A crowd-pleaser for the under-10 set judging from the preview audience’s reaction, Dunston Checks In offers a few funny scenes, one-liners, and characters, but not enough to inspire the entire film.

Those expecting a charming bonbon à la Midnight in Paris may wish to lower their expectations. Magic in the Moonlight’s story is exceedingly threadbare, a first draft that never got fleshed out or tightened up.

No one has ever succeeded with anything approximating the sheer energetic brilliance of what Lee has managed here. For all intents and purposes, this is a comic-book movie in the very truest and most vibrant sense of the phrase.

It may be about little more than a guy getting his head a little more straight than he thought it was and burying a few resentments that he didn’t even know were sticking up, but Ride the Eagle knows that a small, sad, personal story doesn’t have to be a tragedy. I

Hungarian cinematographer Marcell Rév puts himself in the top echelons with his kinetic, vibrant work here, smashing Jacques Jouffret's neon-and-blood visual thrills from "The Purge" series into suburbia with a slick and easy violence, and when the world breaks down – as in one of the most brilliant and sickening home invasions ever filmed – he makes the stylish chaos all too believable.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.

Ambling, just-passable picture.

At its heart, Luff Linn is a very sweet love story between Colin and Lulu, punctuated by absurdity and a specific type of humor that (as I’ve referenced before) brings to the screen the spirit of the work of famed graphic novelist Daniel Clowes.

In a way, it's an archetypal car-chase flick, with next to no plot and a lot of cars flying through the air, engines roaring, tires roasting, sheetmetal bending.

It's like the Sixties never happened, or maybe happened too much.

On the whole, there are precious few life lessons in Is Anybody There? that haven't been noted before.

All told, it’s two-plus hours of trinkets and baubles and clever repartée beneath a perfect summer sun and beside the whitewashed walls of Fez, not inconsequential but as ephemeral as the sky above.

Besson loves his violence almost as much as he loves his leading lady.

A preposterously silly bit of work, chock-full-o' nuts and rife with the kind of plot holes you could drive a submersible ROV through.

All in all, Imagine That is an amiable detour from its star's usual scatological skronk. Kids will empathize, parents will breathe a sigh of relief.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a very pretty production – pretty colors, pretty scenery, pretty bromides – and a busy one, too, which helps distract us from the sad fact that the movie is generous and humane but not all that interesting.

If you’ve ever felt the same about a Felis catus, you’ll cut A Street Cat Named Bob some slack for the same reason I did. You won’t be able to help yourself. And stock up on some Kleenex beforehand. You’re gonna need them.

Sequences like the silly montage of Charlie on Ritalin (which just looks like the precious doodles of a former editor), grievously underdeveloped characters, and heavy heapings of sap instead of snark keep Charlie Bartlett from making the dean’s list.

Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer and current Hollywood comedy godhead Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for Sandler.

Myla Goldberg's novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms.

By the end, however, the movie’s predictable wind-down and ho-hum twist at the end make this Life hardly worth living. In space, no one can hear you yawn.

All we're left with is a second-rate J-Horror entry that bores rather scares.

Alienoid is so big in its ambition that it rarely coheres, and sequences in each time period go on for so long that the other era, and all its characters, fall away. But the characters are overwhelmingly entertaining, most especially Jo and Yum as the hapless monster hunters who are promised much bigger things if Part 2 ever happens.

After the recent rash of superhero end-spectacles as long-winded and self-serious as a term paper, the limited ambition of The Dark World’s climax is a relief. It scuttles all term paper aspirations and instead humbly lobs a thesis statement-slash-open invitation: Let’s have some fun, shall we? And so we did.

At no point does Beast hide what it wants to accomplish. They made a movie that stars an actor everyone loves and pits him against a big-ass enraged lion. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Idris Elba punching lions?

Despite his acknowledged age, creaking bones, and reduced nerve, Schwarzenegger still delivers quite a performance in this fun, straight-ahead action film.

It’s a bold and certainly credible move, but the execution is something of a belly flop. Thanks for Sharing isn’t really about a disease, only the cure, and that bias makes it a plausible picture of the Friend of Bill community-based recovery, but kind of a sham as a portrait of actual human beings.

The screen version feels like a rewrite made to make the tale more palatable to the "mindless moviegoing masses," which prompts the question: Is the film a truer vision of Baitz's tale of an uncompromising man or a version in which the truer vision was compromised?

A fun, well-assembled and -performed slice of life that requires no special affinity with the subject matter in order to -- ahem -- get one's groove on.

For those who adore McCourt's work, Angela's Ashes will most likely disappoint; for those unfamiliar with this inspiring chronicle of a survivor, it will neither impress nor dishearten to any degree.

The "Citizen Kane" of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories... So gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent... Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.

An amazing argument no matter which side of the debate you favor, Stone’s film manages to restock and bring a fresh voice to an old controversy. The documentary is well-made and articulately argued, although that doesn't mean it isn't going to have as many adversaries as champions.

For all its hot button, au courant moral messaging, Joe Bell is preaching to the converted and unlikely to draw in the type of audience that actually needs to hear its pleas for kindness in a mean and wild world.

Attack of the Clones' final 35 minutes very nearly makes up for the preceding 105, featuring as it does the jaw-dropping spectacle of the entire Jedi Council battling it out with not only clones, but also lumbering monsters, space ships of all sorts, and each other.

Sure, the kids will giggle, and the animation is well-executed (even if there does seem to be something a little off around the eyes in this version of Po) but it just doesn't land with that same ebullient skadoosh.

Directed and written by Austin author and horror enthusiast Owen Egerton (who also stars as the mad filmmaker behind the fest and the blood), the film doesn’t come without its setbacks. It’s a formulaic meta-horror movie that for most of its run time tries too hard, but there’s a sincerity about the movie that keeps it zipping along.

If it's a good heist movie you're after, there are surely better ways to go than with this limp caper.

The film is fun. It could have been produced by Ross Hunter but wasn’t, maybe even directed by Vincente Minnelli, although he probably would have screwed with it a lot more.

Well, we're not in "Chicago" anymore, or even its soundstage approximation, but that hasn't stopped Oscar-nominated director Rob Marshall from fashioning another epic spectacle out of two squabbling women in (a sort-of) show business.

Battle for Terra boasts impressively executed battle sequences that, frankly, are light-years beyond anything found in the recent Star Wars animated add-ons.

Rare two-for-one Chan special.

Ultimately, Hidalgo won't win any movie races, but I'd definitely bet on the movie to show.

There's so much and so little going on here simultaneously that you're not sure whether to squirm or doze.

As real as the Astroturf in the Brady's backyard and as eager to please as Alice's meat loaf, The Brady Bunch Movie is -- to exhaust this string of metaphors -- pure junk food. But like most junk food, it sure tastes good.

Ultimately, it's a very boring ride.

When it's on, it's really, really on. But when it's not, it feels like it's struggling to find its style, just as Jerome is.

The music so wholly engulfs the second half of the film, there’s no room left to expand on characters that feel less than lived-in or on the film’s more ambitious ideas.

The movie has its moments but it plays like a ball of confusion. Life Stinks seems to be Brooks' bid to be taken seriously and leave the fart jokes behind. And something about that stinks.

If there are two signatures to Indonesian horror, they would be an overwhelming sense of relentless dread, and poisonous centipedes. The Queen of Black Magic has plenty of both, and an enthralling supernatural siege story binding everything together so tight you'll barely be able to breathe.

But the film overall is a jumble, a stitched-together bunch of scenes that, while often funny, don't hang together very well, you know, like a TV Christmas special or a middling episode of SNL. Free-form sketch comedy can work in a vehicle like Wayne's World, but it leaves a story like So I Married... so, so marred.

Sparks, an acting novice, falters when her character must muster gumption or sexual heat. She saves her best for last in a barnburner singing performance, but it's too little, too late – especially with the memory of Houston's one song – a heart-stopping gospel number – still ringing in the ears.

The year's most viciously entertaining psycho-road-movie-revenge-'n'-wreckage-romance.

An almost sweet sensibility emerges by the end of Bad Grandpa. Young Jackson Nicholl is a real find: The kid can really hold his own against Knoxville’s master pranker.

I could watch Ramírez read the phone book, as the old saw goes. He is one of the most vibrant and charismatic actors working today. He infuses Durán with a charm and a recklessness that is tempered by De Niro’s quiet, understated performance, something he can do in his sleep.

You may want to bring a handkerchief, so boldly manipulative the movie ends up being, but for fans of Pooh and the power of art as therapy during times of existential crises, the story is never less than interesting and melodramatically well-done.

Reeves sticks out like a bad grape in an otherwise acceptable harvest. Having taken this role to broaden his acting horizons, his gain is the film's loss.

There's a reason why Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires – a phrase repeated throughout 12 Strong, a depiction of one of the first and most unequivocal victories of the U.S. war against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

These days, Allen's pictures are more like snuff films, in which the viewer must suffer both gifted actors committing screen hara-kiri and a once-brilliant filmmaker soldiering on with his long, bullheaded decline.

Seems more like an amateur revue, perfectly all right for what it is, but not meant to be seen beyond an audience of friends and family.

A refreshingly lighthearted look at day-to-day life in the inner city, Friday does suffer from a few problems in the scripting and directing departments, but entertains nonetheless, thanks mainly to the easygoing style of its talented cast.

Emblazoned with ambition, this throwback Seventies-style private-eye movie (think Robert Altman’s "The Long Goodbye" or Robert Aldrich’s "Hustle") seems more invested in its form than its content.

The humor is both broad and lowbrow, yet often extremely funny.

Arquette wander in and out of frame, but like everyone else in this film, they're eclipsed by Coogan's gloriously unhinged performance, which has the lunatic, semi-meta tone of a parody within a parody.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days is probably the most inoffensive kid's film you're likely to see this summer. And that's a good thing.

The film may have only the best of intentions, but it tries way too hard and ends up being shallow, superficial, and only sporadically funny.

This is Michael Bay for the John Wick generation: bombastic filmmaking at its finest with complex, multi-level action sequences that give the stunts room to breathe.

Few can write this kind of acid-dripping parlor drama with as much bite as LaBute.

Some of this – the simplest parts, the interpersonal drama played out in the rehearsal room, the power dynamics between actors and directors – are genuinely fascinating and darkly fun, as director Karl quietly abuses his position for his own ends. If Warmerdam had kept to that refined perspective, with quibbling about blocking and line delivery, then Nr. 10 might have become more of a complete film.

The movie struggles to find the right kind of humor for its adult demographic, given that a talking dog flick is a genre usually targeted at kids somewhere in PG territory.

In the end, it's all la dolce vita no matter how you look at it.

The film reunites Carell with his "Little Miss Sunshine" co-star Arkin, who, as always, delivers the goods, as do most of the other supporting players. Too long by at least 15-20 minutes, Get Smart is nevertheless a giggly summer movie.

An admirable little film, a funny and familiar depiction of Americans traveling abroad, strangers to each other and themselves.

Julien may be a donkey-boy but it's Harmony Korine, this film's director, who is a horse's ass.

Infused with enough infectious charm to make us forget how dopey the plot is and become swept up in its breezy countenance.

A visual tour-de-force; it's just that there's not much else to sink your teeth into once the pretty colors fade from view.

No wonder the movie feels something like a retread: It gets you there, but the ride is neither nowhere as smooth, nor nearly as compelling.

So four episodes in, and The Purge franchise is as nakedly provocative as ever.

The performances of Mary McDonnell as the coach's ex-wife and Alfre Woodard as a ballplayer's ambitious mom raise the dramatic levels to such a degree that you might want to see the movie for their performances alone.

Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape from L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?

As long as underdog sports stories hold a place in the cinematic universe, Eddie the Eagle, despite its shortcomings, will soar into moviegoers’ hearts.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.

With M3GAN out of her recognizable body for most of the film, it becomes clear how much of the success of both films comes down to Davis’ delivery.

The movie isn't about Kennedy; rather, Kennedy is the sun around which all the other planets of the film revolve. And like some epic Louis B. Mayer picture from the Thirties, Bobby has a thousand stars in its galaxy, some of them great (Fishburne, Rodríguez), some of them not (Wood, Hunt), and one of them brilliant (Hopkins).

Within the context of films that include the word booty in their titles, it serves up an unusually fresh, inventive and good-natured brew of pure lascivious fun.

Stewart (per usual) is the best thing about the film.

As the parents of four, Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner are a good match, her energetic intensity mixing nicely with his laid-back demeanor, and both underplaying their inherent adorableness.

At its best, Captive State blends imaginative science fiction with the caliber of detail-oriented espionage you might find in an Alan J. Pakula film.

When the film changes gears from light coming-of-age comedy to ex-post-facto war parable midway through, it loses its focus and suddenly becomes a much darker beast.

It's a neat, sweet experiment in meta-documentary filmmaking overall, but like Yi's own heart, it sabotages itself in the process and becomes another casualty of too-close scrutiny.

Yet for all its unmistakable visual trademarks (hypersaturated colors; mad-scientist tinkering with film stocks and editing technique; sudden presentation of enigmatic, troubling images), this is also the most radical departure Stone has ever made in terms of basic sensibilities.

Admirable in its look and style, the film is not unique or exceptional. Nevertheless, given the state of current science-fiction fare, the film does hold its own.

In The Girl, writer/director David Riker returns to many of the same themes he pursued in his award-winning 1998 film "La Ciudad," which told the stories of four Hispanic immigrants living in New York City. Immigration is still very much on Riker’s mind, although he approaches it from a very different perspective this time.

Overall, Clooney has provided a fine time at the movies, with engaging sports sequences, thoughtful storytelling, impactful visuals, and great performances. Its focus can get a bit fuzzy, but this doesn’t dull the film’s overall shine.

There’s nothing to fault animation-wise – Blue Sky’s penchant for migraine and/or dopamine-inducing color palettes and headlong pacing are consistently above par – but, for adults at least, the film’s mushy mediocrity can be a real drag.

Staged and stagy, this adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play about family dysfunction and the "anti-Camelot" is a muddled, middling mess, despite a witty, top-drawer performance from Posey and a surprisingly comic turn from Spelling.

Despite the buildup of these horror expectations, there is no predicting how deliciously enjoyable it is to witness the macabre dance performed by Moretz and Huppert, two of the best actresses working in today’s movies. They play their game of cat and mouse with claws out; by the end of the berserko film, their characters are practically swinging from the rafters. Everyone appears to be having a grand time in Greta, and it would be crass for us as viewers to not respond similarly.

What makes Orphan: First Kill worthwhile is that it acknowledges the original before taking a hard left turn into overblown soapy madness. The modern gothic of the first film transforms here into a perfectly fitting explosion of operatic schlock.

Count it as one of the great Hollywood mysteries – right up there with the death of Natalie Wood and the career of Vin Diesel – that we've had to wait this long for a movie starring a talking milkshake, a floating box of french fries, and a ball of ground beef.