The technical execution is strong...but the invention is weak...simply feels late to the party by spinning off sidekicks...as it trades on '60s style...

Celebrates a city united for fun and goodwill, and the rare, pronounced sense of play and energy adults are capable of rediscovering, as do those who toil excitedly and hopefully to give Miles 'a little bit of his childhood back.'

That it is Hitler doing the exploiting has little relevance to the overriding theme of tragic history humanity remains doomed to repeat: sending naive young men—and, at some times and places, boys—to their ends.

In Criterion's Blu-ray and DVD boxsets titled André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films, we can ponder the full cinematic depth (and much of the theatrical depth) of the collaboration between two complementary creative souls.

Any senses of suspenseful stakes or human-scale relationships have turned weightless, leaving us with crashing and bashing, running and gunning, and a whole lot of head-scratching. The experience is utterly numbing...

Links all-American patriotism with military righteousness, religious faith, and socially conservative family values...when Max isn’t leaping around, Max rolls over and plays dead.

I fervently hoped that some particularly annoyed soul would create a 'Slapheads Yell "Chappie"!' supercut...to refine the movie to its purest form of annoyance. As of this writing, internet, you disappoint me.

A disappointing 'film' but, at least for its target audience of white middle-class teens (and probably their parents), a deeply satisfying 'movie.'

The culture has had just enough time to miss this franchise, and director and co-screenwriter Colin Trevorrow...has met the challenges with an appealing self-awareness.

Like Tarantino's films, Wild Tales will rub some the wrong way by taking glee in the violence that comes from our worst selves, but the catharses have a positive social function...there's no doubt Szifron intends cautionary Tales.

Wiig plays her role with total commitment, fearlessness, and lack of vanity...the movie we deserve in the age of social media and cable television, a satiric child of Paddy Chayevsky's Network in its autopsy of "vox populi" viral video...

This latest gentle, sensitive, unhurried tale from Studio Ghibli...excels not only at natural beauty, touched with supernatural flourishes, but also at acute psychological perceptiveness...

Workman has done a service in making a broadly accessible history of Welles that stands a chance of drawing younger generations of film buffs, like moths, to 'the master''s flame.

Succeeds at exploiting a proven disaster-movie formula without troubling itself much with little things like plot, character, and dialogue.

Our American addiction...bloodsucking from humanity in order to maintain the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. By the time Hess wearily muses, "I'm tired of this existence," it's more or less clear he means a spiritually empty capitalist existence...

At times one feels there's an interesting film here struggling to break free (free as a bird!)...but what's made it to screen sends eyes aloft in its symbolism and its character dynamics.

Curiously vacant characters and curiously pulse-less whimsy...lumbers, middlebrow and tiresome, when it should be daytripping the light fantastic...

Zvyagintsev literally and allegorically depicts modern Russia's runaway corruption but also captures universal fears about the shaky ground on which we construct our lives.

Though the thrill of invention is gone, there's enough comic fertility and accumulated goodwill to sustain Pitch Perfect 2 through to its splashy and socially optimistic finale...

Showrunner Michelle Ashford has played slow and loose with the facts, but in ways that achieve thematic resonance in a speculative, provocative dialogue with history.

Assayas implies that what transpires between the characters of Clouds of Sils Maria, between artists and art, and between art and audiences contains its own beautiful mystery that's nourishing, maddening, and essential.

Revives an era in astonishing, delicate detail, then moves through the space with a documentarian's eye. Leigh takes Turner out of art history and puts him back in the world.

Pure, uncut comic-book fantasy...Whedon tames the beast into something spectacularly epic, if a bit exhausting: bursting with destructive mayhem but grounded by interesting character beats, rife with dark implications but seasoned with good humor.

While the subject matter...amounts to standard fare, audiences can all the more appreciate the thoughtful rigor applied by a team of artists working from page to screen.

Has a smattering of effective moments and a creepy cinematographic look to it, but the sequel's redundancy to its predecessor and pulseless feints at tapping into human emotion leech the suspense out of the picture.

Assess to what extent we're witnessing man-ufactured monkey life...[or] just pay no attention to the men and women behind the curtain and simply enjoy the underwater photography of monkeys swimming.

Burton pokes fun at Keane's art, but he kids because he loves, and Big Eyes productively asks the question of whether the paintings are art or kitsch (probable answer: both).

The obvious shots at hipster scenes...eventually sour into a complex critique of modern ambition in a changing cultural landscape.

A Nicholas Sparks movie is like cinematic Jello. It sells well, the number one ingredient is sugar, and there's always room for it.

Corny, commercial, predictably platitudinous, and tear-jerkingly weepy...also an inevitably thought-provoking dramatization of facing the "ghosts" of the past on an individual level and a national one.

A satisfying excursion, a secular but spiritual journey of self-discovery.

Winds up sawing logs...instead of locating hard truths of the human condition, Serena lumbers through the motions.

Another conspicuously packaged product seemingly designed to wear down an audience more than entertain it. While wee ones won't notice, they probably won't remember Home by the time the car ride gets them back to the real thing.

Lean, mean...Director Yann Demange and screenwriter Gregory Burke (the prominent Scottish playwright of Black Watch) twist the knife by serving Gary with constant reminders of boyish innocence corrupted...

Taps a fresh vein of humor to transfuse the horrific and the mundane.

What could be an inspirational teacher-student, coach-player story keeps playing the race card of simple non-whites not being able to see their own way to prosperity without a guiding white light, who in turn learns from their unsophisticated purity.

Will...[strike a chord] with teen girls, if they can get past the casting of the healthy, but hardly plus-sized Whitman, as well as the changes made to sanitize the book...

Absolutely ludicrous, dramatically clumsy, fifty shades of wrong, but...If audiences can cool their loins long enough, they may have a productive think about the nature of their desires...

Doubles down on glib ultraviolence while pressing buttons of class-consciousness and teasing out pop-culture allusions and self-aware witticisms. But this time, the postmodernism feels played out.

Then and now, Disney fans of all ages have thrilled to the animation-ambitious sight of the titular pack, and chilled at the villainy of mad diva Cruella De Vil.

To the extent we still demand rich characters and sensible plotting, the Wachowskis' latest is a few planets short of a galaxy.

A nominal theme—complete with theme song—of teamwork. But really, Sponge Out of Water is about little more than fast food and ice cream, with the same promise of empty calories.

Though the story touches on politics and even profundities of the human experience, Miyazaki's light touch and overriding sense of fun promise that children of all ages will give themselves over to ninety-four minutes of fantasy that do a heart good.

Sorting through prejudices and nuances of racial perception occasionally takes Black or White into intriguing territory...[more often] a rather mushily obvious, TV-movie-style courtroom drama built on straw-man arguments.

Still still hums with humanity in the person of Moore, whose towering performance shows a staggering technical proficiency while never losing a whit of emotional resonance.

An unsettling examination of moral drift, over a year in the life of a man and a generation in the life of a country.

Iraq warrior biopic American Sniper, about the late Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, affords Eastwood another opportunity to wrestle with the way of the gun, but one that gets mired in military hero worship.

The plot is a sideshow to Inherent Vice's luxuriant atmosphere, cracked sense of humor, and idiosyncratic characterization.

Selma is wet paint Americans (especially young ones) had probably best watch dry, as we remember the past and contemplate where the country goes from here.

Determinedly silly...[but the] undisciplined frat-bro comedy's accumulation of innuendos, boner jokes, gay jokes, and gags that tread through racist and misogynist territory works out to less than the sum of the juvenile parts.