The kid is the most mature person on screen. Otherwise, it is gripe, gripe, gripe and snipe, snipe, snipe, all served family style with a bare minimum of relatability.

No matter how feverishly Gilliam directs and no matter how enthusiastically his actors act, the whole thing remains too, er, theoretical.

A dynamite thriller.

The Guest takes its time revealing what is really going on, and has a lot of fun in that slow reveal process.

Cave's soulful performance, shot in real-time and in extreme close-up, is that much more impressive once you realize he's playing a song for Forsyth and Pollard before he's performed it in front of a live audience.

What’s intriguing about The Maze Runner – for a long time, at least – is the way it tells us a story we think we’ve heard countless times before but with a refreshingly different tone and degree of detail.

Kirkland does some fine work here, but her Margaret deserves a better script and a better movie.

Demoustier is a charming young actress. And there are clearly interesting ideas taking flight here. It’s the execution of the flight plan that keeps them from reaching their destination.

Bailey has achieved the purpose she set out at the film’s start. She’s made a film that’s optimistic, ultimately. But it would have benefitted from being a lot more real.

The movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect.

The Homestretch invites you to empathize with its subjects, to worry with them, to laugh with them, to worry about them. It’s engaging and compelling viewing.

The Green Prince gets its power from the back-and-forth of listening to each side tell its story, and from the moment the two sides converge in a final, very different collaboration in the United States.

Dolphin Tale 2 tries to do too much, with too many stories shoehorned in, but the overall effect is emotional and sweet.

I wish the film withheld more information from its audience to raise the overall tension but it’s a solid genre pic, made so primarily by two entirely committed performances from its talented leads.

The star rating at the top would be two-and-a-half if I were only judging what's on the screen. The other half-star is for audacity.

It asks a lot of us. In fact it asks us to set aside everything we've been conditioned to think movies are, and roll with a different way of seeing and hearing things, and connect.

As we enter this season of big, important awards contenders that “matter,” The Skeleton Twins is a small, intimate gem that might truly matter.

In order to keep the flimsy narrative going, both allegedly brilliant characters are forced to act like morons throughout.

My Old Lady is pretty compelling viewing, mostly thanks to Kline, who gives a career-high performance here.

The Drop is just how I like my Tom Hardy – in nearly every scene.

The best things about Parker are the two lead actors. Although working with material that is lackluster even by his standards, Statham manages to demonstrate a commanding screen presence that cannot be dismissed. Opposite him, Lopez delivers one of her more convincing performances.

In extending itself to reach a conventional feature length, however, it becomes a below-average programmer in which brief moments of interest are interrupted by long stretches of boredom.

Simply put, this is one of the craziest films to come along in a while and I can confidently say that anyone who sees it will either hail it is some kind of crackpot masterpiece or dismiss it as one of the silliest damn things they've ever seen.

Cheaply made, dramatically inept and staggeringly dull despite a running time that only clocks in at maybe 80 minutes tops before the end credits begin, it is so devoid of passion, energy and intelligence that it makes one wonder why those responsible even bothered to make it in the first place.

The problem with Pawn Shop Chronicles is not the fact that it is a clone of "Pulp Fiction." The problem is that it is a lousy clone.

Intelligently conceived, beautifully executed and filled with surprisingly convincing performances all around... We Are What We Are is that rare horror film that could play at both arthouse and grindhouse theaters without seemingly out of place at either one.

The Trials of Muhammad Ali a unique and inspiring viewing experience.

The end result is the kind of vaguely distasteful Yuletide concoction that viewers normally find playing on cable channels that they don't even realize that they have.