Chingford Life

When the whole predictable shebang climbs into its metaphorical Baby Bjorn and carries itself to the delivery room for a series of simultaneous birthing sequences – did you expect anything less? – those of you with heartwarming memories of welcoming your own newborn into this world will get a little choked up.

Battleship isn't the longest or dumbest blockbuster to ever exist, but so soon after bar-raising spectacle of The Avengers, maybe the most pointless.

Eventually The Dictator feels stuck spinning its wheels, with a character who can't really develop and a story that won't go anywhere surprising. There's enough good material in there to earn some laughs, but so many of them seem compromised or on the verge of something even better

Goldthwait is establishing himself as a voice of opposition I know several ears are going to want to turn to. Goldthwait, the screenwriter, fills Murray’s mouth with plain, clear statements of so-called reason, which carry weight because they slice through the mentality of our country’s vocal majority

For the last decade Burton has been doing nothing but remakes and rehashes of stories we’ve all seen before, tinging them with same Burton-esque feel that he established in the early days of his career. Now he’s bringing us an adaptation of the 70s soap opera Dark Shadows, and while I'm still confident that Burton can still turn his career around, his new film makes it significantly harder to really believe it

Madden is skilled with telling big ensemble stories, and Marigold Hotel may feel fluffy and breezy until you suddenly realize you're genuinely invested in these characters and their second lease on life. Madden and his gifted cast take this glossy, formulaic Indian vacation and invest it with heart and honesty

The Raven is a hard movie to watch, and not just in the sense of its brutality. There’s so much wasted potential at play, from the nugget of an idea at the center of the story to the great cast. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to the execution and the result is a loud, over-done piece of noise and nonsense.

I walked into The Avengers with the highest hopes and deepest fears. A little over two hours later, as the credits began to roll, I turned to the friend sitting next to me, smiled and exclaimed, “They actually did it!” What Whedon and Marvel have created here is not just extraordinary, but one of the most entertaining and satisfying comic book movies yet.

It's a tiny, incisive movie that worms its way inside you and devours, expertly building tension and dread as it navigates the audience through its central mystery. Focused on its razor-sharp execution and ideas rather than its characters, the movie is more of an intellectual wallop than an emotional one, but when it quite deliberately ends on a cliffhanger, you have no choice but to ask for more

The Five-Year Engagement, which runs longer than two hours and invites all kinds of bitter jokes about the title, is another collaboration between writer/director Nicholas Stoller and writer/star Jason Segel in which they seem to have written and shot a movie that is four hours long, then awkwardly stuffed it into a still-overlong two-hour frame

There's so little of interest happening in Safe, a dull retread of most lone-man-on-a-mission action movies of the last 30 years, that I found myself constantly reflecting on how this kind of day would play out in real life. After the passengers on the D train watched Statham's Luke Wright dispatch a bunch of Russian gangsters, would they really stand by after he pulled out his gun?

The goofy energy ought to appeal to the silly side of every age group, but with Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria as major characters and cameos from The Elephant Man and Jane Austen, there's also surprising amount of historical texture for something so nutty.

Nicholas Sparks knows exactly who his audience is and, as exclusive as that may be, he knows he can find success writing directly to them. His books aren’t filled with brilliant ideas or commentary, just simple fantasy and romance that people can get lost in and then immediately forget. That said, it would be a surprise if even his most loyal fans could find something to love in the adaptation of his novel The Lucky One.

Darling Companion, the new film from director Lawrence Kasdan, has one of the greatest ensembles you’ll ever see. From its central players to the supporting cast, almost every role is played by someone fantastic. Unfortunately, it also proves that you can have the greatest group of performers in the world, but it’s meaningless if they aren’t working from an even halfway decent script.

Think Like A Man sets up easy sides in its game of love, then spends two hours pretending it's difficult to reconcile the two. As in any rom-com, no one's actual relationship is like this, but that doesn't mean we can't continue taking some very guilty pleasure in watching it all play out anyway.