'Tammy,' the new movie starring, produced, and co-written by Melissa McCarthy, could be an artifact from some alternate universe: the creatures there resemble Earthlings but have an entirely different and debased idea of what's funny.

The music was the best thing about the Four Seasons and the central asset of the 'Jersey Boys' show. By concentrating on the group's personal wrangling, to the near exclusion of their songs, Clint Eastwood has jettisoned the joy and made this a one-Season movie: winter in New Jersey. And, man, that's bleak.

The big gamble in 'Focus' - it's a Will Smith movie that dares to be small.

Viewers who invest two hours in a superhero movie often leave feeling entertained but somehow dumber.

A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.

Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there's as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product.