The material swings between the sensual and the puritanical with whiplash-inducing speed; the dialogue all too often has the flat, dead sound of a first draft.

It's a lengthy burlesque on paranoia, on conspiracies both real and imagined, so dazed in its color schemes that Anderson clearly wants you to get stoned watching it. But the sense of being blissfully out-of-it, which can have its pleasures, soon drifts into another aspect of drug use: detachment.

For about the first hour of its running time, Dracula Untold is far too restrained and tasteful, and it certainly suffers from its tediously noble hero; it's well made but fatally lacking in thrills or excitement.

The Judge is tailor-made for Downey's gift for delivering a quippy, arrogant put-down like he's doing his target a favor. Hank's anti-heroism is a refreshing splash of lemon juice with an occasional spritz of sour vinegar. But much of director David Dobkin‘s cynically cloying legal and family drama goes down like a lump of aspartame.

For a comedy set around one epic catastrophe of a rotten day, this wisp of a farce feels strangely chaos-deficient.

The thing that catastrophically sinks “Him” – or “Her,” if that's the film you see second – is that the two films are enough alike that sitting through the second immediately after the first is a slog.

They're thematically richer and more tonally cohesive than their hybrid. But because the two films are so similar to one another, they fail to deliver on the promise of their unique structure, rendering the “he said, she said” complementary design of the two films a dull, self-indulgent gimmick.

Has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and production values that verge on parody.

The late-60's Satanic panic and housewifely ennui make for a surprisingly complementary mix of fear and paranoia in Annabelle.

It works as well as it does precisely because of an intelligence, humanity and restraint we rarely see in Hollywood films.

Reitman clearly wanted to create a mosaic of sharp-edged shards held together by the mortar of art; with Men, Women and Children, what he's delivered is a group of broken bits mired in the morass of pretension.

The intent of the film, and its timeliness, are beyond reproach, but that doesn't make Kill the Messenger as stirring or inspiring of indignation as it clearly wants to be.

At its best moments, Pride makes the chest flutter and the neck hairs stand up with the revolutionary adrenaline that comes from a potent protest song.

In its conflation of happiness and self-knowledge, “Hector” often feels like the visual approximation of a therapy session. And just as therapy is work, enduring this mess is exertion, too.

Not only brutal but also brutally funny, Gone Girl mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you're still watching the blade go past before you notice you're bleeding.

The excellent cast of This Is Where I Leave You cannot be faulted; all talented performers, they collectively make a constant effort to bring some sort of life to the limp script and uninspired direction.

As nauseating as the film's inventive sadisms can be, Frank succeeds far more in the details than in the larger picture that tries to relate this world to ours.

It's not even that the film shifts wildly in tone as much as the fact that none of those tones work at all: the horror parts aren't scary and, surprisingly for Smith, the comedy bits aren't funny.

“ASIII” feels like the most scattershot entry in the trilogy, despite a relative rally toward competence with the second movie.

The film's look and feel are far more purposeful and propulsive than the story and script, but even so, Space Station 76 has more than a few laughs inside its brazen bizarreness.

[A] perfectly serviceable thriller.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

The whole thing just works; the film gets pretty close to the Platonic ideal of accessible but still meaningful edutainment. And in a movie landscape that's aggressively dumbed down and cynical, a little integrity goes a long way.

For its first half or so, The Maze Runner tells a captivating tale of survival and weaves a potentially interesting mystery. Once its path become clear, however, you realize this is a puzzle you've worked out before.

Willfully empty but wildly entertaining, The Equalizer stands out from its peers like a wolf among lapdogs, as Fuqua and Washington bring out the best in each other for the benefit of the audience.

This is Tom Hardy‘s show, and any opportunity to see this actor exercise his skills merits attention. He, along with the rest of this top-notch ensemble, give “The Drop” far more than they get back.

Credit must be given: run-of-the-mill mediocrities come and go, but The Identical is the most woozily misguided flop to grace the screen since the “Oogieloves” movie. Connoisseurs of the most wonderfully terrible cinema need to run out and catch this one early and often.

The ingredients steadfastly refuse to whip up into the froth this film so clearly wants to be.