For all of its talk about pushing boundaries, the film seems content to remain in the past.
The big disappointment of the film is that McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.
The film never meaningfully reckons with the complexity of the characters’ motivations and the consequences of their actions.
Sometimes it’s important to just step back and pay your respects to a remarkable actress.
McCarthy discusses how her process changed to play a real person.
The rapport between Richard E. Grant and Melissa McCarthy offers deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.
The film aims only to shock, refusing to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.
Life of the Party sets up an intergenerational, interfamilial odd-couple buddy-comedy scenario that it never makes the most of.
When it’s good, director Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is funny, driven, sometimes even a bit scary.
It’s a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson’s sly intuition.
The incongruity between Melissa McCarthy’s eagerness as a performer and her character’s total lack of compassion makes The Boss somehow both restless and tedious.
It’s the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy’s performance that anchors the film’s many winning blind-alley gags.
The inclusivity of this Melissa McCarthy showcase leaves plenty of room for the rest of the cast to stretch their comedic legs.
The actors create emotionally coherent characters from a collection of often contradictory or just plain improbable actions.
Theodore Melfi’s debut feature, St. Vincent, is a heartwarmer that never insults.
The film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the antiheroine’s bratty passivity.
We’ve compiled a list of the finest film performances delivered by actors this year, at least until this point.
The robbers in The Bling Ring aren’t the professionals scripted by John Huston, W.R. Burnett, and Ben Maddow in The Asphalt Jungle
With the film, Melissa McCarthy definitively cements her status as a legitimate comic talent, leaving her co-star stumbling behind in her wake.
Bogged down by raunchy body humor, Identity Thief wastes the comedic talents of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman.