A movie based on a toy should be a whole lot more fun than this.

For all of the film's ideas of art and entertainment, it might just forever change your preconceptions of the firework.

It's a quiet and gentle film, emotional but not manipulatively sentimental, sad but not nihilistic, Marilyn Manson epigram and Goth-font chapter markers notwithstanding.

Coming Through the Rye may be the closest we’ll ever get cinematically to the novel. And in being so far away from it, it’s close enough.

As much as I wanted to be transported to the world of Miss Hokusai, it felt more like an analytical examination of a period and one of its most artistic voices, and I could never quite engage with that aspect of it.

What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between the United States and Mexico in which it is set.

Christine, centered on a riveting and at times unbearably emotional performance by Rebecca Hall, attempts to give a three-dimensional and respectful-yet-honest portrait of a complex woman. Sometimes the film is successful in this, sometimes it's not.

Braga has created a formidable force of nature in Clara.

It is purposefully slow, a film meant to be lived in and considered carefully when it’s done. Almost none of it feels as “important” as my teacher explained and yet it is still great drama.

Kevin Hart: What Now? is Kevin Hart at the top of his game.

Demme’s concert films aren’t just recordings of events—they’re cinematic embodiments of their musicians, capturing in a moment an energy that transcends time.

Tower is explanatory journalism and history, but also personally expressive, and the two impulses never cancel each other out.

As hard as it is to admit, Guest’s once-incisive satirical bite has grown dull in its familiarity. He doesn’t seem to be having as much fun here and neither are we.

It goes very far south, with two plot reveals that are among the most ludicrous that I’ve experienced in quite some time.

You shouldn't watch Shin Godzilla for Godzilla alone. He's not really the star of the film—Yaguchi and the rest of his human adversaries are. They credibly resist the end of the world with ingenuity and teamwork, making Shin Godzilla just as winningly optimistic as it is pleasurably eccentric.

Kevin Pollak's raunchy comedy The Late Bloomer is merely cheesy and horny, but rarely amusing.

Is it worth seeing? Yes, but only if you enjoy being grossed out.

The movie’s impersonal, conventional telling of a reasonably standard male coming-of-age story almost tends to make the punk milieu it depicts beside the point.

This decidedly dark and super-violent South Korean crime drama from Kim Sung-su tells a tale so jam-packed with betrayals, double-crosses and alleged authority figures that even the most dedicated of genre buffs may find it too unrelentingly grim and cynical for their tastes.

A spectacularly foursquare “family is what you make it” redemption story. The kind of thing that film critics like to dismiss as “looking like a made-for-TV movie,” as if that comparison/analogy even holds as a dismissal anymore.

Ravager does have an internal logic that makes its time and subplot-jumping story easy to follow. But this new Phantasm will not be of interest to anyone who doesn't already know who the Tall Man is, or why he needs to be stopped.

This isn’t a film that makes a big deal of its contemporary authenticity; it wears its carefully measured elements lightly, the better to shine a light on its intriguing characters.

Newtown is being characterized as an apolitical documentary, just a portrait of Newtown before, during and after the shootings, but that's not entirely true.

A gentle, genuine trip down memory lane that features one of our best actresses in the kind of role she doesn’t get to play that often, and another great turn in the arc of an independent film icon.

Under the Shadow, a Farsi-language debut feature written and directed by Babak Anvari, creates a world where reality itself is suspect. In a year filled with great first features, add Under the Shadow to the list.

Better than middling as it sidesteps the trap of simply pandering to its youthful demo with cheap laughs and silly mugging.

It’s just a flat and suspense-free tale of pretty people in peril.

Like many Mel Gibson films, as well as such revenge-driven revisionist Westerns as "Posse" and "Django Unchained," The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing object, passionate and furious and shameless and slick, distorting history in both defensible and problematic ways.

The film builds its case piece by shattering piece, inspiring levels of shock and outrage that stun the viewer, leaving one shaken and disturbed before closing out on a visual note of hope designed to keep us on the hook as advocates for change.

It’s a well-made, accomplished piece of filmmaking that works because of how it focuses such a large case down to its key players, thereby illuminating how something like this could happen to anyone.

Long Way North is a different vision, using clear-defined colors, shapes and shadows for hand-drawn beauty, giving the film a bold, intricately-cut-construction-paper look. Especially as the characters are surrounded by ice and cold, the stark white images prove simple yet expressive.

A figure as unusual and distinctive as Fields certainly deserves a commemoration. The bad news here is that he deserves better than what Danny Says serves up.

All movies are manipulative by default; the effectiveness of that manipulation is the more valid measurement to inspect. On that scale, A Man Called Ove is a morbidly funny and moving success.

At the nasty center of the otherwise dutiful Denial is a slimy, self-aggrandizing upper-class blowhard of a bigot who believes he has every right to circulate hateful and hurtful falsehoods to his followers.

Its beating heart is in a story of youth. Reckless, fearless, joyous, always-moving youth.

A furious and often terrifying documentary about the militarization of US police.

If smart dumb comedies hold a place in your heart, you'll like Masterminds. The main characters are masterminds only in their own heads, and the thoughts that tumble out of their mouths are as nonsensical as they are sincere.

Because even though I’d just seen the exact same movie my son had, I wasn’t sure I completely understood it, either.

It’s a fairly familiar critique of patriarchy from a humanist and feminist perspective, but one put across with some very impressive filmmaking skills by a first-time director.

While Kim’s filmmaking is typically engaging, it’s really Song Kang-ho who carries the viewer’s interest.

The entire documentary is unnerving. Focusing on four separate rape cases with eerie similarities, Audrie & Daisy is a stark portrait of a problem which is not in any way local, aberrant, or random. The problem is systemic.

The end result is a sturdy and frequently dazzling version of the material that should leave audiences swooning with delight.

A frustrating missed opportunity, The Lovers and the Despot takes a fascinating story about filmmaking, politics, kidnapping and propaganda and gives us almost no insight into the work of its two main characters, a director and his actress wife.

Tim Roth gives a career-high performance in this meticulous, disturbing film written and directed by Michel Franco.

Kroll and Slate, though, give performances that have the opposite effect. They aren't the best people, but the relative goodness of their intentions is never in doubt. My Blind Brother puts these characters through the comic wringer, but the humor is founded on the characters and their flaws, not the circumstances.

I can’t say this is the best film you will see all year, but I can assure you won’t see another one like it again for a long time.

The film's hazing scenes evoke the boot camp sequences in "Full Metal Jacket" but without the merciless coldness, because the film's hero, Brad (newcomer Ben Schnetzer, in a career-making star turn) desperately wants to belong to the organization.

Zippy and zany, cute and cuddly, Storks manages to balance wild humor with winning heart—for the most part.

Seeing how freakishly gifted he is and watching his ascendance is a thrill, and Cantor keeps the pacing moving crisply.

Southwest of Salem has an investigative questioning bent, but it is always clear in its attitudes about the four co-defendants. It is a powerful act of advocacy. It's hard to look at these events in any light other than that a terrible miscarriage of justice has taken place.

At least with its wide scope, Maya Angelou and Still I Rise shows that her time on Earth was about more than being an author, poet, civil rights activist, a mother, a dancer, a singer, a film director, producer, journalist and much more. Her life was poetry itself.

A low-key and intelligent character study, Miss Stevens doesn’t escape from its indie-film commonplaces often enough to become really distinctive, but it has enough conscientiousness about its people that it doesn’t let the commonplaces fester into movie-sinking clichés.

You know you're in trouble with a film when you're so bored by it that you wind up asking why things seem so implausible.

In focusing on the years when the band became the first ever to mount several world-spanning tours, it offers two things at once: a history of the Beatles during the years of their initial success; and a tribute to the group’s powers as a live act.

There is a welcome sense of familiarity in Bridget Jones's Baby — but also of the fresh and au courant.

Gosling and Stone get these characters, finding grace in their movement but emotional depth in their arcs; Stone has never been better.

As is often the case with Berg’s films, it’s technically accomplished, but it’s lacking the depth of a project that comes from a creative spark. Everything here feels routine—more like an inevitability than a work of art or even a piece of entertainment.

If you ever wanted to see a wartime movie that feels directed by a kinder, gentler Michael Bay, Come What May is right up your alley. It plays like a more cultured — and very French — version of “Pearl Harbor," complete with bad CGI battle sequences, jaw-dropping plot coincidences, over-the-top nationalistic gestures and dialogue that often sounds swiped from a soap opera.

You’ve seen this movie before. You’ve seen it in the past month, actually: It was called “The Hollars,” directed by and starring John Krasinski. But while that film hit every clichéd note you’d expect, despite its good intentions and great ensemble cast, Other People breathes new life into the formulaic, dark comedy about death.

It seems unlikely that Phiona Mutesi ever imagined her life would one day be the subject of a Disney film. But she certainly learned that life is full of surprises. When it comes to movie surprises, Queen of Katwe is a truly pleasant one.

Despite my issues with the structure of Snowden, there are numerous accomplished scenes and the film is carried throughout by Gordon-Levitt.

What’s scarier—someone yelling boo or the sound of someone, or something, whispering it in the distance? Blair Witch has plenty of yelling, but not nearly enough that gets under your skin.

Moonlight is a film that is both lyrical and deeply grounded in its character work, a balancing act that’s breathtaking to behold. It is one of those rare pieces of filmmaking that stays completely focused on its characters while also feeling like it’s dealing with universal themes about identity, sexuality, family, and, most of all, masculinity.

What’s most important to Nichols’ vision is how much trust he has in his two leads, and what they give back to him in exchange for that trust.

It’s a movie designed to simultaneously challenge viewers, move them and get them talking. For the most part, it succeeds.

While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.

More than just catnip for Trekkies. It’s also an often painful examination of the rocky father/son relationship that existed between filmmaker Adam Nimoy and his famous father, Leonard.

Curiously, there’s virtually no mention of religion in the film. For that matter, politics creep into the tale only obliquely, and later. It appears we’re meant to understand that the band’s music and Farah’s lyrics have an edge of protest, but this is registered only as a very general sort of frustration and discontent.

The film tries to pack in a little bit too much in its running time, and there isn't a comedic moment until well into the film, a strange choice in a movie for kids, but The Wild Life has its moments of charm, hilarity, and slapstick that worked really well.

Kicks is knowing and innocent, profound and goofy.

The horrors of Demon are disturbing because you can see how ordinary they might seem to anyone who isn't paying enough attention.

They all ultimately seem as if they are participating in a dubious enterprise, devised by gifted individuals who somehow can't take a big picture view of a story that would seem to demand one. London Road is brilliant in all the wrong ways.

Author is a particular kind of documentary: a first-person account of the creation of a myth by its creator. As such, it poses all sorts of questions about the intersection of art, celebrity and psychological disturbance in our media culture, but it also gives us Laura Albert as a shape-shifting artist of astonishing talent, resourcefulness and originality.

This is first and foremost Eastwood’s movie and if he wants to feature his incongruous tinkling piano-bar jazz on the soundtrack, that is his prerogative.

The sheer talent of the cast here sometimes provides enough depth to get audience members to the climactic shoot-out, and there are a few definite MVPs in terms of ensemble, but it’s hard to envision this film having anywhere near the cinematic legacy of those that inspired it.

The collage film Cameraperson is one of the most original, challenging, sometimes infuriating documentaries of recent times.

A rather terrible comedy-satire, bears the DNA of at least two strains of terrible films.

Its story is as common as sunlight, but the entertainment can be just as warm.

Antibirth is novel, mysterious, and sometimes even dangerous enough to suck you in if you surrender to its confrontational, avant garde style.

The scenes of wretched debauchery pile up, and in a film only 88 minutes long it's a tough slog. It's difficult to perceive what story is actually being told. There's a lot to look at, colors, light, drugs and nudity, and much of it looks really good. But there's nothing else to latch onto.

As conventional and stiff as Max Rose itself is, Lewis’ performance in it is full of virtues: he’s committed, disciplined, and entirely credible.

Yoga Hosers is tiring, and not because it's dumb or inherently obnoxious. No, as RogerEbert.com's resident Kevin Smith apologist, it pains me to say this, but: this movie should have been made by someone with more discipline.

A twisty, Hitchcockian thriller mixed with trippy moments of magical realism. And if that doesn’t sound on paper like it would work, well, it does. And it doesn’t.

Buried beneath this melodrama—but shining through nearly enough to justify a look — one can see the film that could have been, as anchored by great performances and emotional truth. It’s just lost in the fog.

My diagnosis of why Morgan malfunctions as a chilling plunge into blood-splattered mayhem is that, before the midway point, it is pretty obvious what the eventual outcome and supposed big reveal will be. This is not the fault of the actors necessarily — there are highly respected talents involved here. It is just that we have seen most of this unfold before.

The arbitrary value of life in I Am Not a Serial Killer makes its nature as an ostensibly character-driven mystery that much harder to swallow. Don't bother with this nonsensical time-waster.

The fun of the film (and it is often fun) is in the complexities of interconnections, and the sheer number of criminals raging through this tiny area, outnumbering the upstanding citizens by the looks of it.

The movie does pretty well as a treatment of identity and selfhood in a social landscape that grows increasingly alienating as it becomes more transparent. But it somehow fails to wholly satisfy.

Italian drama Mia Madre is an either/or film, a humorous and poignant character study that frequently becomes an ensemble piece.

The Intervention is no embarrassment, and any time a woman is allowed to direct a film benefits the cause. But if DuVall’s purpose was to provide a snapshot of her generation, she should have sharpened her focus and dug a little deeper.

On paper, it feels like a can’t-miss, especially when one considers how much it plays with themes that Van Sant has often - brilliantly explored before. Movies don’t exist on paper. And this one’s a mess.

The performances are really strong, though. That’s what’s so frustrating; you just know there’s a better movie in here waiting to burst free.

Just good enough to make you wish that it were better.

Mechanic: Resurrection suffers from a storyline and script that strains credulity and insults intelligence even by the low bar set by the majority of contemporary action movies.

This down-to-earth approach works surprisingly well because Southside with You never loses sight of the primary tenet of a great romantic comedy: All you need is two people whom the audience wants to see get together—then you put them together.

Like a lot of films of this breed, Don’t Breathe gets a little less interesting as it proceeds to its inevitable conclusion, replacing tension with shock value, but it works so well up to that point that your heart will likely be beating too fast to care.

The process of transformation is the story, and the story truly belongs to the artist.

The mosaic arrangement of material ensures that no one subject can be covered in detail -- the sum total sometimes plays like a very good themed edition of "CBS News Sunday Morning" but with a wickedly funny narrator -- and a couple of segments, notably one about a rehab clinic for gaming addicts, feel intellectually undercooked.