Gringo dabbles in several genres, none particularly well.

It’s a weird little genre, the sick-teen romance. “Five Feet Apart” winds up as just a pedestrian entry in it, because it tries way too hard on the melodrama front. Being a teenager is difficult enough. Being a sick teenager is presumably that much harder. Being a teenager in “Five Feet Apart” means suffering from something else, in addition: overkill. And that’s deadly.

Maybe the real message here is that Brooklyn hipsters are absurdly annoying, whether it's past, present or near future. On that front, Creative Control succeeds. As a compelling film about the alienating effects of technology, not so much.

Between the siblings' adventure scenes, family tragedies and familiar characters it's hard to stay engaged with a film so gloomy, sad and sluggish. In the end, you’re left wondering what was real, whether it was all just a dream or if you're just too grown up to understand.

Cloud Atlas is ambitious in nature, epic in scope and, ultimately, a big, overstuffed mess. [24 Oct 2012]

Although it contains some interesting characters, God's Pocket, like the neighborhood it depicts, is the kind of place you can't wait to escape, even if its inhabitants cannot.

We’re the Millers plays like a “Saturday Night Live” skit that goes on too long.

Cate Blanchett gives a ferocious performance as the steely Mapes, and she mines some genuine emotion out of the material.

The general dippiness isn't helped by the dialogue: "Every word in Italian is like a truffle!" Gilbert exclaims as she learns the language. Equally annoying is the gauzy lighting, which gives Roberts a sweetly angelic glow most of the time.

While the actors certainly have charm, the farcical plot is so formulaic that the comic fizz often feels forced.

Guilt, grief and the struggle to move on are big themes, but unfortunately, director Burr Steers and his script writers aren't interested in exploring them.

There are too many misses among the hits. Once you get past the premise, there’s not a lot farther to go

There's a great film hiding somewhere in the wreckage of "Love Ranch."

A by-the-numbers, good-vs.-evil tale.

Writer-director Amat Escalante was named best director at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for this project, and although it obviously is made with some skill, it also is unrelentingly dire.

It’s so ridiculously overstuffed it’s kind of fun. That extends to, or perhaps begins with, the look of the film. It’s rich, overripe, yet still kind of seedy.

An improvement over its predecessor.

The biggest problem is the whiplash-inducing tonal shifts. Director Jeff Tomsic, working from a script by Mark Steilen and Rob McKittrick, swings from violent slapstick to tender moments in slapdash fashion. You can’t get a handle on it, though maybe that’s fitting in a movie about trying to keep from being tagged.

It's hard not to be disappointed with The Change-Up, which in the end follows the basic conventions of the switched-identity genre, if more profanely, changing up not much at all.

If it weren’t for his voice, Kutcher would have been the ideal choice to star in Jobs, a well-meant but ultimately unsurprising biopic.

Oh, all right, some of The Other Woman is funny. The parts with Leslie Mann, mostly, who makes this hit-and-miss, problematic comedy directed by Nick Cassavetes far more entertaining than it has a right to be.

Of the bunch, Plaza, Minghella and Parker fare best, though Parker's Ben is weighed down with cliches. Alex ostensibly is the focal point of the film, but Ritter is relegated mostly to observer status, healing while watching the melodramas unfold around him. A few of them are interesting. But not enough, not in a story that seems familiar because, after all, it is.

There are a lot of funny people in Brave New Jersey, but the movie is not very funny.

The plot is lacking in emotional weight, even though the adversities are right there on paper.

Daisy Edgar-Jones is affecting and effective as Kya, known to redneck townsfolk as “The Marsh Girl.” If only the filmmaking and screenwriting were as good as her performance. It’s really just a swampy Southern Gothic soap opera at heart, with designs on being something more.

The visual effects are impressive, and there is a certain kick to seeing the human characters dodging barrels in a life-size Donkey Kong. But we don’t really care about the humans; here, at least, Q*bert is more endearing than Adam Sandler.

Half of a Yellow Sun winds up being one of those movies in which a pesky event of great historical import keeps getting in the way of a soap-opera romance.

You shouldn't be able to read a book faster than you can see it play out on-screen.