Not wondrous enough to be likened to a ghost, "Journey to the Shore" is the corpse of a film: lifeless, bloodless, insensate.

Falls flat on its face thanks to a severe lack of self-awareness and an air of dramatic self-importance.

The Nice Guys, which the screenwriter also directed, is the best of Black’s films. It is eccentrically, sometimes broadly funny, with top-notch performances from Crowe and Gosling and a pitch-perfect sense of timing to help smooth over some of the script’s fault lines and blind spots.

The BFG exceeds expectations thanks to Rylance’s performance, and joyously expounds the essence of a cherished children’s tale in all of its imaginative glory.

Extremely entertaining and well-crafted, Crush The Skull promises a bright future in genre films for Nguyen.

Given how good the cast often are elsewhere, it doesn’t seem unfair to put this at Armstrong’s door, and the film has a very first-time-director feel to it.

The film is never as savage as the first-act anarchy suggests it might be, and its best ideas are subsumed into familiar thriller concepts. Good craftsmanship elevates the result above workaday thriller territory, but ultimately Money Monster never rages in the “mad as hell” mode that’s always kept just out of reach

Director Anne Fontaine’s film is based on actual events and grapples with thorny questions that plague even the most zealous during times of crisis. It’s a pity, then, that this picture finds Fontaine compelled to find a resolution in a situation that seldom yields easy answers.

What little shock of the new the film can provide us with comes from the honeyed cinematography by Vittorio Storaro which uses silhouettes, graphic compositions and glowing closeups in an often genuinely breathtaking manner. But it also comes from the performances.

Apocalypse feels like a cog in Fox’s perpetual-motion blockbuster machine, paying lip service to the story’s allegorical potential as it grinds our interest to dust.

At its best, the film becomes something winningly subversive.

A sinister dread pulses through Bridgend, one that is engrossing and terrifying.

Dark Horse is crowd-pleasing and rousing, but its biggest problem is that no successive part of the documentary can sustain the power of its opening prologue.

Mother’s Day is the cinematic equivalent of spilling boiling hot coffee on your mother when you bring her burnt toast for breakfast in bed.

Thomsen builds a fascinating film around a fascinating man, but never, despite his evident deep affection for him, allows it to fall into hagiography.

A moving movie that tries too hard to please and thus never truly satisfies.

Uplifting in a tiny, understated and very authentic way, Sworn Virgin shows us gently how its possible to be living in exile in the world you know best, and how it's possible to come home to a place you've never been before.

The actors test one another like boxers perpetually about to throw the first punch, but all the buildup around their encounter is flabby and forgettable.

Perhaps most impressive is how, despite the nostalgia inherent in this kind of endeavor, "Sleeping Giant" never sentimentalizes its story, and never compromises on the essentially bleak idea that you can be transformed from a carefree child shading your eyes from the glare of a huge, wide future to a scarred and haunted young adult in a single moment.

Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.

Though it delves into a number of topics beyond fashion, it refrains from going underneath the glossy surface. It will appeal to fans of Wintour’s brand and style devotees, but it likely won’t make too many converts outside her kingdom.

Striking and consistently engaging, the Russos deftly craft compelling blockbuster entertainment out of a a moral and emotional conflict, and that’s more impressive than any overblown display of loud and vulgar power.

Sure, there's a bit of spectacle to the film's utterly ridiculous violence. Even that dulls, however, without character or stakes to inject urgency into the parade of broken bodies.

For a movie that is all about accumulation, it adds up to very little, and for a story all about connectedness, 11 minutes, intermittently enjoyable though it may be, never connects.

A taut thriller that almost doesn't waste a single step.

McCarthy has a great knack for vicious verbiage, and in combination with her supreme physical control there's pleasure in seeing Darnell tear an opponent to shreds, even (or especially) when she's in the wrong.

Unfortunately, while Husson clearly has talent to burn, her film is something of a case of all talk and no trousers.

There’s very little in The Huntsman: Winter's War itself that is actively bad. Compared to some of its blockbuster rivals, it’s reasonably watchable, never offensive, and mostly coherent.