The film plays out mostly like an occasionally above-average episode of the show.

Feig keeps throwing so much stuff at you — gross-out gags, chases, brutal violence, not to mention actors working their heads off — that he finally wears down your resistance. In the end, I admired him for keeping this ramshackle construction together, casting performers I adore, and proving that Melissa McCarthy can, indeed, hold a gun. A mixed victory. A definitively mixed review.

After a while, the film feels more like a cute conceit that hasn’t really been developed further. It’s intriguing, and very well-acted, but empty.

Lafleur’s film is a quiet trifle that sneaks up on you, like a pleasant dream you might have and then gradually forget. Its very slightness is its greatest weapon.

By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya’s fragile, unguarded soul through Harley’s eyes, and the film’s discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

The film arrives with both too much and too little to say. It comes at us in choppy bursts of brilliance and dopiness. That is at once its great charm and its great curse.

There are things in San Andreas that no one would have dreamed of seeing 40 years ago, when "Earthquake" (with its tacky, plaster-cracking “Sensurround”) represented the state of the art. But nothing means anything. The spectacle feels less earned than Dwayne Johnson’s biceps, which are ludicrous but not hollow.

I found myself often enraptured by this sad little story. Its weird narrative of faith healing serves as an intriguing diversion from the real matter at hand — the notion that grace lies in the search for help, rather than the finding of it.

No. Nope. Uh-uh.

When Marnie Was There may start off a bit awkwardly, but it'll have you bathing in your own tears by the time it's over.

If you’re going to remake Poltergeist without the whole TV angle, "Insidious" already kind of did that. To be fair, this new Poltergeist isn’t anything special, either. But it’s not a travesty, and that feels like cause for brief celebration.

It’s so smart, so winsome, so utterly rejuvenating that you’ll have to wait until your eyes have dried and your buzz has worn off before you can begin to argue with it. And you should argue with it — even if you had a blast, as I did, and want to see it again with the kids, as I do — because it’s a major pop-culture statement with all sorts of implications, both vital and nutty.

Potent enough to make me wish it were less clunky. It certainly won’t convert the jingoist fighting keyboardists, who probably won’t care that the president at the time the film is set — 2010 — is Obama, under whose watch the use of warrior drones has escalated exponentially. For them, Dick Cheney’s “dark side” still shines brightly.

I’m also guessing Kendrick did not want to come back. I’ve never seen her so flat-out bad — distracted, depressed, conviction-less. Anna, I still adore you, but you should have tried to make it work.

Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it.

The tagline for Tiller Russell’s riveting new documentary, The Seven Five is “Meet the dirtiest cop in NYC history,” which I suspect does a profound disservice to a lot of other NYC policemen, past and present — although none of them are likely to write letters of complaint.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s haunting, a sort of one-stop shop for a range of cultural anxieties — plague, environmental catastrophe, big government threatening the sanctity of home and family.

A mixture of mild pleasures and deep disappointments.

Days of Grace is strong, brutal, despairing stuff. It’s also somewhat anticlimactic, by design.

What makes it work is the solemn efficiency of director David Oelhoffen’s storytelling and the quiet intensity of the two leads.

Welcome to Me might as well have been called The Kristen Wiig Show, for better or for worse. It makes a splendid showcase for the brilliant actress’s brand of mousy absurdism, and for her ability to modulate tone. The film dances between hilarity and disquiet, between goofiness and pathos. But I’m not even sure it can be called a movie; it feels like a setup and a character in search of a story.

Though a mess by all conventional narrative standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a fascinating case study in the rules of “universe” storytelling. Chief among them is that a film may not be self-contained — it must constantly allude to worlds outside its own. Marvel fans want extra characters, extra subplots, in-jokes that pander to their supposed breadth of knowledge. They don’t want closure.

If only Crowe brought the same subtlety to his direction that he brings to his performance.

The Age of Adaline, for its part, delivers the twists and turns of its fantastical plot with elegance and confidence. Here, the weak romance threatens to bring everything down.

Fun, touching, and expertly assembled.

Most of The Dead Lands, in fact, adheres to a fairly simple action film template. But the dynamic between the characters works because Fraser keeps it tough.

A story this dense with incident, character, and history needs to breathe a little — think "The Lives of Others," or "Zodiac" — but Child 44 has no rhythm. It’s blunt, rushed, and scattershot. You're exhausted, bored, and confused by it at the same time.

Nobody was expecting much from Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, but did it have to be this unimaginative and lifeless?