Love & Mercy

To borrow a quip from Manohla Dargis' review of "Boyhood," co-starring her un-favorite Ethan Hawke, Bill Pohlad's "Love & Mercy" seems to achieve the impossible: it makes Paul Dano bearable.

The LEGO Movie

The only way to enjoy "The LEGO Movie" is stoned (as directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller none-too-subtly suggest).

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

"Sequel" is a dirty word in some parts, but not for me.

Seven Psychopaths, Pitch Perfect

Seven Psychopaths

Pitch Perfect

Martin McDonagh's "Seven Psychopaths" is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of ultraviolent comedies with high-toned, non-sequitur dialogue between the bloody murders. Despite the presence of "In Bruges" star Colin Farrell, only rarely does "Seven" attain the farcical momentum or genial ingratiation of that, McDonagh's best film. Too often the writing aims for an epic, "Usual Suspects" grandeur while achieving only occasional absurdist laughs. Christopher Walken turns in a toned-down, effective performance, and Woody Harrelson makes an excellent psychopath-among-psychopaths, but "Seven" remains more a concept than a fully inhabited film.

People Like Us

The sappy and  sententious would-be tearjerker "People Like Us" suffers from the "Three's Company!" version of the Idiot Plot: There would be no movie if the key character just out and said what was going on instead of making everyone suffer on manufactured misapprehension the entire time.

The Hunger Games

"The Hunger Games" is a bloated turkey, an unbroken string of missed opportunities and unintentional laughs that spends its first 70 minutes establishing its parameters and the second 70 violating most of them with internal inconsistencies and gaping logical holes.