The A.V. Club

Even if it wasn’t hot on the tail of Pixar’s Hoppers, Swapped would still be an overly familiar adventure towards empathy, one light on comedy and insight despite plenty of visual imagination in its world of flora-fauna hybrids.

Hokum is the latest fruit of McCarthy’s chameleonic gifts, and his best film yet.

In this case, Eckhart exudes the sort of unselfconscious paternal energy that’s needed to keep things moving in between the familiar, but well-executed disaster movie story beats. He almost single-handedly makes Deep Water a better-than-average genre exercise, though the bloody shark attacks and corny banter don’t hurt either.

While there’s no recapturing the delightful surprise of the first, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is still a treat for fans of the original.

Jokes may fall flat, and the movie might get a bit treacly, but The Sheep Detectives‘ big heart is never in question.

Apex mistakes going bigger for going better when what it really needs is a little more cleverness, either in how Ben operates or how Sasha tries to survive her impossible scenario. For a movie with some pretty ridiculous plot swerves, everything winds up feeling oddly straightforward, which makes the survival genre’s requisite catharsis and comeuppance land anticlimactically.

The movie’s basic appeal––that of rebels rising up against evil empires––still works to some extent, but Desert Warrior does little to make it memorable beyond its historic production.

Fuze doesn’t fly off the rails at its midpoint. It keeps moving forward at a steady clip. By its final stretch, however, the effort to sustain itself becomes more visible, and less quietly confident.

Michael is an attempt to remind audiences why so many fans fell in love with him in the first place, but it doubles as a pretty clear bit of hagiography.

The trouble is, Roommates‘ emotional realism is so compelling that by the time it decides to swing around to being a full-on black comedy, it’s hard not to feel disappointed by the ending. To be fair, that is the setup promised by the framing device, so the film doesn’t exactly pull a fast one, and the cast is equally committed to the more heightened comedy when it arrives.