Andrew Lapin

[A note: This film was shot in 3D, but will undoubtedly be seen by many in 2D. We have a review of the 3D version from when it played at the Toronto International Film Festival; this review is of the 2D version, which may, particularly over time, be ...

Pixar's The Good Dinosaur imagines what would happen if our Mesozoic-era ancestors, instead of being wiped out by an asteroid, survived to star in John Ford Westerns. An opening scene shows the fatal rock whizzing by Earth harmlessly; "millions of years later," Apatosauruses own family farms while Tyrannosauruses herd bison ...

One of the first images we see in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 is that of Philip Seymour Hoffman. This is a welcome seance. We have said many farewells to Hoffman — one of our generation's finest actors, here playing Panem resistance mastermind Plutarch Heavensbee — since his ...

The producers of every romantic comedy wish they could unite two actors as cool as Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. Of course, landing leads of that caliber only ups the pressure for the film to do them justice. Man Up, the movie that made this connection happen, is smart and ...

He may not seem it from his funny-looking round head, but Charlie Brown is one of the great tragic heroes of American fiction. A born failure who nevertheless continues to believe his victories lie just around the corner, Charles Schulz's enduring creation is the stand-in for our human condition: We ...

Like other films about food, Burnt embraces the seduction of taste. It pairs extreme close-ups of sauce being spooned atop gourmet dishes with conversations about the orgasmic pleasure of a good meal, and Bradley Cooper gets to conduct some of them in fluent French. The film is often sexy; they ...

There are some cinematic images which, if we were unable to appreciate them for their silliness, would make us fall into a pit of despair about the state of entertainment. Vin Diesel popping an evil bug out of Michael Caine's face like a zit, for example. Or an ancient stone ...

Five-year-old Jack has an active daily routine in the place he simply calls "Room," where he and his Ma can't take more than a few paces in either direction without hitting a wall. He's happy here, worshipping sparse comforts like the dying bedside plant, the TV, and the snake he's ...

[Note: We assume you know that movie reviews always discuss the plot of the film to at least some degree, but this is kind of an odd one. It's almost impossible to talk about this film without talking about the premise that develops over the course of the first act, ...

As the current king of teen lit, author John Green is a barometer for what young readers respond to. His 2012 bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, about two teenagers who fall in love in a cancer support group, and its smash hit movie last year helped signal that ...

Maybe one day, if we're good boys and girls, we'll get to see the Edgar Wright cut of Ant-Man. Wright, a beloved cult filmmaker best known for his "Cornetto" trilogy of genre parodies, left the itty-bitty-superhero movie in a high-profile split with Marvel last year, after nearly a decade of ...

Inevitably, several months after a beloved actor dies too young, we are expected to reckon with the ghost. That time has come for Robin Williams, the apple-cheeked performer with the giant heart, whose final onscreen appearance is arriving in theaters 11 months after his suicide (Absolutely Anything, which features his ...

There may be no American cultural force more powerful than the cheesy action movie. For proof, look to Big Game, a spectacularly silly explosion extravaganza where a kid saves the world, co-starring Samuel L. Jackson as the President of the United States. Americans are not the movie's intended audience: Big ...

Pixar's Inside Out is the perfect tool for coming to grips with what has happened to Pixar itself. The film's most valuable insight is that it's natural to feel sad about growing up, which is true even when the thing growing up is a movie studio that has shepherded countless ...

Not many teen movies would devote an entire montage to a joke about Errol Morris' Interrotron. But for better and worse, most teen movies aren't Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

The scene parodying the documentary filmmaker's signature interview technique may seem overly esoteric, but in context it makes ...

Do we really need yet another spy movie send-up? That's a good question no matter what year it is, but 2015 has already brought us Kingsman: The Secret Service and Barely Lethal, with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. on the way — not to mention new installments of the real-deal ...

It's hard to tell what, exactly, Bradley Cooper's deal is in the imperfect yet oddly compelling tropical dramedy Aloha. His character, Brian Gilcrest, is a military contractor assigned to oversee a ceremony in Hawaii that will allow his employer to launch a new satellite of dubious motives. That part's easy ...

The first scene of Aloft is one of the more haunting movie openings in recent years. It's a bitter cold day in northern Canada; against a barren snowscape, a single mother named Nana (Jennifer Connolly) and her two young sons hitch rides in vans from morose men toward an increasingly ...

Something's different about these Bellas. Three years ago, the Anna Kendrick-led all-female a cappella group won the hearts of music nerds everywhere in the college comedy Pitch Perfect. Now they're flashing the president at the Kennedy Center.

That's what happens at the end of the opening number to Pitch Perfect ...

No parent should have to watch his child grow up to be a flesh-eating zombie. But if any dad ever had the stuff for the task, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Maggie, the action-movie heavyweight and former governor of California plays Wade, a plaid-shirted farmer from Middle America facing a viral ...