Educating Rita, which might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced march through a formula relationship.

Sweet, in its meandering way. It has no meanness in it, no cynicism, no desire to be anything other than what it is, an evocation of the fun of living your life as a skateboarder.

Trap is a well-crafted shell with nothing inside.

Then they annoy us by trying to deny the attraction while the plot spins its wheels, pretending to be about something.

The first 30 minutes of the movie gave me lots of room for hope. It was fast-moving, it was visually spectacular, it was exotic and lighthearted and filled with a spirit of adventure. But then, gradually, the movie began to recycle itself. It began to feel as if I was seeing the same thing more than once.

This is the kind of film that isn't as much fun to see as it is to hear about.

The overwrought score and the Orwellian themes announce “Barbarians” as a prestige project brimming with Big Ideas, but it’s ultimately stilted and didactic, and more than a bit nasty.

In The Purge: Anarchy, unfortunately, grim and brutal is pretty much all we get.

There’s never a moment when the story lulls. Alas, it’s all just so … preposterous, due to that mistrial of a screenplay.

When the suffering of real children is used to enhance the image of movie stars who fall in love against the backdrop of their suffering, a certain decency is lacking. Beyond Borders wants it both ways -- glamor up front, and human misery in the background to lend it poignancy.

Occasionally creative but mostly distasteful and thuddingly unfunny, this is the kind of story that asks us to take wild leaps of faith at every turn—and then buy into a redemption story arc that is neither plausible nor earned.

Battle looks like the last gap of a dying series, a movie made simply to wring the dollars out of any remaining ape fans.

It has everything you want: shadows, screams, feverish scientific speculations, guttering candle flames, flowing diaphanous gowns, midnights, dawns and worms. Russell was once, and no doubt will be again, considered an important director. This is the sort of exercise he could film with one hand tied behind his back, and it looks like that was indeed more or less his approach.

What Ferrara needs for his next film is a sound screenplay...He has gone about as far as a director can go on pure style.

As quickly as Thing can snap its fingers, we’ll soon forget our visit with this version of The Addams Family.

Planes moves along quickly at a running time of 92 minutes, occasionally taking flight with some pretty nifty flight sequences. The animation is first-rate, and the Corningware colors are soothing eye candy.

The movie is a first-time directorial effort by Justin Theroux, a splendid actor, son of the writer Phyllis, nephew of the novelist Paul. He might have done better to have taken on something by them.

The story fluctuates between the uninspired and the just plain weird — and then gets even weirder. It’s too basic and familiar to keep parents and older children consistently entertained, and too trippy and existential for the little ones.

Reprising his writing/directing chores from the original, Ken Scott gives us an uneven mishmash that alternates between easy gags, shameless sentimentality and some just plain bizarre choices.

There simply isn’t a whole lot of excitement being generated in this lackluster family adventure, though it tries oh so very hard.

Sharp Stick is a rather sour and troublesome film—a strange hybrid that sometimes plays like a Fractured Fairy Tale and is populated by razor-thin characters who behave in an inconsistent manner and exist in a world that alternates between gritty reality and some kind of bizarro alternative world where things just don’t add up.

Jennifer Garner is indeed a charmer, but she's the victim of a charmless treatment in 13 Going on 30.

This is Spielberg's weakest film since "1941."

My two-star rating represents a compromise between admiration and horror.

Too clever by half. It's the worst kind of con: It tells us it's a con, so we don't even have the consolation of being led down the garden path.

The scenes between Gleeson and Huppert are rendered in muted tones and are sweet and effective. Subplots involving Sylvia and Paul are flat and uninteresting.

A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much.

Rocky IV is movie-making by the numbers. Even the climactic fight scene isn't as exciting as it should be, maybe because we know with a certainty born of long experience how it will turn out.