When sitting down and watching movies for work, I do my best to keep an open mind and to remain receptive to films as they present themselves. It’s difficult sometimes, but I always try not to make up my mind one way or another until the final credits roll.

But then you get a movie like “Jack Reacher,” which makes you hate it. And then love it. And then hate it again, going back and forth like some crazy tennis match until all that’s left is to make a list of pros and cons to see how it all shakes out:

I hated … the fact that the movie opens with a mass shooting. Yes, it’s not the fault of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (adapting Lee Child’s novel...

The trailer, the casting, even the title of “The Guilt Trip” sets us up for a specific kind of movie: Nice neurotic boy henpecked by his nagging, smothering Yiddishe mama. It’s a dynamic we’ve seen everywhere from the novels of Philip Roth to Woody Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” and countless other movies and sitcoms over the last half-century or so.

But “The Guilt Trip,” starring gravelly voiced everyslacker Seth Rogen as the son and Barbra Streisand as the mom, has its own agenda that goes far beyond cheek-pinching and boiled chicken.

The movie, directed by Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “27...

Quentin Tarantino continues his tour of “disreputable” movie genres with “Django Unchained,” a boisterous and violent appropriation of tropes from the 1960s spaghetti Western (low-budget European cowboy movies, produced mostly in Italy and Spain) and the 1970s blaxploitation Western (often-angry revenge pictures that examined the Civil War era in general, and slavery in particular, from a post–civil rights perspective).

While the movie doesn’t take the outrageous narrative leaps of “Inglorious Basterds,” “Django” is nonetheless an intelligent thrill-ride, zipping along merrily (and bloodily) until it...

Remember how last year’s “My Week with Marilyn” spent way too much time on its dullard protagonist and not nearly enough on Marilyn Monroe, the film’s one interesting character? Change the title of “Hyde Park on Hudson” to “My Affair with Franklin,” and you get the same result.

Our uninteresting tour guide this time around is Daisy Stuckley (Laura Linney), a fifth cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Murray). By the late 1930s, when the film begins, Daisy had gone from being a wealthy woman to one of the president’s poor relations, eking out a living as a caretaker to an elderly aunt (the wonderful Eleanor Bron, sorely underused).

One day, Daisy gets a...