Adam Fendelman

Rating: 4.5/5.0

CHICAGO – It’s impossible to simply play spectator through the forward-moving experimental indie “Locke” without analyzing your own past. And only a zombie could sit through this one-man film without questioning what choices you’d make in Tom Hardy’s shoes.

Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Films in general are knocked for being knockoffs of something else. Horror films in particular have it especially hard in the “new” department because we’re so quickly annoyed when we’ve “seen it all before.”

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – If the original is anything to applaud, the sequel usually isn’t. And even more rarely is the sequel actually better.

While it’s aggressive to market “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” as one of the “best superhero movies of all time” and more realistic to pitch it as “better than ‘The Avengers,’” it most certainly is 2014’s best action flick yet and it definitely defies common sequel disappointment.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – It’s challenging to enjoy this film purely for what it is rather than fault it for what it could have been.

“Island of Lemurs: Madagascar,” which opened exclusively in IMAX 3D and 2D on April 4, 2014 and is narrated by Morgan Freeman, is only 39 minutes. The film too simply grazes the surface of a complicated problem.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – You get the sense that a writer for the new “RoboCop” felt very proud of himself when he coined the cheeky word “robophobic” as a play on a current cultural hot button. The Samuel L. Jackson moment of self-fulfilled glory reminded me of the rest of the plot that was missing.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – It’s been 12 years since we’ve seen Tom Clancy’s masterful, Jason Bourne-esque character Jack Ryan in 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears” (led by Ben Affleck), which itself was a character reboot. We first saw Jack in 1990’s “The Hunt For Red October” as Alec Baldwin and then twice in the body of Harrison Ford with 1992’s “Patriot Games” and 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger”.

Rating: 1.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Big-budget Hollywood is struggling to find new stories, which is why we sometimes see the same ones two, three or even 10 times. Sometimes they’re days or months apart. And sometimes they shouldn’t have been made in the first place and just were to profit from a beloved story or hero.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

CHICAGO – No matter how painfully bad it may be, I never walk out of a screening. It’s a professional rule I’ve set and keep it at all costs. But with Martin Scorsese’s latest stroke of genius, I experienced a kind of pain I don’t usually wrangle with: the survival of my bladder.

Rating: 2.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Has Vince Vaughn peaked?

Since hit films like “Swingers” and “Wedding Crashers,” critical flops like “Couples Retreat” and “The Dilemma” have shown he’s fighting an uphill battle to find redemption. While “Delivery Man” isn’t his re-breakout role, it does show you a lesser-seen side: his drama instead of his comedy.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – For me and the subculture as a whole, so much of science fiction came from “Star Trek”. If creator Gene Roddenberry were alive today to witness “Thor: The Dark World,” he’d tell it to focus on being a superhero film rather than failing to dabble in science fiction.