Schemel's life story contains many interesting pieces - growing up as a lesbian in a conservative rural town, battling a lifetime of drug addiction, spending years in proximity to Love - but Hit So Hard often finds her as an extra in her own film.

The lens through which the The Intouchables was filmed may be too rose-colored for some people's taste, but the window that these talented performers throw open -- a window onto the strange and touching friendship between two very different men -- is crystal clear.

Almost everything about Smurfs 2 signifies an improvement over the original.

They're enough to elevate the film above its somewhat by-the-numbers plot and add a little juice to its slightly sluggish forward momentum.

The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.

While this reboot is fun, it’s also forgettable and occasionally infuriating.

The film also begins to feel like a case of a director getting to revel in the very thing he's reviling.

There are elements worth celebrating. The movie is thankfully less self-serious than the mopey “Twilight” films. The Mortal Instruments revels in its own camp. But there is plenty of room for improvement. The action flick is overly long, complicated and, even by teen romance standards, cringe-worthy in its cheesiness.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is as visually imaginative as its predecessor.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

Rogen and his friends may have set out to celebrate virtue at its uneasiest, but they’re clearly still most at home with earthly delights.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

There’s tension to be wrung from the premise, but Luketic is content to telegraph his movie’s juiciest twists, concentrating instead on applying a sleek visual sheen usually reserved for shampoo commercials.

The unevenness of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Stiller’s recessive characterization of the title character, keep it from being an all-out crowd-pleaser.

It feels like each and every moment bursts forth with urgent dialogue, and yet what does anyone actually say?

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

The fact that this overlong, often preposterous comedy succeeds at all (which it does, only occasionally) proves that the Vaughn/Wilson charm can still work a measure of magic.

Celeste and Jesse Forever engages in Bridget Jones-like comedy of mortification, sending its heroine down a path of self-discovery that ultimately seems more cruel than revelatory.

The movie itself is a tad overheated. In the lurid, swampy, yet almost perversely engrossing follow-up to director Lee Daniels's "Precious," the temperature is set to "sizzle." Ironically, it could have used a little more time in the oven.

Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.

When the jokes work, it's for a simple reason: The four actors playing the couples are seasoned veterans of film comedy (although each is more than capable of handling dramatic roles, as well).

Smashed never really rises much above the level of a dramatic public service announcement. That's not so much because of its tone, but because what it's announcing isn't exactly news. Alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics aren't bad people. Quitting is hard.

It's a shame that the plot proves to be such a head-scratcher when so many elements of the film seem promising.

Despite their Everyman appeal, Damon and Krasinski don't create much by way of emotional investment, instead becoming mirror images of their most mild-mannered, white-bread selves.

Branagh, who proved his action bona fides with “Thor,” does an inarguably competent job of choreographing a modestly intelligent espionage thriller, even if it’s impossible to identify anything new he’s bringing to an already groaning table.

The movie feels at once too busy and too derivative. That’s no easy feat, but it’s also one sequel-makers probably shouldn’t aspire to.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

The question isn't whether Toys in the Attic is any good. The question is: good for whom?