The Dead Don’t Die isn’t bad, exactly. It’s just that with all this talent and all this beautiful weirdness at hand, it could have been so much better.

Now this is a scary movie. And, given that it's a horror film, that means it's a good one. [18 Oct 2012]

Carroll purists and freshman English majors may be aghast at the change in story, but for those who watched "Avatar" and marveled at the images but were left wanting by the wooden acting and tired story, "Alice" is a treat.

There are moments of real power and beauty in Ava DuVernay’s film, based on the much-loved Madeleine L’Engle novel. You just have to work too hard to find them.

The Big Year is better when it is examining the obsession of the birders, and Martin, Black and Wilson are enjoyable in toned-down mode.

While Baldoni had a surplus of material and talent to work with, "It Ends with Us" felt flat and uninspiring.

These supremely talented women are put through embarrassing paces by director and co-writer Bill Holderman. It’s meant to be a film about a reawakening of desire, and thus life. It turns out to be a wince-inducing mess.

Even if your veins pump with more popcorn butter than blood, Alita: Battle Angel can get a bit too stupid to bear, like watching a pair of 13-year-old boys play a very expensive video game they designed themselves.

The children may tug at the heartstrings, but it’s the adults who give the film its heart.

Delicacy is not a very good movie. But it is entertaining enough -- barely enough -- to make it worth seeing.

I'm all for directors making audiences think, but ultimately, those thoughts need to lead us somewhere. "To the Wonder" didn't, to my mind. I'm not sure Knight of Cups does, either.

Allen builds to a climax that is ridiculous and a comment on … I don’t know. Fate? Folly? There are plenty of both in Irrational Man, but they’re not often a comfortable mix.

OK, maybe they cut a couple seconds out of that scene where Deadpool gets ripped in half, but the movie's sardonically gruesome sensibility remains intact.

Without an actor like Dafoe at its center (and margins and everywhere else), it would be unwatchable torture. With him, it’s more like watchable torture, easier to admire than enjoy.

How do you end the most iconic franchise of all time? (Don’t panic, there will be more movies, just not a part of this particular universe.) You end it by trying to please everyone. Which can make it hard to please anyone. But Abrams is a crowd-pleaser and a good one. He’s made a film that is unquestionably entertaining and wraps things up in a way that will make fans happy.

For a film about art forgeries, The Art of the Steal is itself something of a forgery, a painstaking, brushstroke-by-brushstroke re-creation of masterworks dreamed up by better artists. And like a good forgery, it's enjoyable on the surface, but loses its charm a bit once you do some digging.

Grunberg and Boyar have a charming, if broad, chemistry. It’s all kind of cheesy, of course, but it’s meant to be. And the effects, when not deliberately silly, aren’t bad.

The story is gripping, compelling. One wonders what De Niro might have done with such a role 30, 35 years ago. De Niro -- whatever happened to him?

An ever-changing obstacle course does sustain its own kind of tension, but it’s not like there’s a real puzzle to solve, nor any arc to the plot. The movie is just a succession of scary stuff happening, haunted-ride-style.

Scott's epic - and it's hard to think of anything this big, this elaborate and, no doubt, this expensive as anything but - is very much an origination story, a prequel, if you will.

It all has the air of a community theater troupe performing in a Disney parade, overeager in the exaggerated artifice. That's well enough for an amusement park, but on film it's embarrassing.

Eventually, the film morphs from a horror movie to a border shootout. It’s not a seamless transition.

Emancipation, Antoine Fuqua’s well-meaning and graphic depiction of an enslaved man who escapes in search of Lincoln’s army and freedom for himself and his family, is a mostly affecting, no-holds-barred look at degradation, inhumanity and, ultimately, inspiration. But at times — too many times — Emancipation also plays like an action-adventure movie.

Ma is one loony little horror film, and Octavia Spencer has a grand old time being the craziest thing in it.

Britt-Marie Was Here succinctly crams in plenty of overwrought tropes but maintains a sentimental heart with its prickly heroine. Is it revolutionary? Not by any means. But is every journey of self-discovery supposed to be?

In fact, the problem with the film is that, despite an excellent cast that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy and Rupert Everett, it doesn't really know what it is. A little of this, a little of that and by the time it's done, it adds up to not much at all.

The best thing about the film is neither the top-notch CGI nor the shallow moral lessons but the performance of Will Poulter ("Son of Rambow") as Lucy and Edmund's insufferable cousin Eustace Scrubb.

The first word that comes to mind when watching Landscape With Invisible Hand is "weird." It’s very weird. But in the most thoughtful way possible. This sci-fi film packs originality in every scene and plot point.