Tom Russo

It’s clear To is striving to keep the action gripping and creative. Modestly inspired is more like it.

Hawke delivers a strong melancholy variation on his familiar emotional cool as Reverend Toller.

The movie may feel tonally consistent with the first, but it’s also overlong and thoroughly routine.

Director Tomm Moore (the 2009 Oscar contender “The Secret of Kells”) crafts a traditionally rendered feature whose doe-eyed characters faintly echo Miyazaki yet offer a beauty all their own.

This time the not-so-idle talk is about taking a socially conscious stand against gang violence. And while some of this territory is covered too tritely and safely to have all the impact intended by director Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man Holiday”), the movie’s entreaties are compelling enough.

Pattinson and Dafoe dig into their roles, all right, with both actors crazily, mesmerizingly toggling from workaday to recriminating to maniacal and on and on. Together with Eggers they deliver a masterful study of souls trapped on a rock alone, but also trapped together, with all the twisty complexities involved.

Go figure that the year’s most outrageously harrowing action movie turns out to be an arthouse doc from National Geographic.

After a long, long stretch in which the series’ attrition had come to feel like even more of a bummer than intended — no more Mickey, no Apollo, no Adrian — the franchise has welcome new life. But instead of going by Rocky, he goes by Creed.

Unless you’re familiar with the various particulars, you’ll likely find yourself experiencing the film in aptly wavelike fashion, cresting with optimism about the crew’s prospects before plunging into apprehension, again and again.

Snitch gets a decent amount of drama (and action, of course) out of the argument that there’s paying for a crime, and then there’s overpaying.

Still, not to put too fine — or juvenile — a point on it, a bigger problem is that there’s nothing but ’bot-on-’bot mayhem until the climax, when familiar ugly heads are reared over Tokyo.

This thoroughly stripped-down thriller simmers in a way that's still unsettling 25 years later. [24 Oct 2004]

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to visit this corner of the world, you’ll instantly recognize the blissful natural grandeur that Moana captures, as well as the Pacific’s intimidating vastness.

Polished? Not exactly. Poignant? Definitely.

Far from contrived, the triangle that “Zachariah” sketches among the last three folks on earth is all too human.

The best moments come in seeing Galifianakis’s costars try to keep up with him as he finally, frantically lets loose.

Inspiring, or amusing? Appealingly, Eddie the Eagle invites both tags.

The best we get here are modest action diversions.

This is mythology that’s famously transportive in every sense, but the animators struggle to take us anywhere truly captivating, or even clearly defined.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

Despite the material’s fit, the story’s relentlessly downbeat tone is challenging. Strong performances by Logan Lerman (“Fury”) and Sarah Gadon (Hulu’s “11.22.63”) can’t keep the film from feeling like exhaustingly slow going.

The movie grows easier to like in the later, straighter going, as it stops pushing so aggressively to be naughty and lets its characters try on some introspection.

Judy and Nick’s unlikely-buddies routine is amusing, but their exploits and interplay occasionally neglect the youngest demographic.

The role of investment banker Naomi Bishop seems right for Gunn, no question, and it’s one that she approaches with conviction. So why is it so hard to root for her, or for any of the characters here?

Taking its title from the site where Christ was crucified, the controversy-courting film has a lot of Catholic church business (and doctrine) on its mind, and veers from poetically eloquent to jarringly blunt in hashing it all out.

This is less a throwback to cutely misunderstood Molly Ringwald than to “My So-Called Life” — but with our high-school heroine stuck in a spiral like Claire Danes never knew.

Jackman and Stewart’s fond, easy dynamic helps to balance some very provocative brutality, as the movie pushes Wolverine’s berserk nature to graphic new extremes.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 recaptures those lyrical highs. But returning writer-director Dean DeBlois also aims to layer on more poignancy for Baruchel and his castmates to play. At points, we’re left feeling a little detached.