playing a subdued charmer, and the kind of movie-serial baddie who ties women to railroad tracks.

Unfortunately, it misses the one cliché that might have been welcome: the predictably plotted flashy dance movie where the actual dance makes it all worthwhile.

For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre.

Clumsy, ephemeral, and wholly unnecessary.

As clumsy as Quale is with the sequences of people shouting exposition back and forth, or delivering teary Blair Witch-style goodbyes into a camera that would have died long before its operators, he handles the CGI action with breathless intensity.

Poe was a flawed figure, but his greatest strength was in avoiding convention, or reinterpreting it to create something new. The Raven aspires to both, but abandons those ambitions to lie limply on the floor - only this, and nothing more.

It's a squeaky clean pre-John Hughes, pre-Farrelly brothers throwback to an era where the words "Disney film" meant something: a movie free of crotch slams, gross-out gags, and tittery innuendo.

Unknown manages a hat trick by making its march toward the climax so tedious and unlikely that it unravels even as it gets off the ground.

Batman v Superman addresses Man Of Steel's problems in words without learning anything from it in tone. Instead, the new film doubles down on the grimness, the ugliness, and the indifference to human life.

It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.

Those dance sequences are Step Up Revolution's major sticking point. No one goes to a dance movie for the plot, but the lower the expectations drop for the story, the higher they rise for the raison d'être performances.

San Andreas doesn’t have much interest in the lives lost during its sequence of catastrophes, but it does dole out plenty of the large-scale spectacle that matters in disaster films of this type.

A short and soppy story that Coyote lends some dignity, but not much power.

Many of the shorts are visibly impressive, given their scant budgets, and there’s no end of visual and thematic creativity stretched throughout the anthology; there are, after all, a million horrible, memorable ways to die.

Actually, by way of a sequel, the filmmakers could just set Cerveris, Dafoe, and Reilly up for a purr-off. That’d be more fun than most of this film.

Machine Gun Preacher is stirring when it presents Childers as a hero, but it does its most impressive work when it addresses him as a flawed, struggling, but still determined man.

Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird.

Virtually none of The Circle has any emotional or narrative impact.

For all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart.

While Sanctum is frustratingly familiar, it's easy to get caught up in the action.

This isn’t a movie about car chases and explosions, it’s about the squirmy but satisfying feeling of watching justice done, and it’s a pleasure to watch the pieces fall into place.

As a Captain America movie, Brave New World is batting strongly below average. The filmmakers try to dodge the political commentary that’s always marked the MCU’s Captain America movies, and focus on personal stakes instead, but those plotlines don’t land with any force or focus.

Audience members are likely to feel like they're right there in the picture, suffering for no reason and trying to pretend it's funny.

Austenland embraces convention, and the result is a romantic comedy in which the ending seems not just foreordained, but promised via contract from the first moment of the film.

Solidly mindless, breathless summer fun.

Like those mild old Disney comedies of the ’60s and ’70s, it seems perfectly content with being a harmless distraction.

The training montage where Lincoln learns to twirl his axe around his body like a baton for no apparent purpose is neither the movie's first laughable sequence nor its last, but it sums up the movie's aesthetic: The filmmakers mistakenly think nothing is silly if it's done with a grim enough facial expression.

King Arthur has a vulnerable heart beating somewhere under all the grimy, sweaty muscles lovingly displayed for the camera. It’s just buried too often under narrative chaos, and the inexplicable ideal that if a story runs at double speed and triple energy, the gaping holes in the story will outpace anyone’s notice.

While Princess Kaiulani makes do with what story it has, the film feels stretched and straining, full of sleepy scenes and pregnant pauses.

Only those already predisposed to love a TMNT movie that at least LOOKS edgy are likely to care.

Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.

It’s the rare romantic comedy that doesn’t underline viewers’ needy true-love fantasies by saying “This couple was destined to get together,” so much as it says “Eh, this could happen, I guess. Whatever.”

There’s a hint of Aja’s old love of shock-value horror in this film, but it’s blunted by syrupy fake sentiment, mismanaged twists, and half-baked plotlines.

A messy, confused, over-the-top mixture of brutality and sick comedy, puckishness and ugliness, self-awareness and tone-deafness.

Miller’s Girl is a luxuriant meal for [Ortega], a chance to play a variety of facets of the same girl while finding the connections between them. For everyone else, though, it’s short rations, and more than a little underbaked.

For all its visual flourishes and fair-to-decent acting, Passengers is a failure of a movie full of missed opportunities.

Raw but riveting front-line journalism. Like any good reporter, Davis knows a fascinating story when he sees one, and he goes to impressive lengths to put himself in the middle of it, taking his viewers along for the bumpy ride.

Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film.

It never winds up with anything particularly interesting or effective to say about life, intelligence, religion, the nature of consciousness, or any of the other big themes it deliberately evokes. It does, however, blow up a lot of stuff.

It’s all tasteful and polished to a fault, but it feels like exactly what it is: an abbreviated version that preserves the high points, zips past the rest, and never approaches the depth of the full text.

Surprise number one: It's smarter than it looks. Surprise number two: That doesn't entirely ruin it as an action film.

With so many plot hooks and so many story demands, it's incomprehensible that Kaena spends so much time on meaningless action.

Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

The script glosses over everything that's important to the characters, which makes them vague and poreless. Some sense of specificity, about virtually anything, would be helpful for making them seem less like bare story functions and gag-delivery systems.

While the stitches holding together the plot are clearly visible, Igor breathes some enjoyable life into its stolen grab-bag of gimmicks.

The film doesn't go far enough in setting its own course. Ayer works to establish those villains as gleeful fantasies of unfettered freedom, then fetters them with maudlin backstories that make them all sad, soulful, misused, and misunderstood.

Its busy, stiff, artificial graphics are a perfect match for its busy, stiff, artificial plot. A simple Shirow pinup parade might almost be preferable.

Like the big shiny sphere at its center, the film is fairly pretty, but there's no real sense that there's anything inside it.

As absorbingly weird and dark and sad as the film becomes, it still labors against jumpy construction, an irritating variety of visual styles and film stocks, and a crowded story that no one gets much individual screen time, which means that redemption for everyone comes far too quickly and neatly.

In every aspect, from story to tone to characterization to visual aesthetic, it's laughably perfunctory, as though everyone involved were too embarrassed to give it more than a half-ironic token effort.

A film that’s largely a raw, uplifting love letter to creativity in every possible form.

At least when they're singing, they aren't sniping and griping at each other. That original title really would have worked a lot better.

Moshonov's capering, wheedling, and stagey monologuing become deeply taxing, and so does the conclusion, which makes more sense as metaphor than narrative.

There's a noble cause buried under all the clumsy speeches, blatant manipulations, and foreordained conflicts, but the thudding lack of subtlety proves exhausting.

At this point, the Resident Evil movie franchise has become a personal playground for husband-and-wife team Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich; every few years, they find another excuse to pit Jovovich's videogame-inspired dark superhero, Alice, against zombies and other gruesome monsters.

Largely, it’s a jellybean of a movie: bright, colorful, sugary, and with no real content.

Watching the film is strangely like looking at the same three still frames of supernatural battles over and over for 90 minutes.

It’s a pleasant enough expression of a series of familiar story beats, but apart from a few brief action-sequence moments, it could hardly be more rote or vanilla.

Simply put, From Prada To Nada is "Sense And Sensibility For Dummies."

Even the animation is imitative rather than inventive.

It’s rare that a blockbuster movie feels this competently, serenely middle-of-the-road, but maybe being this safe in an era of easy outrage is its own form of mild, moderate, entirely bland achievement.

Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.

Final score: Book 1, Movie 0.

There are no casual conversations in The Citizen, and no idle moments. It’s pushing its agenda at every moment, first gently, then relentlessly.

Garrett’s performance lacks any nuance or fire. When he’s playing, he’s a powerhouse. When he’s talking, he’s a half-presence with a vaguely Tommy Wiseau-esque accent, and sleepy eyes to match.

In theory, the film is another hoary exploration of the pressures of modern womanhood, but in practice, it offers the exact same thing as those NYC ingénue books: cookie-cutter wish-fulfillment and lifestyle porn for easily pleased, lonely romantics.

Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.

Not that anything in Judy Moody is meant to be taken seriously - or could be, even if it was meant to - but even for sugary neon fluff, it's awfully lightweight.

The overall experience is manic, juvenile, and hit-or-miss, as if the auteurs behind "Epic Movie" were trying to remake "Wag The Dog." It's too soon to laugh about Iraq, and it'll never be time to laugh about it with this kind of maladroit humor.

Shamelessly manipulating his audience, wallowing in his highly questionable premise, and above all mocking himself, Arnold bulls ahead enthusiastically and without reservation, and in the process, he brings something like dignity to one of the least dignified movies in recent history.

Even at 86 minutes, with plenty of chases and action sequences thrown in, The Nut Job feels overstretched and arbitrary.

Unlike the first two films in the series, Cloverfield Paradox doesn’t stand on its own as a horror movie, or even as a standalone story. There’s no central idea, no governing principle, and more to the point, virtually nothing frightening about it. No one involved in creating this movie seemed to have any clue what kind of tale it’s telling from one minute to the next.

For a bad, broad comedy, Tooth Fairy boasts a surprising number of positives. Which isn’t to say that it’s good, but it could be much, much worse.

Yamazaki is clearly a science-fiction fan himself, and in Returner, he shows some worthwhile style, if only by stealing the biggest and best possible elements for his serviceably entertaining genre mashup.

The major problem is the death of a horror film: It's startling, but not particularly scary.

Turns a cultishly creepy classic into a dull and windy farce.

There's a ton of backstory behind Underworld: Evolution, which gets slightly denser and rowdier than its predecessor, but it's ultimately all in the service of a nigh-endless series of numbing, mechanical battles in which snarling protagonists and CGI monsters shoot, claw, and bloodily eviscerate each other. In other words, it's "Underworld," but more of it.

By the end, the most charming thing about The Art Of Getting By is that while its adults cut Highmore far too much slack, they aren't Hughes-movie oblivious idiots, and they eventually draw a few firm lines. Unfortunately, the movie isn't daring enough to follow suit.

The film's pieces don't always fit together, but even in isolation, some of those pieces are well worth watching.

The film still suffers from cheap plasticky design, a klutzy overall look, dim preschooler humor, and a nearly impact-free story that thinks it's clever when it steals cues from 2001.

The film looks great, with vivid colors and sharp, snappy staging, but its 92 minutes drag by interminably. Tim Curry in fishnets might have helped, but a coherent storyline would have been far better.

Velvet Buzzsaw is a messy movie, and not just in the sense that Gilroy ends up painting a room with blood at one point.

Frey didn't really need a ghostwriter for this story, he just needed an archivist with a Xerox machine and a mercenary streak.

Superhero fans will likely be into Push just for the cool-factor of watching embattled heroes and villains in tense war of wits, wills, and skills. That broader audience is less likely to come along for the ride.

With its simple-goal-driven plot, its wordy, cutscene-like interludes, and its stiffly modeled characters, it wouldn't even make for a particularly high-end videogame.

The film's ambitions are woefully small and familiar.

No exciting action can cover the film's profound shallowness and repulsive attitude toward everyone but Christensen.

At least in the last half-hour, Bay's incredibly sloppy continuity and overeager rush to action pays off.

The Host is a step up from the endless metaphorical lectures and gaping plot holes of Niccol’s last film, In Time, but its muffled emotions, delivered with Twilight-esque blank-eyed calm, put it in the same category of a creative idea hamstrung in execution.

Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.

By the time Olyphant leaves an enemy in the most ridiculous deathtrap since the '60s "Batman," just because it looks kinda neat, the whole project has started to feel like "Ultraviolet 2: The Further Stupidening."

It’s unchallenging fun for a younger crowd, but adults might feel like they’re staring down a colorful 24-piece board puzzle, trying to figure out how such a simple activity could be drawn out over 90 minutes.

Director Peter Webber can't do much about what's missing from the story: a soul or a sense of purpose.

The Dark Tower, helmed by Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, is so simplified in places that it seems outright generic.

This is a rom-com, formulaic and comforting and breezy, with some action trappings, but with no expectations that anyone needs to care about the results of that action.

It's almost charming in its sheer lack of ambition, but the lack of creativity in its by-the-numbers shocks is harder to excuse.

Thunder Force is only occasionally insightful, and almost never surprising. It’s arriving in a world where people generally expect more from its genre than light, enjoyable performances and a handful of overstretched gags, and that’s all it has to offer.

The problem with Smurfs 2 isn’t the message, it’s the way the film repeats it so baldly and emphatically that even the youngest kids can get it. Also, the way it surrounds that message with groin-smashing and farting.

Where the first film was content with straight-faced silliness, Zoolander 2 tries to blow the same silliness out to epic, world-spanning proportions, and it just winds up feeling overstretched. Like Stiller with his ridiculous characters and stylized performances, it's consistently trying way too hard.

Given that The Mummy only barely works as a movie on its own account, the question becomes whether it works as a franchise-starter. And the answer is that while its franchise elements are foregrounded, they still aren’t terribly compelling.

To the degree that Love Hurts feels like a movie at all, it’s because Quan puts so much heart into his work, and so much squeaky-voiced comedic talent, paired with the speed and flexibility that makes a fight scene thrilling.

House Of D never feels honest, but when Duchovny consciously tries to score sentiment points, the strain is more than the film can handle.

The film contains almost no rough edges; thanks to decades of previous use, just about every shot and sequence is as polished as a riverbed stone.

All the thought seems to have gone into the marketing, and none into the unfathomably terrible script.

The action is frequently too chaotic to register, and the performances are monotonal. There's no personality in this story, or the way it's told.

A cartoonishly grim supernatural thriller that could stand a lot less talk and a lot more thrills.

The Rise Of Cobra holds to a thrill-ride sensibility that’s unchallenging and more than a little goofy, but exciting and consistently well-managed.

It's a knock-down, drag-out fight between storytelling, franchise-making, and fan service, and some casualties were inevitable. But even a messy fight for nuance is better than an apathetic sell-out.

When the left-field ending finally arrives, it explains a lot, including why she's so off-putting and histrionic, but it never really explains why audiences should bother sitting through such a tangled mess.

Over the course of two hours, the mania becomes exhausting and numbing.

Fantastic Fear leaps all over the place narratively and conceptually, servicing the comedy of every individual scene without considering or linking the others. Some of those individual scenes are marvelous, though.

The whole movie is just one increasingly dull roll downhill. The same could be said for this once-fresh franchise.

Actual kids may find this fun, but for adults, watching The Smurfs may feel a little too much like trying to wrangle an overcrowded kiddie birthday party.

While it’s nothing new and lacks individualistic touches, it’s still solid trashy fun as an overwrought superhero origin story.

If this uninspired fight-fest had been delayed out of existence, it's unlikely anyone would have missed it.

The main difference is that while the "Twilight" films strive for straight-faced grimness, Red Riding Hood often verges on outright florid hilarity. It isn't laughing at itself, but that needn't stop the audience.

It’s "Ishtar" with the passion and sincerity replaced with a surface-level shrug.

Even Eddie Murphy's endless hyper "Shrek" vamping is more entertaining.

The film looks dispiritingly cheap and, as if in response, most of his cast seems half-committed at best, as if they're counting the moments until they can move on to a bigger picture.

Doesn't have much to offer viewers who aren't still eagerly awaiting their first adult tooth.

Every retread of a familiar story has to bring something new to the table, if it’s going to justify its existence. Instead, this is yet another cinematic Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together out of scavenged parts, and shocked back to life for no clear or compelling reason.

While the ending is wretchedly fakey and predictable, Murphy in subdued mode gives it a little authentic sweetness.

Tucker Max’s only real strengths are his outrageousness and his uncompromising self-confidence, but neither comes into play in this punch-pulling, frankly boring film.

So sanctimonious and sincere in its pandering.

It’s the kind of wretched embarrassment that may leave viewers trying to suspend the belief that they’re still sitting in the theater watching it.

Deadly dull.

Rings is a phenomenally distracted film, and it can’t focus on any one concept for too long.

A plodding, bloated, long-shelved adaptation/expansion of Ray Bradbury's classic short story about the dangers of time travel.

For the much-cheaper-looking sequel, Piranha 3DD, director John Gulager mostly seems to be trying to see how much he can degrade the old "Jaws" formula and still have it interpreted as parody rather than apathy.

Writer-director-producer-actor-composer-singer Soling claims to have spent a year researching the war on drugs before deciding to make a satire instead of a documentary, but he apparently threw most of his facts out the window in favor of absurdism, exaggeration, slander, and self-congratulatory humor.

The grim heroes don't have a nuance or more than a hint of emotion between them, and the same goes for the film around them.

Shark Night 3D barely bothered to show up, let alone deliver the minimal goods.

Looking cheap, rushed, and often apathetically thrown together, except for the lovingly shot scenes involving gratuitous nudity or sudden violence

Just as trying to keep up with every geopolitical crisis on the planet all at once can be overwhelming, trying to track Geostorm’s name-checked concerns and its barely present characters is likely to tax viewers’ attention spans. Horror movies help people process some of our worst fears, but there’s a reason most movies don’t try to address every human fear at the same time.

Underdeveloped antagonist Nick Chinlund sums up the entire film during one of his rants about Jovovich's latest casual, offhand slaughter: "One woman against 14 men! It's ridiculous!" Well, yeah.

Nutcracker In 3D doesn't just compound past errors in re-imagining the story. Thanks to a big budget, huge staging, massive overacting, and the non-wonders of post-production 3-D conversion, it adds a wide bevy of new errors.

The pacing is leaden, the visuals are murky, and there’s pretty much no reason to care about anyone on the screen, except to idly wonder how they’re going to die, and what their innards will look like when they do.

Impossibly dull form of niche-marketed entertainment.

For a mainstream supernatural-fantasy war film, Spectral is curiously devoted to rhapsodizing about science, and considering the moral implications of scientific discovery. It’s also appealingly certain that science is the answer to all problems, including what appears to be a supernatural attack.

Radius is a puzzle story built around a series of reveals. The script is tight and propulsive; the writer-directors have a talent for not over-explaining the implications of each development, and for giving the audience space to figure things out for themselves. That makes the developments hit harder and feel smarter.

Even as a low-key Netflix time-waster, Fearless isn’t that much fun, except for people who really, really like the idea of super-babies.

It comes across more like a showreel than a stand-alone film, like, a confusingly edited sizzle teaser for a much more in-depth Doors drama series.

For all the eye-popping battles and fast-moving action, it’s an emotional story that takes the time to explore what its protagonist really wants out of life, and why god-tier power may be as much of a burden as a benefit.

It unfolds with a fascinating specificity that goes well beyond the Batman details, and unlocks a lot of conversation-starting thoughts about the various ways and reasons people associate with different fandoms.

Good horror-comedy is hard to pull off, but Hsu finds his balance by steering hard into the comedy, while pouring on the fake blood.