Only the combined talents of both Blanchett and Mara can make the film's powerfully realized finale work.

His characters may spout Kant and debate the ethics of different human interactions, but it's only sugar coating on top of what is effectively a simple and familiar story.

Co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen have told a very, very small-scale story when you look at what happens in the actual physical world. But in doing so, they've done something very powerful, because they have paid full respect to just how turbulent and important the inner life of a child can be.

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

Amy also turns the camera back on the viewer who saw, mocked and ignored Winehouse’s descent as it transpired across the media landscape. How could the world collectively denigrate a woman whose addiction was destroying her? In this era of reactionary social media it’s a warning to all of us to be wary of stoning the next Amy in the digital town square.

There is nothing easy or predictable about what George Miller delivers with Mad Max: Fury Road, a stone-cold action master class, beautiful and brainy and startling in the ways it throws off the current definition of the blockbuster.

Where Banks truly excels is in directing the film's musical numbers.

The film feels very tiny, and intentionally so. This isn't a horror film at all, which is an odd thing to say when you're talking about a movie with zombies in it.

It would be a lot easier to give the film a soft pass if it wasn't so aggressively lazy.

This is a movie that is almost exhaustingly large-scale, and Ultron's ultimate plan involves a crazy visual idea that Whedon makes sort of beautiful and eerie. It's got so much action that I'm going to bet some audiences go numb after a while. But in scene after scene, there are beats and stunts and poses that suggest that an army of comic book fanatics worked on this movie.

I'm baffled by the screenplay credit. Richard Price is a muscular writer, and he's done some great work in the crime world over the years, but this feels like a screenplay by someone who has never written a film before, full of first-draft dialogue and weird structural and tonal issues. It's almost amazing how tone-deaf it is.

I'm giving this an "A" letter grade because I find it utterly absorbing, start to finish. I don't know if I think it's a good film, but it is a powerfully compelling film. Perhaps my favorite kind of strange or insane film is the personal passion project, and "Roar" is one of the most remarkable examples of this.

It's obvious that they're aiming for something more fun than genuinely haunting, and it helps that there is a good deal of humor used to punctuate the horror. It doesn't all land, but there's a fair amount of wit in something as simple as watching what someone types, deletes, then retypes.

It would not surprise me if most reviews for this film are openly hostile. It is a wretched piece of writing, and an absurd final product. It almost seems pointless to pile on, though. The audience who loves Sparks is going to go see this film and they'll no doubt walk away satisfied.

Tim Johnson gets the character stuff right, and the animators do an amazing amount of subtextual work with color and with texture ripples on the various Boov characters.. It's lovely work overall, and it might be the most cheerfully benign conquering force we've ever faced on film.

There is a giddy sense of glee that runs through most of this movie, making it feel like Feig can barely contain himself with all of the things he wants to do and show you in the movie.

This is a film that suggests that Morehead and Benson have something important to share with their work.

Visually uninteresting, dramatically inert, and remarkably silly no matter how seriously it tries to play things straight, Insurgent is franchise management and little more.

Competently made but morally repellent, Get Hard may be my least favorite Will Ferrell feature film.

It's hard for any actor or director to pull off love at first sight, but Branagh is lucky enough that James and Madden have just enough genuine on screen chemistry to make you at least want to believe it's possible.

Trainwreck is more than funny. It's also wise, and that hard-won wisdom makes this a can't-miss for anyone who feels bruised by love, but never beaten.

Plot is unimportant. Family is everything, and Furious 7 is a blast.

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.

Chappie feels like Blomkamp and his co-writer Terri Tatchell had three or four different films they wanted to make, and instead of figuring out which one actually worked, they just made them all at the same time.

It helps that Gelb shoots this less like a horror film and more like a drama. When the film does finally kick into overt horror, it becomes more familiar and less overall effective.

Ficarra and Requa are good at creating a sense of momentum in their films that carries you along from scene to scene, and a film like this depends largely on chemistry. Smith and Robbie have bundles of it, so there is an easy pleasure to watching them circle each other.

Shira Piven, working from a script by Elliot Laurence, has directed a beautiful, sad, sweet and funny movie that deals honestly with mental illness while also earning big laughs and offering up some hard truths. And it helps that Kristen Wiig gives the best sustained performance of her entire career in the lead.

The best moments in this film are the moments where it feels like they're just throwing jokes at the screen. The moments that are toughest are the ones where they try to create some sort of emotional beat, because the moment we're supposed to invest in these guys at all, the movie crumbles.