James Rocchi

The Internship delivers what it promises, no more and no less, and faulting it for not being a rougher, tougher, smarter film about how much we all seem to live our lives through our work today would be like yelling at a spoon for not being a knife.

The film’s so inflated with moral importance that it becomes ridiculous, a Lifetime movie shoved into a cage and fattened with sermons and platitudes until it is ready to be served up cold and bland.

A perfect example of how lame, lazy material strands good actors, resulting in a movie that looks great and feels less so.

One of the most tedious apocalypses to come down the chute in recent years, this series gets lamer, and lazier, with each entry. The only ‘Trial’ offered by this film is the ordeal of watching it.

Shyamalan has had some difficulties as a director of late, and it’s understandable to hope that by placing him back in the realm of lower budgets and more manageable expectations he could impress us yet again; that turns out not to be the case this time.

The action’s accent on Russian rogues, lethal ladies and Rivera-set car chases makes The Transporter Refueled feel less like a film and more like the world’s most violent Vanity Fair fashion spread, all poses and pouts instead of the two-fisted, rough life of the originals.

Anyone looking for an introduction to Gibran’s poetry can find it in any bookstore; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is achingly well intentioned, but not especially well executed, and its failings as a film can’t be overlooked.

Made of equal parts mourning and melancholy, mystery, and possibly madness, the striking Tom at the Farm showcases Dolan’s abundant talents at turning seemingly simple material into a taut, tough film.

Even with the film’s mild flaws and arms-wide-open approach, it tells a powerful, engaging and compelling story of how America challenged and changed five young black men, and how they in turn challenged and changed America.

Nothing here feels cheap or hasty, which is why the horror, when it comes, is all the more chilling and grim. Slick, sharp and legitimately terrifying, The Gift is a truly brilliant thriller — and, one hopes, the first of many features from Edgerton to come.

Mr. Holmes may not be the biggest or boldest recent updating of Sherlock, but McKellen’s performance alone is almost reason enough to see it on the big screen.

Disturbing, honest and compelling, The Stanford Prison Experiment turns a well-known story into must-see storytelling, depicting the ugly truth through gorgeous filmmaking.

Jenny’s Wedding isn’t ill-intentioned or actively bad; it’s just a little too familiar, a little too safe and a little too satisfied with itself.

Boulevard consistently evokes the road not traveled, but doesn’t particularly stand out alongside other dramas that have explored the same terrain.

The stunts and CGI and attendant action scenes are all simply fine; there’s nothing here with the stark simple power of “The Terminator” or the strong-but-strange brilliant inventions of “Terminator 2.” Instead, it’s all less-than-spectacular “spectacle” and plot convolutions twisting around themselves at the whim of the summer’s least interesting killer artificial intelligence.

Escobar: Paradise Lost plays more like Greek tragedy than the kind of drug-war tale we’d get in a broader, bigger film, and that is no small part of the many reasons it works.

Watching Madame Bovary, you find yourself wishing that Barthes had done something, anything with Flaubert’s novel other than slap it up on the screen as yet another tale of woe from long ago.

The thing that wrecks The Human Centipede III isn’t how the film is disgustingly, degradingly unclean; instead, Six’s work is ruined by how his film is desperately, depressingly unclever.

With superb, nuanced comedy performances from both White and Marsden, The D Train is a great, out-of-left-field star vehicle with tough laughs and real regret in it.

By taking the mob film back to its basics of land, family and death, Munzi’s film strips away artifice, cliche and gun-in-fist glamor to make a story of family and fury that burns cold and slow.

While initially playing like a fish-out-of-water (or, more specifically, into-the-water) rom-com, Hunt’s Ride winds up being surprisingly satisfying, a film with the guts to talk about the things that really matter underneath what could have been a glib, shallow version of the same tale.

There’s nothing here that actually digs deep enough into any of the films’ surface-level concerns — maturity, responsibility, parenting, siblinghood — to snap the movie out of its own slumber.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s Child 44 turns a best-selling period-piece procedural into a slow, tedious thriller almost totally devoid of thrills. While the cast is full of exemplary performers — Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman and more — the fault here is not in the stars, but in the material.

While The Barber may be a first-time directorial effort, it’s tense and taut enough to make an impression thanks in no small part to the steadying, strong presence of Glenn.

There’s nothing in Home that you haven’t seen before, but there’s a lot in it your kids haven’t; as animated sci-fi for small fry, it’s a success whose modest but well-executed ambitions are no small part of its charm.

It’s too bad that neither the philosophy nor the pyrotechnics on-screen in Chappie can distract you from your own sinking feeling that you’ve seen almost all of this before.

The action is shot far better than it is in most Marvel movies, with clarity in the framing and a fluid skill to the cutting.

The Lazarus Effect is a smart, unsubtle chiller that should leave even a dedicated horror fan shaken and spooked from its opening scene’s revelations to its final scene’s implications.