Thanks for Sharing is a bit of a head-snapper in its tone changes, stumbling into flippancy. The light moments are appreciated, but they do tend to undercut the sobriety of it all.

Robert Stone directed the wonderful environmental movement history documentary “Earth Days,” and that earns him the benefit of the doubt for his latest, Pandora’s Promise. He needs that benefit, because what he sets out to do in 87 minutes is upend 50 years of green movement anti-nuclear power dogma.

Late to the game, blandly cast and scripted with every Italian American cliche in the “How to Make Spaghetti” cookbook, it is Eastwood’s worst film as a director.

As Jackass japes go, though, Bad Grandpa was better in concept and in its short, punchy TV commercials than it is as a feature.

It’s just competent, light entertainment.

That doesn’t make Oblivion a bad movie, just a familiar one — generic.

Costner and Garner are good and Langella properly menacing, but Leary has lost his fastball and seems to be holding something back in his quarrel scenes with Costner. Costner has to carry the film, which he does.

First-time writer/director Peter Sattler finds a few surprises to throw at us in this somewhat conventional “Stockholm Syndrome” story.

So even though Signal isn’t great sci-fi, you’d never know it to look at it and listen to it.

That miss-or-hit collection of horror shorts, “The ABCs of Death” becomes more hit or miss with its sequel, ABCs of Death 2.

Before it trips over its own overly complex plot, before the comic leads have exhausted their modestly amusing repertoires, this odd stoner/sci fi creature feature blows out of the gate and threatens - for about thirty minutes - to blow your mind. Then it doesn't.

As “cute and cuddly” as ever, and often downright hilarious.

So while this Spider-Man is, if anything, more competent than the first film it’s still not one that demands that you stick around after the credits. There’s nothing there.

Beyond Outrage reaches above and beyond most Hollywood underworld movies to deliver a tale of righteous revenge doled out only after showing us how much it is deserved.

An 'E.T.' knockoff that works.

In Let Me Explain, you’re never NOT aware that you’re watching a gifted, rubber-faced/rubber voiced performer (his “Laugh at My Pain” concert film was a surprising hit in 2011) work too hard to make inferior material go over.

So yes, even if you know how this story goes, there are moments that work wickedly well in between the needlessly drawn out ones, by which I mean the entire, predictable third act.

White House Down is a corker, real competition for “Fast & Furious 6″ as the dumbest fun you’ll have at the movies this summer.

The script here is pretty stale stuff, with an under-developed side story of the cop (Karen Mok) on Donako’s trail and dialogue (in English and Chinese) that is often banal.

The absurd turns the story takes to serve up streetwise and bloody "life lessons" for the kid will make any parent blanch and any movie lover roll his or her eyes.

The venerable acting firm of Smith-Kline & Scott Thomas make certain that this Paris trip is anything but a waste.

Get Santa is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce.

For all its stunning and stark wilderness settings (Spain and the Canary Islands), its stunning effects, technical proficiency and scriptural cleverness, Exodus is a chilly affair... It’s still an exciting, entertaining epic.

Gooding brings just enough streetwise credibility to make Brown work.

Clooney, for the first time in his directing career (“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”) never finds the sweet spot, and never quite wrestled the script into a shape entertaining enough to make the liberties he and Heslov took with the facts worth it.

A tragic quasi-musical that never quite finds its way.

Epic isn’t epic, but it isn’t half bad, either. It’s just that as high as the bar has been raised on this sort of animation, this is more evidence that a strong story is worth more than any next generation software.

The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy “In Living Color,” button down this judge and find ways to break formula and make him hilarious.

For all its filmmaking care and care-worn performances, is nothing more than a beach book, inconsequential and utterly out of place in January.

Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie. Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

There’s something so delicious when Brits such as Thompson and Irons sink their fangs – sorry – into Deep South dialect. Thompson devours scenery, supporting players and dialogue with every “Bless your heart, shooo-gah” in the script, and Irons curls his non-existent mustache with every syrupy zinger.

Like "42," Cesar Chavez lacks the budget to feel truly epic in scope. The violence is scattered, shocking and personal, the struggles within the union muted but the outrage — is palpable.

For all Singer’s expertise at making the fantastic real, all we’re left with here is an expensive-looking bauble – worth looking over, but not really anything to treasure.

What gives it’s juice is the supporting cast. John Bernthal (“The Walking Dead”) is credibly wary as the ex-con John begs to get him in the door of the drug world. And the terrific Michael Kenneth Williams is the first dealer he meets, a guy who pulls a gun on him just to test him.

The Liberator may be a Cliff Notes version of South American history, but Ramirez breathes life into it and makes us care.

Whatever its intent, White Bird in a Blizzard misuses most everybody involved, especially the dazzling young star of “The Descendants,””The Fault in Our Stars” and “Divergent.”

The film captures the magic and manic energy of the performances, the inventive choreography and spine-tingling tunes.

Sure, it’s good-looking, cautionary and clever enough. But there’s not much in this “Game” that you’d call thrilling or fun.

It’s a bit of a muddle and a touch too soap operatic. But Newton, Rose and Ejiofor give their characters and this story just enough pathos to make the history lessons sink in.

It's all quite lovely, mesmerizing – and right on the edge of sleep-inducing.

Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as The Call does at almost precisely the one hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour, this is a riveting, by the book kidnapping.

It’s too short to do justice to its subject, but in an era when young women build careers and get rich off “secret” sex tapes that somehow make their way onto the Internet, maybe that’s all this subject deserves. Lovelace was but an aberration, an amusing, then quaintly grim footnote on our way to a Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian future.

Parkland is a fascinating insider’s view of those fateful two days in November of 1963, when a president was murdered, his assassin was gunned down in custody and generations of conspiracies were born.

Blame it on the weak chemistry of the stars, blame it on the way the script refuses to let them develop chemistry and the perfunctory way the story is dispensed with, but the sparks aren’t there.

A movie comedy that is funnier in performance than it ever was as a script.

This dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be.

It barely has a fright in it on its own, this bloody, Mexican-made supernatural thriller set in the hill country near Tijuana. But open it with a hot “Blue is the Warmest Color” sex scene, toss in a few other hot and heavy moments and a generous helping of nudity and you can be sure, at least, of getting a Hollywood studio’s attention.

Like “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” it’s about human connections in a technologically warped world rendered lonely and unlivable by the lack of those connections.

For all its showmanship, Now You See Me has a lot less up its sleeve than it lets on.

It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

It’s preachier, more diverse in its casting. All of which make it more specific and limit it. Throw in generally lackluster performances and illogical plot twists and “Anarchy” is seriously crippled.

The tempered violence, the nature of the villains, the easy bonhomie of our leads and a cast peppered with great supporting players make Escape Plan go down easier than the other “Rambo/Last Man Standing/Expendables” pictures that brought these two aged action stars back from the dead.

It’s a smidge too cute and a bit too long, but Huard and Scott make this comical journey (in French and “Franglish” with English subtitles), a trip from indifference to kindness, incompetence to responsibility, a most rewarding reinvention of what “family” can mean.

It’s disappointing that Spurlock didn’t have the access, the footage or the spine to depict any of the cynicism behind such creations.

The aloof, guarded Cumberbatch plays Assange as a mixture of brilliance, hucksterism, ego and naivete. He carries the baggage of an actor who plays “smart,” with a menacing edge.

Director Allen Hughes ("The Book of Eli") hides the secrets well and stages a good fight and chase. But what's most entertaining about Brian Tucker's script is the lived-in feel it has.

Words and Pictures is the cloying title of a cloying little comedy made by talented people who, not that long ago, deserved better than this, and knew it.

The best of them you could certainly see as full length features, chilling little tastes of a complete vision — story, characters, horrific situations and visual aesthetic. The worst? Simply generic.

It’s just romantic enough and barely funny enough to qualify as a romantic comedy. But it works, despite never being graceful or unstuck enough to take flight.

Like Vin Diesel, it has bulk, lumbering clumsily along as it repeats Diesel’s greatest hits — the ones that don’t require him to drive a fast and furious car.

The diminutive McAvoy, trying his hand at all manner of action, may be hoping to become the Scottish Tom Cruise. But Welcome to the Punch shows he’s still more of a Scottish Michael J. Fox, an actor better served by roles with more charm and less grimacing than this one.

In detail and combat spectacle, Stalingrad is hard to beat. And whatever its failings, one can’t help but be curious about a story as connected to national identity as this one, a film that like today’s Russia, feels more Soviet than Russian.

If this sequel proves anything, it’s that more is not always better.

Lee, in a sort of humorless send-up of Tarantino, substitutes kinky for mystery, explicit sex and violence for sex and violence with real shock value. When it comes to this remake, you plainly can’t teach an oldboy like Lee new tricks.

A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.”

There’s no reason the missionary-recruiter turned stalker idea couldn’t work. But this one doesn’t.

If it’s not convincing as either a find-one’s-faith parable or clever spoof of pop Christianity, at least it’s relevant.

Some of the profane hip hop acts seem dated in the sea of upbeat soul, pop and alt-rock acts presented here. But Pearl Jam and Run-DMC, inspiring joyous sing-alongs to their hits, just seem timeless.

Divergent, the latest outcast-teen-battles-The-System thriller, is similar enough to “The Hunger Games” that hardcore Katniss fans may dismiss it. But it’s a more streamlined film, with a love story with genuine heat and deaths with genuine pathos.

Last Vegas isn’t “out there” in a “Hangover” sense. It’s comical comfort food, with actors doing the sorts of things they’ve done for decades. But even if this is the safest Vegas romp of them all, this cast never lets us forget that we’re in very good hands.

Among the players, the wild-haired Bardem stands out, and a vampy Diaz sets the stage for uninhibited future in villain roles, or deadly-sexy car sales.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is roughly twice as good as its predecessor, Planes, which was so story-and-laugh starved it would have given “direct-to-video” a bad name. Yes, there was nowhere to go but up.

Tommy Lee Jones gives us a saltier version of MacArthur than the image-conscious general ever let on to.

The design... is stunning, an improvement over 2006′s “300.” And the action never disappoints. It’s a pity this colorless cast doesn’t hold a candle to the Butler/Headey/Michael Fassbender/David Wenham crew of the original, that the writers couldn’t conjure up thrilling speeches to match the original.

Choppy and bordering on incoherent, Bullet to the Head is Stallone's answer to Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand," an action exercise in "Here's how we used to do it."

Fey plays this inner-outer conflict well. But at her most wide-eyed and vulnerable, she still has trouble making a romance credible, even with Rudd, edgy comedy’s puppy dog of a leading man.

A down-and-dirty genre picture that manages a couple of decent plot twists, a couple of passable car chases and two epic shoot-outs.

Modestly entertaining and uplifting version of a “greatest story” that has proven as malleable as it is timeless.

It’s too long and wildly uneven. And the longer it goes on, the more uneven and oddball it seems.

Red 2 goes down easily, from Marvin’s demented moments of relationship advice to Dame Helen’s tender and amusing “Hitchcock” reunion with Sir Anthony. There’s a knowing twinkle in their eyes, and in everybody else’s. “Yeah, we could’ve done a Bond film,” they seem to wink. “And it would’ve been a bloody fun one, at that.”

Minor moments of slapstick may tickle the kids, but anybody older, especially those who remember what Williams was like in his prime and how funny Stiller was just two “Museum” movies ago, will wish this tomb had stayed sealed.

A soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories.

For all the fun these folks could have had with Hercules maintaining the supernatural assistance facade, or denying it as his handlers gild his lily testifying that it’s true, the movie is content to just go through the motions.

It’s too bad the script lacks the sight gags or one-liners that could have made this good looking picture more animated.

Whatever the film’s other failings, it presents an incredible story with a credulous, approachable innocence that it to be envied, whether or not you believe a word of it.

While The Giver scores points for being smarter and deeper than “The Hunger Games” or its inferior photo-copy (“Divergent”), coming after all those other versions of this plot does neither it, nor us, any favors. The Giver has nothing new to offer.

Mumford and O’Leary get beyond the cardboard character “types” and make these people more interesting and conflicted than they first seem. And the claustrophobic milieu, just two people staring at long range video, punching buttons, maneuvering their Reaper and trying to make snap decisions that won’t haunt them, serve the movie well.

Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil. And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.

A genuine “bodice ripper” of a thriller, with the requisite heavy breathing that comes after said bodice is ripped. The sex isn’t explicit, but Olsen and Isaac suggest the heat that gives this doomed affair its momentum.

Rock is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.

The performances are perfunctory and the scenario standard-issue even if the execution of this no-budget thriller is top drawer.

"A Dame to Kill For” isn’t the shock to the system “Sin City” was. But whatever its plot repetition and warmed-over tough talk cost it, this is still a movie like few others you’ve ever seen, a 3D slice of Nihilistic noir that will have you narrating your own guts and guns story on the drive home, chewing on a toothpick as you do.

Manipulative, contrived, melodramatic — all labels we slap on that most perfectly titled movie genre, “the weeper.” All fit If I Stay like original packaging.

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory, something more than Radcliffe’s Ig explaining his protrusions to one and all with “They’re horns. It’s a crazy story.”

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

The entire affair feels malnourished, under-rehearsed and starved of energy.

It’s just too much — too much graphic violence, too many plot wrinkles, too much stupidity, too many supporting players to track...For a movie as physically fit as this one wants to be, Pain & Gain is carrying way too much extra weight.

Robert Duvall may be 83, but he’s still up to playing a real Texas hell raiser on the screen. He can hold his own with bad hombres.