One of the best films of the year.

A wholly illuminating look at Muhammad Ali in all his complexity, providing a surprisingly fresh and vivid portrait of a man who played rope-a-dope with history, religion and sport and emerged from the ring as an inspiring, and flawed icon.

For Scenic Route, it doesn’t seem to be the journey as much as the destination: seeing two sorta-friends wailing on each other feels like the shortcut a better movie never made.

For all its abrasiveness, the film is also capable of real tenderness.

Ultimately, the cumulative effect is deadening, just another chapter in an endless battle between overtasked and underpaid good guys, and cowardly baddies; the only real humanity in the film comes from Hudgens’ Cindy, who seems like a wild card of sorts, her character’s dimensions suggesting a world outside of the lurid details of this case. Refreshingly, she’s the only one in the film who refuses to be defined by the death and tragedy surrounding her.

Savannah does attempt to tell the story of the friendship of those two accomplished men, but does so in a manner that is so astonishingly tone deaf, confused and narrowly focused that it leaves you almost amazed at the lack of vision behind the entire enterprise.

No matter how good The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones looks, it's hard to really care about anything that's going on, and not just because we could barely understand it.

[Thérèse] is not the nuanced period drama it should be but is rather more like a banal, pseudo-thoughtful and monotonous episode of Masterpiece Theater.

Moore’s movie may not seem to make much sense...but he does set up bits at the beginning that do come to pay off in ridiculous ways, and cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham pulls off the commendable feat of shooting the film with some margin of legitimate composition in spite of the crew’s apparent guerrilla antics.

Despite some great character work, the film's journey comes across as pedestrian at best.

The bland, boring Paranoia does little to distinguish itself and isn’t good (or even enjoyably bad enough) to be passable even as Saturday afternoon cable fodder.

The crime isn’t that Kick-Ass 2 is vulgar (which it is), but that it’s for so little gain.

While Muscle Shoals and its presentation doesn't reinvent the wheel—this is your standard talking heads documentary—the treasure trove of stills and found footage makes for a compelling and effortlessly watchable film that even the casual music fan should find themselves totally engrossed in.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler could be an important film that comes at a time where race is still a challenging topic for America, but it succeeds less as a film than as a history lesson.

Despite Seyfried’s gameness, we come away a little deadened from the experience and knowing precious little more than before about the person who inhabited the body, the life and the throat of Linda Lovelace.

The focus is spread too thinly on the various colorful local voices, all of whom openly campaign against Recchia’s intentions with zest and flavor.

The little action in 'Percy Jackson' wouldn’t be out-of-place in a superhero film, which is to say it’s mostly functional, and sometimes quite diverting.

When Planes really takes flight, it can be boldly transporting. Other times, though, it feels like it's running low on jet fuel, full of limp characterizations and questionable set pieces.

A smart, well-acted and well-directed picture that adds up to a little more than the sum of its parts.

We're The Millers isn't really a bad movie, so much as its inoffensively and instantly forgettable.

While Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report is far from flawless, this contained sci-fi thriller is shot through with a devotion to realism and a sense of wonder largely missing in films that overshadow it in terms of scale.

When the final moment comes and it's revealed how the children died, it's less of a surprise than a shrug. Drama robbed of suspense is just dull.

As a movie, it’s quite an effects reel: Cockneys Vs. Zombies is a greatest hits package of your least demanding expectations given such a title.

It's utterly unconvincing and not scary in the slightest.

With Elysium, Blomkamp has made good on the promise of "District 9" and proven that working on a bigger canvas doesn't mean compromising on smarts or aspirations to deliver tentpole sized stories with a thoughtful backbone.

There’s nothing about 2 Guns that doesn’t feel prefab, like someone poured a packet of Insta-Movie into a glass of water.

The Smurfs 2 doesn't even pretend to be anything more but the most base, sugar-coated family entertainment, the kind of things that parents won't even be able to comprehend, much less enjoy.

The cavernous emptiness of The Canyons cannot sustain itself, and it makes for a mostly flat, strained and uninvolving experience (not helped by the pace which makes 90 minutes, feels like a sluggish two hours).