The film spends more time lingering on Emma's love affairs than it does in making sense of them; her declarations of passion and despair lack both.

Attractively staged and spiced through with raunch, About Last Night is still a pleasant enough romp, even if you have no intention of returning its phone calls.

"I didn't hate it" isn't a high watermark for praise, but when it comes to most Sparks adaptations, it's practically as good as winning an Oscar.

Even though Five Armies is the shortest Hobbit movie, it also is the least thrilling as it chugs toward the finish line weighted down with all the added characters and confusing subplots that have been tacked on along the way.

It comes down to a matter of tone, and Clooney can’t really settle on one. The Monuments Men is in no way a bad movie. Just, with this bunch, a disappointing one.

There's nothing particularly earth-shattering here, but maybe that's appropriate for a film honoring food that aims to be mouthwatering but unpretentious.

Quirky, funny and a little claustrophobic (by design), it’s confident enough in what it’s trying to accomplish to take the chance on the title. And what he’s trying to accomplish is ambitious.

It lays on the pathos, moralizing and forced whimsy thicker than figgy pudding, but it’s still entertaining, heart-warming family fare, thanks in large part to charmingly sincere performances.

Too often Washington is made to simply sit and observe -- which is not a fatal mistake because he is such a good actor that even then he's worth watching. Worse, though, at times he's gone altogether. That's not the only flaw in the fairly straightforward thriller, but it's the biggest.

Even as big-budget blockbusters go, this is a hard movie to connect with.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. is a surpassingly strange, often frustrating movie.

Ultimately, Revenge of the Electric Car is like meeting with an overeager salesman. In real life, that's not necessarily an unpleasant experience, but it also doesn't last 90 minutes.

For fans, counting up how many superheroes can emerge from the clown car of one three-hour movie is half the fun. For casual moviegoers — say, those who might skip minor installments such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — it accounts for half the exhaustion, a bit of world-building fatigue to go along with the sensory overload of a fantasy realm that seems stuck in perpetual apocalypse.

What spares Learning to Drive is an awful lot of comedic talent and artistic good will. Clarkson and Kingsley imbue average material with easy charm and wit, clicking onscreen with the smooth platonic chemistry of old friends.

It's clear this movie is for a certain audience, but at least the film embraces its genre and the jokes stick the landing. It's definitely worth a watch for fans of movies with an early 2000s rom-com aesthetic.

Despite being peppered with dynamic fight scenes, the film drags. And the tacked-on vigilante subplot...doesn't help.

Ultimately “The Last Showgirl” is worth watching for its final scene alone, but a lack of character and relationship-building leads to the film being as deep as a kiddie pool.

Whether Army of the Dead is any good isn’t really an issue. It’s more whether it sets out to do what Snyder intends for it to do. If he intended it to be an over-the-top exercise in zombie mayhem sprinkled with the occasional human emotion, he succeeded. The nice part is that this time he has actually managed to make it fun along the way.

Is it a good movie? It’s … a movie. That’s not the slight it sounds like. It’s certainly no masterpiece, though not for lack of a great performance from Lady Gaga. It’s an investment, but watching this cast do these things is worth the price of admission.

You also aren't sure what the film is about or if it's about anything at all, except fluid filmmaking.

The movie is never boring, but there may be some information overload for laymen in the audience.

If the story is somewhat lacking, Cox is terrific.

There’s a limit to how much patience one has for spending time with terrible people living large. But for all the lackluster familiarity of the film’s style, the story is too interesting, too baffling to deny.

The good news is that it's better than the second "Men in Black." The bad news is: not all that much. There are a couple of clever ideas, a few funny moments, a wealth of computer-generated special effects. But it's hollow at its core, and the asides have lost some of their spark.

Shipka is both funny and gritty as the wry observer unwillingly drawn into the action, the kind of role at which she excels.

I liked Dean. And I liked Martin’s direction. I just hope his next outing is a little more ambitious.

The problem with Peyton Reed's film is that when he shrinks the always-affable Paul Rudd, he shrinks a big part of Rudd's charisma, too.

You know you're being manipulated but you don't really mind, because it's fun to watch this bunch work.