Band of Robbers just plain doesn’t work, to the extent that I’m almost regretful that the attempted schoolroom bans on Twain’s work weren’t more effective over the years, as they might have spared me watching it.

This is a bland, nearly incompetent animated movie.

Garrel judges none of these people for their bad choices, but rather acknowledges that these things happen all time. It’s a sentiment as timeless as the look of the picture, a French New Wave throwback shot on 35mm film which could take place decades ago or in the current day. C’est la vie.

One of the loudest laughs arrives when we get to enjoy a scowling James re-imagined as a game character. Points for greater diversity in the cast as well, but, if there is a second sequel in the offing, please allow the women to be more than the sum of their body parts.

As an action movie and as a historical document, it is a bombastic and wholly inauthentic mess that displays precious little interest in the men whose actions and sacrifices it purports to honor.

I want to recommend Nelson's film in spite of how misconceived it is simply because it asks interesting questions, albeit in some of the most banal ways imaginable.

All goodwill from that first hour is dead and buried by the last scene, abandoned by a screenwriter and director who had no idea where to take this story.

Its plot is an unholy blending of “Taken," “The Searchers” and "Angel Heart." As befitting a January release, it’s also an early candidate for the 2016 worst movies list.

The film’s final scene is both charming and hilarious and puts a delightful ribbon on top of what the film’s opening so sneakily established.

Although nowhere near as obnoxious as such recent faith-based offerings as “God’s Not Dead” and “Do You Believe?,” The Masked Saint is still kind of a chore to sit through, even for those predisposed to like anything that brings together Christian faith and sleeper holds.

Lamb is empathetic and untrustworthy, haunting but often unpersuasive. In the end it's hard to say what the film's point is. But it lingers in the mind.

Whatever difference Zada's relatively minimalist approach to scenes might make, it does not outweigh the overarching feeling that the movie falls into a predictable, repetitive routine.

It’s a rambunctious, often hilarious, and carefully-constructed story about a teenage boy starting to question his sexuality in the midst of his Evangelical Christian world.

Like “Kaguya,” it functions as a highly sensitive and empathetic consideration of the situation of women in Japanese society—but it’s also a breathtaking work of art on its own.

For all its visual audacity and honest feeling, Anomalisa is a modest, even slight work, aesthetically sealed off from the same reality it engages.... But there's so much beauty and sadness in it, and so many exquisitely conceived scenes (including an impromptu musical performance that ranks with Kaufman's greatest moments), that it would be miserly to underrate it.

The idea of remaking "Point Break" was not necessarily a bad idea, I suppose, but whatever charms that film might have had, they are utterly lost on the people behind this embarrassment.

Such a hit-and-miss mess that it makes the wild-and-crazy-to-the-point-of-sometimes-flailing tenor of “Anchorman” and other such Ferrell vehicles feel like finely-tuned Logitech vehicles.

Joy doesn’t work entirely, and the structure set up so clearly in the opening sequence is dropped early on for no apparent reason, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t get carried away at the story of a mop sweeping the nation. It’s a lunatic “Mildred Pierce," without the murder.

In my view, it’s one of the most genuinely, and valuably, patriotic films any American has ever made.

Will Smith’s performance as Omalu is lovely: small-scaled, precise, imbued with righteousness but not tritely pious.

If you prefer acting prowess over “Star Wars,” you won’t do better at year’s end than observing Rampling (she of the withering stare) and Courtenay (he of the soulful gaze), two stalwarts of that wonderful wave of British talent that hit our shores in the ‘60s, as they perform a finely calibrated pas de deux.

An impressive display of film craft and a profoundly ugly movie—so gleeful in its violence and so nihilistic in its world view that it feels as though the director is daring his detractors to see it as a confirmation of their worst fears about his art.

Our favorite films often drop questions like these into our lives, allowing us to appreciate the world a little differently than before we saw them. The Revenant has this power. It lingers. It hangs in the back of your mind like the best classic parables of man vs. nature. It will stay there for quite some time.

Worse still: because The Emperor's New Clothes is often beholden to the whims of Brand (star of "Get Him to the Greek," and that tedious "Arthur" remake nobody saw), it too often feels like "Button-Pushing Encounters with Russell Brand."

Come for the murky action, and stay for the shudder-inducing feeling of nostalgia for Mao's Cultural Revolution. It's a very odd movie, indeed.

Willis really might as well have phoned in his performance. Part of me doesn’t blame him, but another part of me would like him to cut it out.

The opening party represents what is best about the movie: it's pure mayhem and it's entirely silly.

As the themes, characters and ideas from the first two parts begin to reappear, so too do full-figured women and gorgeous, semi-nude men right out of the earthly kingdoms of Pasolini.