It never feels contrived, never panders to our illusions. When the ending comes, it is neither expected nor a twist. It’s just what happens.

the performances, even from some really good actors, are wooden, the huge CGI effects are a distraction and the best thing about the movie is the one thing that, other than the casting, will probably make the most people angry: God is a kid.

By the time the film reaches its implausible climax, it is far too late to rescue the story from the limbo that lies between ugly history and slick entertainment.

While it is a perfectly serviceable placeholder in the larger series, its contributions to the Potterverse are disappointingly minor.

The franchise... concludes with a genuinely stirring ending. ... But [Stewart's] acting hasn't improved, and the dialogue remains laughable. Bad actress, bad lines. Bad combination.

To pretend that the film’s pleasures are more than modest is just that — pretending.

Perhaps the problem isn’t one of too little ambition, but of too much. The Spy Who Dumped Me is, after all, trying earnestly to be about half a dozen different things: a buddy comedy, a spy drama, a raunch fest, a thrilling action film. It’s just that it doesn't have the focus to do any of those things particularly well.

The story is good enough to tell itself, and the filmmakers should have let it.

You expect the big joke in Casa de Mi Padre to involve Will Ferrell mangling the Spanish language. Instead, the movie is funny because of just how commendable the actor's Spanish is.

In creating the ultimate movie for sword-and-sandal blood-spatter fetishists, director Zack Snyder scores on the spectacle side—300 looks amazing—but his mechanical story line and over-the-top melodramatics don't support the action. [9 March 2007, p.1]

A fast-starting film that quickly piles meta, self-referential elements on top of each other until they no longer make much sense, and the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own coolness.

Add romantic chemistry to the list of things that fall flat in the film, alongside dialogue and acting.

It feels flat, disjointed, with too many moving parts.

There is a gentleness, both to Allyn’s performance and to the film overall, that draws the audience in. The movie’s path is as predictable as Jackson’s, but it’s beautifully shot and the idea is a good one — reversing the typical border-crosser-on-the-run idea. That doesn’t forgive all of its shortcomings, but it comes close.

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.

Rudderless is a quietly ambitious film, and if it eventually collapses under the dramatic weight it's asked to shoulder — and it does — at least it's trying.

If you’re going to keep your audience guessing, you need to provide them with answers they care about. Beckett doesn’t.

It’s a compelling journey into the deep, if a meandering one, guided by a moral compass that operates by a different magnetic field than our own, and often leads astray.

Everything, Everything is a flawed film in many ways, but there is one that’s a deal breaker: It doesn’t make you cry.

The film looks terrific, with a fantastical forest coming to 3-D life. Swooping birds, flying arrows and more make good use of the technology. But the best films use technology as a storytelling device, not as a substitute for story itself.

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.

The elements are all there. They’re just thrown together in haphazard fashion. A funny scene here, an attempt at a touching scene there, toss, repeat randomly, the end.

Even with the talent involved, almost everything about Labor Day plays less like something you’d buy a ticket to watch and more like something you’d buy in an airport bookstore to read.

Thanks to a good cast and a willingness to stray fairly far afield from the source material, it’s better than you might think.

Beautiful Creatures rises above the rabble thanks to an eminently watchable cast and a sharp screenplay by writer-director Richard LaGravenese.

Matthias Hoene’s delightfully chipper film delivers, even on the “not-a-lot-more” front. He set out to make a funny, fast-moving gross-out zombie flick, nothing beyond that, and he has succeeded with style. And humor. And guts. Lots of spilling, dangling guts (and other body parts).

The Intern is idiotic, unrealistic, Boomer wish fulfillment that has no business working on any level. I quite enjoyed it.

Lee Toland Krieger's film masquerades for a while as a romantic drama brainier than most, getting good mileage out of an intriguingly odd performance from Blake Lively. But ultimately, the movie relies far too much on contrivance and coincidence.