To work onscreen, Thank You for Smoking needed to be fast, scruffy, and offhand. But even the good lines here last a self-congratulatory beat too long. Aaron Eckhart is likable, but he's too hangdog and naturalistic for a part that could have used a brisk young Jack Lemmon type.

Kill Bill is about nothing more (or less) than its director's passion for the mindless action pictures that got him through adolescence. It isn't sex without love: It's an orgy with just enough love.

The dogs learn to fight for themselves and eventually tangle with a (computer-generated) leopard seal in the movie's most thrilling encounter.

Watching it, I was excited that such a strange piece of science fiction got made—and disappointed to realize that it is strange in just about all the ways that Interstellar is. But while even Nolan’s detractors couldn’t deny his skill at manufacturing awe, the primary emotion that Arrival evokes is puzzlement.

A big part of the reason for this movie's nose dive around the one-hour mark is that, seen up close, the Infected just aren't that scary.

A thriller of serpentine excitement all the way up to that dud of a climax.

Full Throttle is full-throttle camp: It's like a third-rate Austin Powers picture cut to the whacking, attention-deficit-disorder tempo of "Moulin Rouge."

A too-pat but very funny comedy.

The film is seamlessly made, its mood balanced dreamily between sexy-funny and sexy-scary.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

A documentary about one of the most mediated, image-conscious people on the planet sounds like an oxymoron, and though director Lana Wilson is no hagiographer, Miss Americana is hardly warts-and-all.

One magnificent piece of agitprop.

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

The movie's more than cute, funny, and (at 81 minutes) brisk enough to move families in and out of the multiplex in mass quantities, like the social insects we are.

Mostly, the jokes and the recurrent attempts to tweak the superhero genre serve as a reminder that somebody else has already done it better. Sure, Megamind is pretty good. But why settle for less when you the best is already available on DVD?

Pure misery.

It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness.

Until its resolution, Bad Times is a fun-enough romp through retro genre pleasures. But when it drags in the real world in its final scenes, it reveals itself to be just as fatuous as most such nostalgic pastiches tend to be.

Its fancifulness is at times too clunky, its pathos too strained. But Barnz has a secret weapon, one that's 4 feet tall and looks to weigh about 60 pounds: Elle Fanning.

Fascinating for the issues--ethical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic--it raises. But it doesn't fully come together.

I was onboard with the gentle charm of Safety Not Guaranteed until these last few scenes, when the genuine trauma suffered by these characters - especially Kenneth, whose paranoia and isolationism seem like symptoms of real mental illness - gets glossed over in an unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending.

For a movie about the policing of borders, couldn't this one have policed a firmer one, between credibility and incredibility? Between seriousness and self-seriousness?

The movie is sweet but deeply suspect: It's like "Lost Horizon" re-imagined by a realtor.

This kind of movie is superfluous yet strangely compelling. We don't need to see Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman sing a duet next to a Roman fountain any more than we need to see an elephant pirouette in a tutu, but wouldn't you be crazy to pass up the opportunity to see either?

Although Dolan has called it by far his most accessible film, Tom at the Farm is hardly paint-by-numbers.

The sum amounts to far less than its parts, but oh, what parts!

A simple, chronological history, narrated with melancholy gravitas by Morgan Freeman.

The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy.