Intermittently playful, consistently confounding, finally petrified, it's a film of fussy, cultivated austerity.

There are no real stakes, and I find the attempts at creating suspense to be almost offensive. Irritating, at the very least.

Overall, American Sniper is a solidly-staged but unexceptional picture, filled with overly familiar dramatic situations and a surprisingly blindered view of the world around its central character.

Where Imitation Game ultimately falters is in tackling Turing's later years and subsequent demise. In some ways, this period is meant to bookend the film, but instead just leaves unanswered questions while diminishing actual historical events.

Ferrara is openly inviting comparison with Pasolini’s work in this ambitious but messy and flawed piece, where reality bends and stretches and sensation rules.

Whatever affection I once held for this story was ruined by this documentary, and I hope that these guys are, once and for all, finished with Raiders and remaking it. I certainly am.

Whether it's past its pop-culture expiration date or not, Into The Woods deserved a more visually inventive director to help make it work, and instead, we get something that feels somehow reduced by its translation to the screen.

Julianne Moore seems to be the one person in the film that truly gets the tone right, playing Havana like a person walking a tightrope over a yawning pit of psychosis, her every emotion bubbling up and threatening to knock her off.

The movie wants to make a statement about the intersection of art and family, but it’s all too muddled to add up to anything that astute.

Watts co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher D. Ford (“Robot & Frank”) and, frankly, it’s not as clever or compelling as it wants to be.... The filmmaker does deserve credit, however, for conjuring up some nicely tense cinematic moments.

As a biopic for Fischer, Pawn Sacrifice can certainly encourage viewers to research more about him. It’s just unfortunate Zwick couldn’t bring a slightly more understated approach to the entire endeavor.

While there are some very strong performances in the film, the movie is inert, dramatically speaking, and covers such familiar ground that I can't really recommend it.

All the actresses do their best with the material, but only Mulligan truly transcends its limitations.

The pacing on this one is flaccid, and while I think he has some interesting points to make, the framing device to the film is a total bust.

There are moments of real wonder and even beauty amidst the slam and the bang and the big bada boom, and while Lucy is a mixed bag, it's been mixed by a master, and it is delightfully, happily insane.

They have tried, with this Daniel Craig run of films, to elevate the Bond movies so they are more than just acceptably silly spy movies, and one of the reasons SPECTRE is so frustrating is because it feels like the collapse of that ambition, and it is in one moment that you can see the entire thing burn to the ground.

Cranston has his moments and you have to laud his attention to detain in channeling Trumbo’s unique voice and mannerisms. Unfortunately, he’s so committed that his character borders on being a caricature.

Tomorrowland may be well-made, but whether you're talking about it thematically or dramatically, this is a profoundly mixed bag.

While Bercot's intentions are admirable, she and co-screenwriter Marcia Romano have conjured up too many moments that play out like thousands of courtroom scenes you've seen before.

Heli executes its shocks with sleek, gasp-inducing effectiveness, but neither its politics, nor its shifts in physical perspective, ever surprise or disorientate us.

No one who sees I Smile Back will question if Silverman was right for the role, they will simply question whether this was a story that needed to be told in the first place.

The film plays with some funny ideas about time travel, and like any good time travel movie, it flirts with paradox and what happens when you violate the rules of time and space. It doesn't really go far enough with those ideas, though, and the end result is too often timid instead of brash and silly.

Run All Night starts off on the wrong note and never recovers. It is entirely too serious and entirely too thin, and that combination turns what might have worked as a pulpy action romp into this po-faced, overly somber march from one unlikely plot point to another.

There are scenes I dug and a few set-pieces that work, and there’s an overall level of intensity that I like from director Paul Greengrass. Taken as a whole, though, this is very familiar territory, and I just don’t care when the stakes are this low and the violence is this rough.

Unfortunately, Southpaw descends into a tedious exercise of formulaic filmmaking that leaves you feeling worse for Gyllenhaal and Whitaker than the characters they play on screen.

It's a dull film.

As a theatrical experience, I Am Michael is fairly forgettable, but it does manage to pierce in places, and it carries a cumulative charge that is bigger than any of the individual emotional pieces.

The film feels 30 minutes longer than its 109 minute run time mostly due to the fact that “Paper” seems distinctly like three different films.