The performances, particularly from Towne and Tighe, go a long way toward making the story’s improbabilities seem trivial.

MacFarlane’s follow-up feels less like a film than like an extremely long, fairly inspired live-action episode of Family Guy, one that’s only as strong as the latest gag or riff. And this being a Seth MacFarlane production, those gags and riffs are of varying levels of quality.

There’s an overlay of gender politics, but it isn’t so firmly ingrained in the material that it transforms Levine’s throwback ’80s slasher film into a much nobler, more thoughtful endeavor.

Thompson and Brosnan really are fine romantic foils. They deserve a better movie to trade barbs in. They deserve better barbs to trade.

Momoa does capture some scenes of genuine warmth and beauty that suggest he has the potential to develop a filmmaker’s eye for visual poetry.

The film overflows with inspired comic ideas that fizzle and die in execution like a marathon fireworks display of nothing but duds.

Delivery Man has sentiment and affability embedded in its DNA, but Scott and Vaughn don’t do enough to nurture the film to its full potential.

While Barely Lethal is conscious of the clichés of the genre, it’s also the type of film that won’t let that get in the way of regurgitating them.

This Bizarro-universe Coen brothers mash-up has the decency to be sporadically fun, even when it isn’t especially original or steady.

In the spaces between the hackneyed dialogue, ham-handed score, and poor acting, Walking With The Enemy eventually wins its sole victory: a desire to look the story up on Wikipedia later that day. That may be a small triumph, but it’s hardly the mark of fine cinema.

Unfortunately, the film frequently relies on telling over showing, and Rosie and Alex’s bond is rarely demonstrated through palpable on-screen chemistry.

As clumsy as Quale is with the sequences of people shouting exposition back and forth, or delivering teary Blair Witch-style goodbyes into a camera that would have died long before its operators, he handles the CGI action with breathless intensity.

A decent-enough inroad to one of film history’s most respected parodists.

While the setups are often laughably forced—two words: “weed baby”—the script navigates its way out of them relatively gracefully, and sometimes hilariously.

The movie’s style consists of tossing up a lot of heartbreaking medical stories next to a characterization of the industry as a mysterious monolith, and letting viewers finish the correlation in their heads. When it’s possible to use the same line of reasoning to push both truth and lies, different tactics are in order.

Wolf Creek 2 does all it can to paper over the fact that it shouldn’t exist, but the film severely diminishes the integrity of the first Wolf Creek by turning Mick into a cartoon icon, more Outback legend than man.

This ultimately isn’t a film about human fallibility, but about high-concept grotesquerie for its own sake.

This Is Where I Leave You struggles in vain to meld broad, farcical comedy with low-key, contemplative drama. It lurches so violently between its twin modes, in fact, that it’s a wonder the actors are able to remain standing upright.

Lockdown is mostly a humorless bore until the obligatory bloopers and outtakes in the end credits—and even those are drawing from a flat vein, since there’s so little play in the movie.

It’s bloated, overwrought, and nakedly sentimental, a sappy and cliched celebration instead of a searching and incisive exploration.

All four of the main performances are so strong that they deserve more space to develop and intertwine. Instead, at times, Blood plays like one long “previously on” montage for the series that inspired it.

Jackpot feels more like Guy Ritchie than the Coen brothers. It revels in moronic violence, unleavened by playfulness or wit.

San Andreas doesn’t have much interest in the lives lost during its sequence of catastrophes, but it does dole out plenty of the large-scale spectacle that matters in disaster films of this type.

Le Chef involves a showdown between traditional French cuisine and molecular gastronomy, but the film very much serves as the cinematic equivalent of fast food, offering generic, processed menu items that are practically pre-digested.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.

When the film doesn’t strain for twinkly enlightenment, it stoops to find the easiest possible joke.

Second Opinion doesn’t play like a revelatory exposé, so much as a conspiracy-minded chain email sent from a distant relative.

Against The Sun, like its rudderless seacraft, goes with the path of least resistance: a talkfest where the men reiterate every obstacle they face out loud (all the better to show off period-friendly dialect), engage in some temporary breakdown of friendly bonds, and pray. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but there’s also nothing special about it.