The only surprise about U-Turn is the good reviews it got from people who should know better.

ATHF can seem brilliantly deconstructive one moment and stupefyingly boring the next--or to provide a more accurate ratio, it can follow five brilliant seconds with five straight minutes of boredom.

The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag.

In some strange way, I admire the enterprise. Like his Gerrys, Van Sant doesn't seem to know where he's going to wind up when he embarks on these journeys. The ether that seeps into his head might be the price we have to pay for his keeping his mind so open.

What's meant (I think) to be a "f*** you" to action-movie conventions reads instead as a "f*** you" to the audience. Observe and Report tickets should come with a free breath mint, because however hard you've been laughing, that ending leaves a seriously bad taste in your mouth.

Magnificent Seven has one and only true goal: It’s a new Hollywood crack at good, old-timey entertainment.

Maybe the movie would work better if, like Se7en, it were set in an unnamed noir city instead of a real police department with real abuses, or if the script relied on more than genre shorthand to sell its noxious ending. As things stand, however, the only way to enjoy The Little Things is to ignore the big things.

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.

Lousy remake.

Speaking for myself, I’m fine with the concept of terminating The Terminator — and there’s no need to blue-orb back any more augmented hitmen or - women to do it.

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

Even knowing what's likely to come-the doors opening on their own, the skeptical characters scoffing at metaphysical explanations, the unheeded warnings from paranormally gifted guests-doesn't make it any less nailbiting to watch.

A film adaptation should, of course, treat its source material as inspiration rather than dogma. But did Burton have to get the books so ENTIRELY wrong?

For all of Wrinkle’s unevenness, DuVernay still manages to draw out some glimpses of more intimate beauty, the kind that one expects from the filmmaker.

Book Club may in the end be little more than an excuse for a senior sex comedy, and a somewhat sleepy one at that, but at least it understands the weird energy of enjoying something you know you shouldn’t.

For all The Blind Side's flaws, it's impossible not to get caught up in Michael Oher's life.

A movie so lifeless you’d have more fun guessing the Netflix niche group that the production is supposed to satisfy.

It’s goofy as hell and borderline inexcusable at times, but it’s also kind of glorious.

It’s not that I wish Aline took more advantage of its fictional liberties to mock or undermine Céline Dion. I just wish it had much more to say about something—such as child stardom, what it’s like to move from working-class margins to opulence, or the simultaneously reverent and condescending relationship that pop culture had with Dion at her 1990s peak

Malick has moved from self-discovery to self-affirmation; he knows exactly what he’s looking for, and Knight of Cups, for all its splendor, made me wish that he could take a swig and forget.

And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character--Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday--is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement

It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

For the first half of Looking for Comedy, Brooks' hangdog demeanor performs reliably, and there are plenty of solid laughs.

Because I'm a sucker--I was entertained...The script is good at making you think that it has better cards than it really does. And the actors constitute a royal flush--OK, OK, enough with the poker metaphors.

Though much of the action in Shooter is beautifully photographed, the movie's force is as a blunt instrument of metaphor. Shooter is a video-game-fantasy version of the 2006 midterm elections, a howl of rage at the hypocrisy of the Bush presidency and the Iraq war.

Pretty much ill-conceived from the ground up but saved by a couple of strong performances and a wealth of well-researched period detail.

Has a routine finish but up to that point is a more than decent thriller--or, given its taut self-containment, a more than decent Hitchcockian "exercise in suspense."

For a filmmaker who in Videodrome and Dead Ringers so elegantly broached the unspeakable, Cronenberg has here made a picture that is all surface.