Tasha Robinson

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.

Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they’ve left the theater.

It’s a Dada daydream of a movie, but no one who sits through it can complain that they weren’t warned up front.

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.

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.

The problem with The We And The I: Gondry is focused more on moments than on the film as a whole.

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.

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.

War Witch is a remarkably mature portrait that trusts its audience to have their own reactions to its material; it doesn’t yank at the heartstrings so much as expertly strum them.

Anyone already planning on seeing Stoker, the English-language film debut of Oldboy and Thirst director Park Chan-wook, shouldn’t read this review. Or watch a trailer. Or read anything about it at all, really...It’s best taken one tense, exhilarating moment at a time, without anticipation or expectation.

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.

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

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

For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.

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.

Plenty of horror movies are willing to settle for making audiences jump. Mama is more ambitious by far: It makes sure viewers are emotionally committed even when they aren't clutching their armrests or covering their eyes.

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.

However crafted their stories may have become, and however reluctantly they participate, their sacrifice will be appreciated by history, and by the next generation of voyeurs as well.

The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.

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.

The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.

By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.

While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.

The larger messages about spirituality often seem forced, and it's more compelling to focus on Lee's visceral cinematic experience than on the larger, fuzzier messages Martel's story conveys about humanity's connection with God.

While Rise Of The Guardians boasts a great deal of visual energy and amounts to a lot of fun, it's mostly lacking in that kind of depth elsewhere.

It's a wildly exciting ride, the fastest-moving, most enthusiastically kinetic kids' action film since "The Incredibles."

While Frankenweenie is pleasant enough as a curated tour through horror's past, it doesn't add much to its present.

Theoretically, the "Bring It On" model can be applied to any remotely performative art. All it takes is a certain level of sass, some eye-catching performance showcases, and a plot where a talented outsider livens up a moribund group with some fresh ideas. Pitch Perfect slaps that stencil onto college a cappella singing groups, with a smattering of success.