The semi-documentary format and the cast’s age could have been used to undermine or examine the ways male bonding in films is used to erase or denigrate women. Instead, the twists are simply used to excuse the usual tropes.

Part of what’s made this middling action movie so durable—besides its ready-made “Movies For Guys Who Like Movies” template—is how endearingly uncool Harley and Marlboro are, as a biker and a cowboy who don’t really belong to any particular time and place.

At every possible turn, the film chooses to take the dumbest and most reductive path. It remains semi-watchable nonetheless, which is a testament to the skill of its four lead actors, who valiantly struggle to remain truthful.

There’s a certain undeniable gravity to John’s tragic arc. But Dawn Patrol feels distended and awkwardly paced despite a lean, 87-minute runtime.

Mauriac’s portrait of a society obsessed with family honor and the appearance of propriety at all costs comes through strongly, but that can’t entirely compensate for a character study with a hard-working vacuum at its center. Like Keanu Reeves, Tautou requires a perfect fit; when she tries to stretch, she gets stranded.

The film struggles in vain to balance petty infidelities and other personal crises with displacement, famine, and death.

What’s most frustrating about The Captive is that it includes all the elements for a potentially great Egoyan movie—they’re just buried in the mountain of schlock.

Despite strenuous efforts, 24 Days fails to make the case that Halimi would be alive now had the anti-Semitism of his abductors been properly recognized. And since that’s the film’s sole reason for existence, there’s not much else to say.

Drenner’s overall approach here is too limiting for a character sketch—which may be why That Guy Dick Miller frequently veers off-topic.

Tomorrowland comes across as a grinning rictus of a movie, a desperate door-to-door evangelist trying to force its foot into the door and push its salvation by any means possible.

Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often, it’s frustrating: It’s a film without a net, and it tends to land with a thud.

Maleficent is out of balance in all sorts of ways. The effective silent sequences conflict with the frustratingly talky ones. The new material fits poorly with moments that directly quote the classic.

Billy Jack is a film of violent contradictions. It is a fortysomething über-square’s tribute to the promise and potential of the hippies, as well as an intensely violent homage to non-violence.

The accumulation of weird incidents and fake-outs doesn’t lead anywhere productive. That’s the problem with Dupieux’s vacant brand of surrealism: If you just keep pulling out the rug, there will never be anything to stand on.

Thompson makes Ruskin such a cardboard villain, playing on stereotypes of the cold, stuffy intellectual, that she turns Gray’s story into a tastefully dreary domestic-prison saga.

Thanks to Sandler, Barrymore, and South Africa’s natural beauty, Blended is far more palatable and bearable than it has any right to be; it’s fluff that rises to the level of innocuous disposability.

Its attempts to force comedy, tragedy, farce, action, and melodrama into the same story never quite fit.

Title notwithstanding, Somewhere Slow doesn’t dawdle and luxuriate; everything is presented right up front, then underlined three or four times for good measure.

While there are individual delights within Pitch Perfect 2’s 115 minutes, they don’t add up to a functional, coherent film. There’s no harmony, only loud grandstanding.

Neeson’s innate dignity can often serve as a gravitational force for movies this ludicrous, but in a cabin filled with so much flying debris, he is but an ineffectual paperweight.

The Bag Man is always teetering on the edge of amateurish absurdity, before being tugged back from the edge by its actors.

It’s handsomely shot and reasonably well-acted, and it’ll likely get Martin better gigs as a director, if not a screenwriter.

Without the landscape or the heroine expressing themselves particularly sharply, Tracks is just a taciturn young woman wandering through the desert for months. In other words, a slog.

It isn’t a documentarian’s job, necessarily, to prescribe remedies for the social problems she reports. But de Mare and Kelly never get as far as framing the scope of the problem in any real way.

A lot of the story’s emotional shifts seem designed expressly to prolong the narrative, which is pretty darn skimpy.

May In The Summer just never distinguishes itself in any way that isn’t superficial.

Anyone who paid the slightest attention to the Jayson Blair story when it broke will find nothing new here, though director Samantha Grant does a solid job of laying it all out. What’s disappointing is how little time is afforded to subsidiary aspects that are arguably more significant than Blair’s anomalous transgressions.

Ivory Tower asks a lot of provocative, important questions, but it’s decidedly short on answers, and even shorter on satisfying or convincing answers.