A sumptuous ride with breathtaking scenes and a soaring musical score.

First Snow tries hard but lacks originality.

Somebody is nihilistic, misanthropic, and weirdly relaxing. I've never seen anything like it.

Inelegant but not uninteresting, Ramen Heads is a bronze contender at best.

Ultimately, The Equalizer 3 marks a fitting and warm end to the franchise. It offers all the audacious violence and familiar set-pieces of the previous films, paired with a wistful goodbye to its central vigilante. It’s not reinventing the genre, but it doesn’t have to. Like its protagonist, this movie knows it has a simple job to do and accomplishes it in the most satisfying way possible.

The sensation that dogs Hope Gap is that they forgot to roll camera on the most dramatic parts. What’s left over isn’t bad, only underwhelming.

To sum it up, there is little that is unexpected in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Rather than an epic continuation of Jackson's Middle-earth obsession, the film seems more like the work of a man driving around a multilevel parking garage without being able to find the exit.

Shrek, DreamWorks' big green cash machine, has finally run dry, perhaps not of box office power, but most assuredly of the caustic, fractured fairy tale-isms and the wry, snarky wit that made the first film, and to a lesser degree, the first sequel, so winning.

Carter Burwell’s score is particularly thunderous, mirroring the onscreen action, and the 3-D really is – for once – superb, making for a rather breathtaking two hours. Well done.

There is truly magic in this long, golden summer day.

Somm doesn’t try to write the book on wine connoisseurship, but it does give good CliffsNotes.

What makes The Hummingbird Project so intriguing is that it explores areas of business – and of industrial espionage – so esoteric that it's hard to imagine that it's really a business model.

Pacing problems and shallow psychological inquiries plague this film almost as much as the overworked metaphor that supplies the film's title.

It’s a daunting task to mount a stage production of the play these days, given the college-lit symbolism embodied by its hapless titular bird and the narrative arcs to which today’s audiences are accustomed, much less adapt it for the big screen and still remain true to Chekhov’s delicate dramatic sensibilities. Either way, it’s an uphill climb. This film adaptation of this seminal play (the fourth, by most counts) gets about halfway up the hill.

Ultimately, it's undone by the overfamiliar nature of Doon and Lina's quest, the outcome of which, while breathlessly paced, is never really in question.

This “one crazy night” taps out at lightly kooky; there’s nothing here that gets within striking distance of the sheer weirdness of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" or the darkness of "After Hours", to name two genre stablemates.

This is one of the major delights of Hotel Artemis: a plot that posits a damaged, Medicare-aged woman as its central figure. And that the role is executed by a two-time Oscar-winning actress delivering her best work in many years makes this a rare treat.

Again, Hill gives us a world filled with morally complex characters, but that just may be this film's undoing.

This is a garish, rocket-fueled slice of popcorn mayhem, and the perfect antidote to this summer's limp action lineup.

Less can sometimes be perceived as more, but in the case of The Myth of Fingerprints less is simply less.

A go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator grab bag of raunchy sex gags and freakish outbursts. The cool thing is that it works.

Writer-director McKee’s arch comic dialogue (i.e., "We’ll hang out and eat some melons or something") is out of synch with the creepy horror he wields.

Let’s be honest: With a cast like this, it doesn't matter too much what the characters are doing onscreen, or if it makes about as much sense as a monochrome rainbow.

Chon’s ambitions are astonishing, but his bloated script needed an edit or two. It’s a film written with big moments for big performances in mind, which is too painfully obvious as the film treads on.

Lots of ideas are tossed around in Freakonomics, and it often feels as though one is trapped in some kind of pop centrifuge. None of the authors' arguments is contested in any way, and the zippiness of the film paints everything with a Teflon sheen.

See it for the performances – they are delights from the leads on down to the characters in the episodic vignettes. But the film’s vision of Gen-Y nesting is liable to leave you up a tree.

The setup is great, but Fading Gigolo’s follow-through lacks dynamism.

Granted, the lavish set pieces are beautiful, and there really is quite a bit of amusingly acrobatic coupling going on, but in the end, it's extremely hard to fight down the giggles you'll find swelling inside you. It's all so relentlessly goofy, it makes you long for the early Eighties antics of Traci Lords, or The Dark Bros.