Although the film’s character portraits are vividly drawn, they remain largely one-dimensional.

For both kids and adults, CWCM2 is little more than a vague memory as soon as it’s over.

Although there’s a strong likability quotient for everyone onscreen here, which ought to keep the movie minimally afloat among its target audience of black viewers starved for a new Tyler Perry offering, Baggage Claim should be left behind at the carousel.

It's a veritable shoo-in for an Oscar nod this year, and one of the more disturbing films to come out of a major studio in ages.

Few characters are well-drawn, rivalries substitute for real group dynamics, and the dancing is chaotic, showy, and confusing.

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.

Salerno spends more time talking to photographers with telephoto lenses who, over the decades, laid in wait for Salinger in the hope of capturing a grainy picture, than he does talking to literary analysts and historians.

Brie Larson is a revelation as the linchpin of Short Term 12. An industrious young actress, her performance here is remarkably natural and understated.

It dispassionately plays like a video game with a high body count.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is perhaps an even more scattershot mess than its predecessor. Whannell's script is so rife with portentous backstory, third-act goofiness, and a denouement that practically screams "Insidious 3: Same Old Shit," that the film as a whole is jarring, and not in a good way.

Spark, however, is the best of the lot when it comes to attempting to grok the burn and the burners.

The handful of redeeming moments in Jayne Mansfield’s Car belong to Duvall in the role of a septuagenarian who finds himself more and more at odds with a changing world.

Afternoon Delight has many small pleasures but falls far short of reaching the G spot.

Much has been made of the fact that Swanberg has cast for the first time bona fide movie stars and not just his mumblecore pals: In fact, it's the making of the movie. If you're going to build an entire film on microexpressions, then a certain innate magnetism is required. Swanberg gets it in spades from his top-shelf cast.

While "The Chronicles of Riddick" was an overstuffed melange of CGI and unnecessary subplots, Riddick is a far more streamlined affair, and all the better for it.

Again. Via Red’s experiences as a young man and wildcatter, Jason learns that money cannot buy happiness. What the viewers learn is that money can’t buy a good movie either.

For such a deft wit, Jane Austen sure has inspired some nitwitted entertainments. Actually, the Austen influence here is negligible.

In the end, I Declare War is both enthralling and a little frustrating in its refusal to fit neatly in any box. Its unpredictable tone clicks back and forth between the comical and the serious like the safety catch on a firearm.

Heinzerling allows us to read whatever we want into this picture. The endless struggle for money and professional recognition is either a curse or a raison d’être.

The U.S. cut, which Wong endorses, runs a slim 108 minutes, and has by all accounts been reshaped for American audiences, who, by and large, don’t have the same foreknowledge of Ip Man, or martial arts, as Asian audiences do.

The World’s End affectionately takes a page from our Fifties sci-fi films.

Wingard’s film is its own subset of fractious family crazy.

Not only have we seen this all before, but we were probably hoping to not see it again.

Amounts to little more than a big, wet kiss to the group’s worldwide legions of young, female fans.

Still, the revelations of evildoers clogging the corridors of power pack very little punch; we're all too aware that such malfeasance and malignity have become the status quo in the real world.

This is not a remake of Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway," but a new effort. The film is loaded with action and violence, although not in any logical or accessible way.

An ambitious comedy with not-negligible dramatic depth, but Bell, a first-time feature writer and director, is frankly too generous with her large cast.

It’s a query with no answers, a period piece about the present. It’s idiosyncratic, actively noncommercial, and doesn’t follow the rules – like playing a game of chess on a board with no squares.