“A cartoonish parade of gargoyles and grotesques helmed with staggering ineptitude. Re-titled after premiering as Imogene to crummy reviews at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, here is a movie so baseline incompetent that scenes don’t cut together and the wobbly camera has a hard time keeping actors in focus for an entire shot. Crushingly unfunny, it’s a must to avoid.” – Metro, 07/18/2013

“Sandler and company go to K-Mart for a protracted product placement commercial in the morning. Later that night they throw a 1980s-themed costume party. That’s all that passes for a plot here, folks. Laziness wafts from the screen like a foul odor. Grown Ups 2 is abysmal.” – Metro, 07/11/2013

“Spirited vocal performances from the cast add to the antic atmosphere. The energy level never flags, even though you might wish everybody would stop to breathe once in awhile. Overstuffed with daffy non-sequiturs and not one, but two exuberant Minion musical numbers, Despicable Me 2 is almost too much of a good thing.” – Metro, 07/03/2013

“Set the DeLorean for 1986 and you just might have a grand old time with The Heat, a lo-fi buddy-cop comedy that tweaks time-honored formulas by replacing Mel Gibson and Danny Glover with Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock. For the first half-hour I thought it was gearing up to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. But eventually it grew on me.” – The Improper Bostonian, 07/03/2013

“More canned misanthropy from playwright Neil LaBute, who poisoned arthouse cinemas in the late 1990’s with toxic stunts like In The Company Of Men and Your Friends And Neighbors. LaBute’s schtick is all about men behaving badly, but there’s no sympathy for these devils. His work is just cut-rate Carnal Knowledge.” – Metro, 06/28/2013

“Much Ado shovels mass quantities of iambic pentameter into the mouths of untrained third-string television actors, most of whom appear to have learned their lines phonetically. Not since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet have I been so convinced that most of the cast had no idea what they were saying..” – The Improper Bostonian, 06/19/2013

“An elfin, non sequitur–spouting sprite with oversized features and the haunted stare of a man 40 years his senior, performing physically impossible feats and uttering sentences in which key words seem to have been swapped out like Mad Libs, Biaggio is the most hilarious third-wheel comic relief in a teen movie since Superbad’s McLovin.” – The Improper Bostonian, 06/05/2013

“An overcrowded hodgepodge of familiar tropes and Xeroxed bits from other, better pictures. It’s the kind of movie that even while watching it for the first time you could swear you’ve seen it before. The nicest thing you can say is that at least Epic practices the green environmental message that it preaches: the entire screenplay is recycled.” – Metro, 05/24/2013

“Opting to spare myself from crummy projection and those gropey, TSA-styled searches Disney demands at its press screenings, I just waited two days and headed to my favorite suburban multiplex in Woburn to kick off the summer season with a civilian crowd. Surprisingly, it’s a good movie, at times even very good. ” – The Improper Bostonian, 05/22/2013

“As glum and mechanical as its predecessor was buoyant, ditching the space exploration for a joyless, been-there-done-that revenge plot. The charming supporting cast is sidelined, and Michael Giacchino’s rousing score can only feign excitement for so long. This sorry sequel feels rote and hopelessly derivative, timidly going where we all have already gone before.” – Metro, 05/14/2013