William Bibbiani

It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Paul Thomas Anderson has stuffed so much into one movie that a lot of people will find something to take away from it. All I see is the lack of focus.

Sadly, I’d rather watch any of Smith’s fake movies than The 4:30 Movie, because at least they seem enjoyably weird.

When I say The Garfield Movie is the best Garfield movie, it’s going to sound like faint praise. Because it is. But faint praise is still praise.

If Jennifer Westcott’s animated kids’ movie Elliot the Littlest Reindeer was a Christmas gift, it’d be the toothbrush at the bottom of your stocking. It’s well-intentioned, and you might get some use out of it, but let’s just pray it’s not the highlight of your holiday season.

It may freak you out a little bit, and that may be enough for some people, but it only briefly grabs hold of something significant. Then it lets go.

If this is just one bullet point in your Valentine’s Day to-do list, an excuse to hold hands or neck in a darkened theater, or maybe as a litmus test for your date’s artistic tastes, it’s a harmless, mostly generic action rom-com.

The screenplay captures the grizzled-cop-movie tone and draws some memorable characters, but the storyline is rote, the mystery is frustratingly predictable, and the imaginative deaths are less imaginative than ever. Spiral sacrifices entertainment value for respectability and in the process doesn’t quite achieve either.

Trier manages to make a movie about passion that feels almost completely detached, right to the end. It’s an approach that gives Thelma, the movie, the appearance of portent without fully exploring the fascinating themes, characters or storylines that might actually have justified that self-serious tone.

A sword-and-sorcery epic that can’t swing the 'epic' part.

The story isn’t so hot. At least the leads are. That’s not enough to make Lonely Planet a good film, but it might be enough to get through all 94 minutes without clicking on something else instead. Maybe

A few sharp moments can’t compensate for a film that feels half-developed, and only half-heartedly told. Like its protagonist, Bad Samaritan isn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but it’s not good either.

A potpourri of general genre genericness, never making enough noise to rattle, or even produce an echo.

It takes a farcical premise and tries to find something meaningful to say about it. It doesn’t succeed, but the effort is worth analyzing.

Summer Camp is not a particularly good movie but it’s the kind of movie that makes a film critic wonder what 'good' really is, anyway."

All the genre elements play like an afterthought, and that's frustrating because the rest of the movie isn't quite spry enough to stay interesting without action, adventure, or at least little more weirdness.

There’s nothing really to recommend The Union except the fact that it exists and you can watch it. It’s a harmless waste of time because it’s a serious waste of a good idea.

It just never goes far enough with its ridiculousness to reach pure entertainment, and it certainly can’t be taken seriously enough to justify its melodrama.

It’s a mismatched buddy comedy which tries — and sometimes succeeds — to tell an emotional story about processing failure and shame, but it doesn’t have anything terribly interesting to say about it.

Although the film takes place in a dystopian near future, the story rarely reveals any meaningful information about how society functions after an environmental collapse, or indeed portrays hardly any scene as though it could take place only within the confines of Mondocane.

If all you want is another Beverly Hills Cop, here it is. If you want a great new Beverly Hills Cop, keep waiting.

Sincere but uneven, professionally acted but amateurishly presented — there’s a lot to like about Family Squares, but there’s always something getting in the way of its intended impact.

It’s all about radical acceptance but can only talk about the real-world application of its message in general metaphors, so people who don’t actually accept 'weird,' 'different' kids won’t have to think about how wrong they are.

It’s not so much a movie as it is multimillion dollar background noise while you stare at your phone.

Tells the story of Amy Winehouse but shows no passion in telling it and has nothing to say about the events that transpire. It’s the utter minimum of what a biopic can be.

It’s a horror movie for people who want to watch a scary movie but are hanging out with someone who gets scared very easily, and so they decide to compromise. Not too scary, not too silly, not much of anything really, but not much to complain about either.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich almost works. The dialogue and performances are unusually good for this kind of material, and the gore effects are shocking. But the changes the filmmakers made to this franchise have unpleasant consequences, which dramatically reduce the film's entertainment value, and arguably rob these iconic puppets of the very characteristics that made them special.

A few odd touches and one impressively, cathartically violent sequence don’t compensate for the film’s resistance to its own ideas.

Flatliners had every opportunity to improve on the original, and it doesn’t take most of them. It falls flat as a horror movie but the cast is good enough, and the sci-fi concepts are interesting enough, to keep it from crashing completely.