You get the feeling that Glazer and Levinson are going for something along the same lines as the filmmaker’s similar classics like Good Morning, Vietnam or Wag the Dog, trying to find a balance between humanity and satire, humor and drama, that could both tickle the funny bone while also exciting the intellect…Problem is, it’s all too nondescript, too superficial, and as such little makes enough of an impact to be vital or affecting.

McDonald is just too talented to make a movie that’s a complete waste of time, and considering the obvious creep factor of the scenario I was intrigued as to where he and Trottier were going to take things. But [Hellions (2015)] just doesn’t have any weight, any meaning, never earning the sorrow-laced conclusion the final images hint at. I wanted more, the fact McDonald’s latest refused to give it to me an upsetting turn of events I admit I did not see coming.

Return to Sender is a bad movie. It’s script is hogwash. It hasn’t the courage to embrace its exploitation origins. It’s surprisingly misogynistic in many of the ways David Fincher’s Gone Girl potentially could have been yet fearlessly, ferociously never was…Director Fouad Mikati (Operation: Endgame) does what he can, allowing veteran cinematographer Russell Carpenter (Titanic) and dynamite composer Daniel Hart (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) to work as magic as they can, but in the end it just isn’t enough, this thriller about as difficult to sit through as any movie I’ve seen this year.

Cinema Squabble is now legal – happening in Episode #21 (download .mp3): Squabblers Matt Oakes, Tim Hall, Sara Michelle Fetters and Adam Gehrke dig into the following releases: Pan | 99 Homes | Bridge of Spies | Crimson Peak | Goosebumps | Steve Jobs After, find out all the facts about the 10th annual Seattle […]

Spielberg is in fine form with Bridge of Spies, his handling of the material confidently self-assured and magnetic. A stunning procedural, this is an intimate, engagingly personal thriller that held me spellbound first moment to last, building to a suitably tense climax upon the film’s titular location that’s as appropriate as it is divine.

With top-notch performances from Wasikowska, Chastain and Hiddleston, featuring stellar technical efforts from the entire production team, del Toro has crafted a magnetic spellbinder that does the genre proud. [Crimson Peak is] one of the acclaimed director’s better efforts and, more than that, it’s also one of the year’s most memorably fascinating thrillers.

But the movie never lives up to its set pieces, and the last half hour is particularly insufferable. Third act twists land with a blandly mundane thud, and the visual freneticism is too nonsensical for its own good…While fans of the books, as well as younger viewers with a taste for the macabre, might disagree, for my part Goosebumps left me cold, the only rising fear I felt while watching it the sneaky suspicion decent box office might inspire the filmmakers to someday go through the process of creating a sequel.

I’m not sure the cloak and dagger thriller Momentum (2015) would even classify as C-grade, let alone rising to B level, this routine action spectacular amazingly pointless. From a clearly slumming Freeman picking up a quick paycheck, to a set of secondary characters straight out of central casting, there’s so little new here it’s almost impressive just how inconsequential the resulting motion picture proves to be.

Steve Jobs (2015) is an exhilarating spellbinder, moving at a fervent pace as it attempts to show genius and all that comes with it – the good, the bad and the decidedly in-between – as intimately as it can. In the end the orchestra being conducted are the audience’s own emotions, Boyle and Sorkin the clever maestros making beautiful music out of them for everyone to enjoy.