A.A. Dowd

It’s when the walk portion of The Walk arrives that this unevenly scripted, fact-based thriller achieves its full potential. Even without the suspense of uncertainty, the sequence achieves a bated-breath intensity and wonder.

While its righteous rage is bracing, fans of the filmmaker Bahrani used to be will mourn the subtlety and careful character development of his early triumphs. His heart remains in the right place, but his head has gone hopelessly Hollywood.

Enjoying this rancid slab of red meat depends not just on an appetite for slop, but also a taste for sloppy leftovers.

This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.

It’s the epitome of the anti-vanity project—a way for a veteran charmer to prove that he has more to offer than charm.

As interesting as it is to see the filmmaker move out of his wheelhouse, Tom At The Farm is neither dramatically satisfying nor psychologically convincing. Something was clearly lost in its transition from stage to screen.

The result, unfortunately, is a movie featuring a teenage hero who spends most of his screen time watching from the sidelines, passively observing events that just sort of happen around him.

This new-new Baumbach isn’t necessarily better than the old-new Baumbach; "Young" felt meatier, with a stronger sense of who its neurotic New Yorkers were. But that film didn’t have Gerwig, bringing warmth, wit, and loopy star power to a character — a human bulldozer of incorrigible extroversion — as fictional as the Big Apple you see only on the big screen.

It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.

It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.

Pivoting out of conventional horror-flick territory into the realm of psychodrama, and drastically blurring the lines separating its heroes from its villains, The Gift turns out to be much smarter and more troubling than it looks on the surface.

The result is less portrait of an artist than snapshot of a brief, meaningful encounter, shared between two men enjoying different stages of professional success. That one of these men happens to be a modern literary hero is almost, if not quite, incidental.

The M:I films remain blessedly, unfashionably self-contained: They’re stand-alone popcorn entertainments that can be watched in any order, with only the thinnest of connecting continuity between them.

For what it sets out to accomplish, across a brisk 98 minutes, Petzold’s film feels perfectly judged. And it builds to an ending that’s just plain perfect.

Physically speaking, the transformation is as impressive as the one Gyllenhaal underwent a year ago to embody the gaunt, wiry sociopath of "Nightcrawler." But was this character, a boxer battling the myriad conventions of his genre, really worth the training regimen that brought him to life?

The Look Of Silence is a powerful gesture of political rebellion, one whose boldest action isn’t damning mass murderers to their faces, but being willing to believe that their stranglehold on country and history could be broken.

A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.

Formally, Stations Of The Cross is a rigorous achievement; there’s a purity, cinematic if not spiritual, to the way Brüggemann carefully composes each static shot, as though they all really were paintings to be arranged in succession along a line of pews. It’s less successful on a dramatic level.

Making audiences care about the characters is always a more effective fear-generating strategy than just knocking off a bunch of dimwits in the dark.

This new Terminator, the first since the dreadfully dreary and Arnold-less "Salvation," is engineered to feel at once eerily familiar and raise-the-stakes fresh.

Watching A Little Chaos, one might assume that its makers were dramatically limited by the details of Le Notre’s life, when it was really just their own imaginations do the limiting.

Either way, Ted 2 strikes a sometimes-awkward balance between sincerity and cheap provocation. It also forgets that the real draw of the first film wasn’t Ted himself, but Wahlberg, whose sweet-lug routine scored a lot of belly laughs.

The pleasure of the movie lies in the way it both rewards and subverts expectations, delivering on the risqué possibilities of its premise while also coming up with something smarter and a little deeper than a log line might suggest.

Bucking the current company mandate of churning out lesser sequels and prequels, it’s not just a brilliant idea, but maybe the most conceptually daring movie the Bay Area animation house has ever produced. And that’s really saying something, what with "WALL-E" on the books.

One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.

Jurassic World, a goofy and fitfully entertaining summer movie, understands and even winks at its place in the pecking order of blockbuster sequels.

All this nesting-doll storytelling might feel hollow if Blind didn’t possess such a solid emotional foundation.

The uninitiated, meanwhile, can start with Pigeon and work their way backward through Andersson’s trilogy. It only gets better in reverse.

Though Entourage is set just months after the events of the HBO finale, its actors are (noticeably) several years older, and there’s something kind of sad, even desperate about seeing these characters behave like the same horny frat boys they basically were at the start of the series.

Perhaps the energy Crowe could have expended on shaping believable characters went instead to the cultural context.

Shot on gorgeous black-and-white 35 mm that only seems to enhance the melancholic drabness of the events it depicts, Tu Dors Nicole is an especially wispy, French-Canadian addition to an irresistible genre.

What’s really been withheld, in this dreary drag of a movie, is a reason to care.

Bird stages the PG mayhem with his usual grasp of dimension and space, his gift for action that’s timed like physical comedy. He keeps the whole thing moving, even when it begins to feel bogged down by preachiness and sci-fi exposition.

At certain point, whether all of this is purposefully awkward becomes almost irrelevant: The non sequitur vignettes are often hilarious either way, and the film gains an oddly agreeable rhythm.

Though Peli stages a few fun and creepy effects shots, nothing that happens here couldn’t be surmised from simply reading the film’s title.

The trouble begins when this gaunt, intelligent star is charged with embodying someone lacking in levity, someone burdened with excessive malaise. His deadly seriousness can be deadly dull.

For all the chaos erupting at all times, we never lose track of what’s going on, because it’s been staged not just with diabolical mischief, but also total clarity. What a movie.

The words “Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie” create certain expectations. Maggie, the glum new indie that technically fits that description, meets almost none of them.

There’s so much ground to cover here—so many introductions to make, so much story to churn through, so many gargantuan set pieces to mount—that the movie never really finds room to breathe.

A colossal miscalculation in audience uplift.

Adult Beginners, by contrast, is mostly just… nice. Neither dramatic enough to qualify as drama nor amusing enough to completely succeed as comedy, it’s the kind of movie that coasts on pleasantness, content to elicit a few smiles before disappearing from memory banks.

The filmmakers here completely commit to their gimmick, turning its limitations into benefits and exploiting the chosen technology for maximum effect. In the process, they hit the refresh button on the entire found-footage format.

The meat of the movie is the behind-bars rendezvous between Finkel and Longo, whose interactions raise questions of journalistic responsibility and the banality of evil. But when a closing block of text announces that the two men still talk on a semi-regular basis — a surprise, given the finality of their last on-screen meeting — it’s hard to shake the feeling that a truly complex liaison has been reduced to an acting exercise for a couple of moonlighting funnymen.

Lost River displays almost no distinctive personality of its own. The film proves that Gosling has refined taste in movies, and that he’s a quick study, but not that he has much to say as an artist. Not yet, anyway.

This is clearly the work of a master in the making, an artist on the cusp of greatness. Farhadi may be fixated on fibbers, but there’s almost no one working today who makes films so emotionally honest.

An early contender for the most Weinstein movie of the year, Woman In Gold bends a complicated legal quagmire—heavy on questions of ownership and national responsibility—into a crowd-pleasing David and Goliath story. The title, too generic for Klimt’s masterpiece, suits the movie just fine.

Laying out its anxieties right there in the title, While We’re Young is Noah Baumbach’s midlife crisis movie, a funny, talky portrait of an aging artist reaching for the vitality he sees in some younger friends.

As a curious hodgepodge of ideas, White God gets by. But the releasing-of-the-hounds at the start is a bad omen. The film, like the dogs, mostly goes downhill.

A film about taking chances takes its own big chance, risking ridicule with a third act that’s at once sweet, amusing, lackadaisical, and more than a little preposterous.

The artificiality is funny but also thematically resonant: This is a film about fake feelings, the invented romance for which two strangers forfeited their futures. And to Hausner, such a colossal waste of potential deserves not a melodramatic tribute, but the cinematic equivalent of an eye-roll.

Maudlin when it’s not being offensive, The Cobbler belongs to that special class of comedy that seems to get worse with every new (mis)step it takes.

Fans of early John Carpenter will immediately identify the master’s influence — on the voyeuristic slink of the camera, the synth pulse of Rich Vreeland’s throwback score, and the transformation of “safe,” warmly lit residential environments into landscapes of dread.

Like "Elysium," this rusty A.I. story is basically just "District 9" with a new coat of paint; it’s distinguished only by the jabbering, irritating personality of its title character.

True to its title, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a mildly inferior sequel, diluting the modest charms of its predecessor. Said charms do remain, however.

In exploring how an honest person might compromise her integrity in the face of insurmountable obstacles, The Lesson compromises its own sense of reality; the movie just keeps piling on the misfortune, pushing past believability into what feels like questionably intentional comedy.

Like too many horror films, this one seems targeted at a hypothetical audience using only 10 percent of its brainpower.

It’s a movie you’ve seen many times before, just never in the perverse key of Cronenberg.

At its core, Wild Canaries is a reminder that relationships require a sense of adventure, and maybe a little mystery, to keep the magic alive. Indie comedies, as the film proves, benefit from the same.

The footage, edited by Actress director Robert Greene, coheres into what feels like one long, chaotic school day. You can practically feel the pulse of grown-up veins, the fraying of last nerves.

The filmmakers have cannily structured this crazed collection of shorts, using running time and general quality as organizational criteria. The best segments serve as bookends. The worst ones are buried in the middle.

To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.

A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.

Satrapi makes some bad calls in her attempts to balance bleak humor with bleaker thrills, including ending the film on a glibly cheerful note. Her best decision, bar none, was entrusting such heavy material to the guy who played Van Wilder. Behind that perpetual smirk lurks a talent for quiet depravity. Bonkers looks good on him.

As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.

Tempting though it might be to celebrate any earnest, good-faith attempt to talk about race in America, it’s clear that the creator of Mind Of The Married Man was not the right one to do the talking.

Macdonald exhibits a rewarding interest in the mechanics of running a sub—the complicated series of manual-labor tasks and coordinated analog processes required to keep one of these mighty boats afloat. It’s a submarine movie that cares how submarines work.

Even, however, if its thunder hadn’t been immediately stolen by "Birdman," which premiered three days before it at last August’s Venice International Film Festival, The Humbling would still look like a folly. Bad timing is the least of its problems.

The Wedding Ringer has so many gay jokes that some of them apparently didn’t even make the final cut.

Predestination, a superficially cerebral new thriller, plays almost exclusively to the diagram-drawing crowd.

As cinema, Selma is commendable; as cultural barometer, it’s beyond reproach.

Big Eyes has plenty of surface pleasures, but there was reason to expect more than that from it.

Two Days, One Night is a small miracle of a movie, a drama so purely humane that it makes most attempts at audience uplift look crass and calculated by comparison.

Given the material, it’s fitting that Mr. Turner is the director’s most visually ravishing movie. With cinematographer Dick Pope behind the lens, every shot is gorgeous enough to hang in a museum.

In any case, none of the gambles Jim makes over the course of the movie are as ballsy as the film’s casting strategy. Will audiences really buy Mark Wahlberg as a wordsmith too brilliant for academia? Smart money says no.

Bilbo fades into the sidelines of his own movie, and that may be why the mournful finale of Battle feels so canned, like a roiling tide of crocodile tears. Eleven years ago, Jackson earned the fond, seemingly endless farewells of The Return Of The King. His Hobbit series has only one ending, and it comes not a moment too soon.

The structural gamesmanship is just a smokescreen, a way to obfuscate the pulp nature of what is, ultimately, little more than a glorified, low-aiming potboiler.

It’s the cathartic, even meditative qualities of metal that are explored in A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, a new documentary whatsit that frequently resembles nothing so much as an adaptation of some imaginary black-metal record.

Believe it or not, though, the real horror of this superb Aussie monster movie has almost nothing to do with the title fiend and everything to do with the unspoken, unspeakable impulses he represents. Remove the Babadook from The Babadook, in other words, and something plenty terrifying remains.

It’s good for business but bad for drama, and the inelegantly titled Mockingjay—Part 1 suffers from an unavoidable sense of anticlimax. It doesn’t build to an ending so much as just eventually grind to a halt, like a video game demanding more quarters to continue playing.

A sequel so slapdash and ineffectual that its army of directors — six of them total, counting the poor sucker whose contribution got axed — might well be accused of intentionally burying the franchise. More charitably, perhaps they were trying to put a nail in the coffin of all found-footage horror. Some good must come from this much bad.

Dumb And Dumber To is crueler, crasser, grosser, lazier, creepier, and, yes, dumber than the first film.

The movie reaches for big insights about America’s obsession with winning and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek tragedy.

Shelton, who used to make scrappy, wholly improvised indie gabfests, continues to sand down the rough edges of her style, so that each new movie feels a little less distinct — and a lot less transgressive — than the one before it.

If there’s any fault to find in this expertly directed, frequently hilarious study of imploding male ego, it’s that Östlund basically arrives upon a perfect ending — one that brings the movie full circle, both dramatically and visually — and then bypasses it in favor of a more muddled one. But as climactic missteps go, it’s not exactly disastrous.

For Michael Keaton, Birdman is some kind of gift from the movie gods, a license to have his cake and messily devour it too.

Identity is the film’s true subject: As much as he pokes fun at the foibles of a privileged white America, Simien is more interested in the ways his protagonists conform, or refuse to conform, to society’s idea of them.

Derives almost all of its very modest power from its relationship with its better half. McAvoy, turning up the broody charm, isn’t to blame. The trouble is that Conor’s drama, set against the backdrop of a lonely Manhattan, looks even more generic than Eleanor’s.

It’s little surprise that Her turns out to be the better of the two movies, mostly by virtue of prominently featuring Chastain, who conveys an interior life — shifting emotions, competing desires — the script doesn’t supply her.

In examining the man’s selfless service, Moss uncovers something greater than a vision of a divided community; he’s made a drama as prickly and surprising as any fictional character study.

More sad dad and noble martyr than creature of the night, Evans’ dashing Prince Of Darkness inspires less fear than just about any incarnation of the famous character, save perhaps the one played by Leslie Nielsen.

More "Full Metal Jacket" than "Dead Poet’s Society," the film is an epic battle of wills between two fanatical artists, one doing everything in his power to painfully make a master out of the other.

This Left Behind may be worse than the last Left Behind, but it’s much less boring, thanks in part to the commitment of its star, who plays the often ludicrous material with the straightest of faces. The Cage works in mysterious ways.

As a blunt object, a machine built to put nerves on edge and fingers over eyes, Annabelle is still crudely (and cruelly) effective. Fear comes cheap.

In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease.

It’s just more joyless junk, another title to bury at the bottom of Fuqua’s resume.

Manipulative but big-hearted, Pride is an ode to activism as a social equalizer, and a gushy illustration of the belief that hearts and minds can be changed, and that it’s impossible to truly battle oppression without opposing all forms of oppression. Why resist?

There’s more existential wisdom in five random, zombie-infested minutes of Shaun Of The Dead than in the full two hours of this feel-good folly.

This Is Where I Leave You demonstrates, a great cast is a terrible thing to waste.

If you’re going to treat your audience like a rat in a maze, it’s best to offer a tastier reward than the promise of more maze to come.

Dumb fun is rarely this smartly delivered.

The plight of this struggling family unit weighs more heavily on the heart with each passing minute, making Stray Dogs the rare marathon-length art film that seems to grow less oppressive the longer it goes on.

What saves the movie is its actors: Exploiting audience’s memories of their previous collaborations, Hader and Wiig really do seem related. And both actors handle the balance between drama and comedy with aplomb.

Cultural authenticity seeps into the cracks of this low-key lowlife drama, whose best attribute is the pungent sense of place it possesses.

It’s dazzling, but also excessive; by the end, even those consistently wowed by the directorial showmanship may find themselves feeling that less would have been more.

What’s the point in shooting a horror movie in the catacombs if it’s just going to end up looking like every horror movie not shot in the catacombs?

Thing is, though, for anyone familiar with the Tarantino film, this less remarkable picture will totally seem like a prequel, peering back as it does on younger versions of characters audiences got to know in "Jackie Brown."

In just about every way, the film is an inferior sequel — dumber, flatter, lacking even the barbaric extremity of its predecessor. Where’s a flesh-eating Elijah Wood when you need him?

Setting several scenes to the famously poignant plinks of pianist Frédéric Chopin, Love Is Strange never achieves the sheer emotional resonance of "Make Way For Tomorrow"; it’s gently affecting, not deeply heartbreaking — in part because Sachs builds to a less devastating punctuation than McCarey did.

Child actors can have a tough time transitioning into adult careers, their charm often evaporating with the onset of puberty. But for Chloë Grace Moretz, the trouble isn’t growing pains; she’s just overqualified for the roles Hollywood tends to offer young women her age.

Dinosaur 13 reduces a complicated legal quagmire about paleontological ownership to something of a pity party. But hard luck is not the same as injustice.

The ironic side effect is that this major influence on today’s new class of dystopian YA smashes now looks like just another greedy knockoff on-screen—a monochromatic "Divergent," or something similar.

Frank is never more endearing than when Fassbender has a mic to his mouth, spitting out the hilariously batshit lyrics of his “most likeable song ever,” or literally singing the praises of his cohorts during an affecting showstopper.

At times, the movie seems to exist for no other purpose than to collide these two personalities together, privileging their antagonistic banter above all else. But isn’t that the basic point of all buddy comedies?

What the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lacks is not fidelity, but a spirit of genuine boyish fun.

This innocuous crowd-pleaser delivers everything that its pedigree and ad campaign promise, courting the patronage of foodies, Oprah Book Club members, Travel Channel subscribers, and Helen Mirren lovers alike.

Some of Calvary is uncomfortably bleak... But writer-director John Michael McDonagh—brother of the English playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)—has an ear for wry humor, providing his characters with a steady supply of acerbic wit.

The movie exists mainly as an act of social advocacy, showing how one portion of the population lives and offering a sobering rebuke to pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric.

Guardians boasts not one, but two Han Solo proxies — not to mention an ass-kicking Princess Leia surrogate, a villain with a very Sithian fashion sense, and the flora answer to Chewbacca. Also, one of the Han Solo types is a talking raccoon.

What resonates, in this smart but minor procedural, isn’t the harsh vision of a post-9/11 world, but the unglamorous depiction of governmental grunt work.

No amount of imaginative trickery can fill the void of feeling at the movie’s center. Whimsy for whimsy’s sake is just too much to take.

For better or for worse — okay, mostly for worse — he’s made the exact film he wanted to make; it just took him some time, and a lot of charity, to get the earnest thing off the ground.

I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.

It’s nice to look at, easy to watch, and impossible to remember for the length of a car-ride home.

Yet for all the heart and soul the actor pours into his role, watching Dawn still feels a bit like seeing massive, expensive wheels spin in place.

There’s a cumulative power here that transcends any rough patches. Boyhood isn’t perfect, but it’s an astonishing, one-of-a-kind accomplishment—and further proof that Linklater is one of the most daring, ambitious filmmakers working today.

The action scenes are clumsily filmed and choppily edited.

McCarthy co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and appears as the heroine’s wormy tyrant of a boss. Their collaborative mojo results in some winning sweetness, but not a lot of hilarity.

Seeing clichés mimicked this skillfully is plenty hilarious.

Provides little in the way of comforting catharsis. That may be because Berlinger, a thorough and impassioned muckraker, has managed to find hints of injustice in the justice that was served.

Polanski isn’t a miracle worker. Venus In Fur works where the facile "Carnage" largely didn’t because the play itself is something of a delight — a straightforward but sharply comic twofer about roleplaying and control-based relationships (be they artistic, romantic, or otherwise). The casting, too, is impeccable.

As schematic as Third Person is on a whole, it’s downright risible on a moment-to-moment basis.

The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects — of which there are basically none — but on heavy doses of paranoia.

At heart, The Rover is something of a buddy road movie, albeit one almost completely devoid of humor.

The movie never becomes truly involving — mostly because it’s hard to get wrapped up in a narrative when you can’t shake the nagging feeling that the rug under your feet is being tugged.

There aren’t just more dragons, but more characters, more plot, more everything. The trade-off is that the charm of the original gets a little lost, a casualty of rapid-franchise expansion.

Goldthwait is just having too much fun with his bantering couple and the eccentric, guitar-playing Bigfoot fanatics they encounter; the climax feels like an afterthought, the obligatory mayhem he had to provide as justification for making a shaggy romantic comedy about the cult of Sasquatch.

In turning a 23-minute story into an 83-minute one, Robespierre sometimes struggles to occupy her running time.

Good movies are made out of great books all the time, and to fault Fault for not living up to its inspiration isn’t much more fair than dismissing the novel on the grounds that it sounds, superficially, like "Love Story" for millennials. As with infinities, some successes are just bigger than others.

There’s a certain muddled ambivalence to the movie; one gets the impression that Reichardt is more interested in these people than their ideas, but she never quite cracks Josh, who’s much more impenetrably aloof than the beleaguered travelers of "Meek’s Cutoff", her masterpiece. Night Moves is a portrait of outsiders that leaves its audience on the outside.

As entertaining as it is to watch Cold In July drift, the film has to eventually pick a lane — and that’s where this otherwise accomplished suspense picture runs into the ditch.

This Godzilla doesn’t tap into deeper cultural anxieties the way its 60-year-old ancestor did. Nor does it engender much dramatic investment in its hero... Yet as pure popcorn entertainment, Godzilla delivers plenty of goosebumps.

In other words, what starts as a glorified "Pretty Little Liars" episode eventually evolves (devolves?) into a flippant hybrid of "The Craft" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

For anyone who’s followed Favreau’s career since the mid-’90s, the temptation to read Chef as veiled autobiography will be overpowering.

Trouble is, Neighbors rarely exploits its generational war of attrition for big laughs or true insight. And despite a couple of puerile gags, it often feels as domesticated (and fatigued) as its main characters.

McLean puts the pedal to the metal from the start, forgoing suspense in favor of instant, gruesome gratification.

Because the film is meant to resemble documentary footage, West is forced to effectively “play dumb,” disguising his craftsmanship behind a lot of intentionally cruddy handheld camerawork. Still, that’d be less of a problem if the material he was gracelessly filming weren’t such run-of-the-mill claptrap.

Over an efficient 80 minutes, no shot feels wasted, and no one says much that couldn’t be better communicated through their placement in the artfully arranged frame.

Even at a hefty 142 minutes, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hasn’t the time for its surfeit of plot, nor for the sprawling ensemble of supporting characters caught in the sticky web Webb weaves.

all the retro production design in the world can’t disguise the sheer familiarity of the film’s paranormal parlor tricks.

Locke, as fascinating as it is in theory, never evolves into anything more than a glorified acting exercise.

Blue Ruin rarely resembles anything but itself. Much of the singularity can be attributed to the film’s atypical hero, surely one of the year’s great characters.

Really, though, the film’s focus is on neither the destination nor the journey, but on the individuals planting themselves in front of the lens.

This humorless science-fiction cautionary tale feels like a relic from an earlier era, pulled out of a dusty old box of zip disks and 56k modems.

Proxy’s greatest attribute is its deliberate dismantling of the audience’s assumptions.

Along the way, The Railway Man accumulates some power and insight, but it’s also hard to shake the feeling that a complicated first-person account has been given the Weinstein treatment.

For two hours or so, he becomes a magnetic actor again, the same vibrant presence who wowed audiences with his work in "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation." He is, in these rare instances, just plain good.

The derivative evil-mirror potboiler Oculus doesn’t exactly shatter the clichés of the genre, but it does distort them in a couple of interesting ways, beginning with a creative reversal of the usual vengeful-spirit plot.

In many respects, Adam and Eve are nocturnal cousins to the angels from Wim Wenders’ "Wings Of Desire": They’re secret observers of history, living records of the past with little control over the future. But Jarmusch has no interest in the kind of guilt and grief Wenders wove through his movie; Only Lovers comes in a hipper, sexier shade of melancholy.

Under The Skin is rich with menacing atmosphere, so much so that viewers could probably tune out the narrative and still get on the proper wavelength.

The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."

The result is a monolithic slab of Biblical fan fiction, at once deeply serious and seriously silly. It’s a mess, but at least it’s the mess its creators wanted.

What Cesar Chavez critically lacks is a unique, complicated, or personal perspective on its world-famous subject. As is often the problem with portraits of influential firebrands, the film never quite sees past the movement to the man leading it.

Taken as a whole, with volumes one and two in concert, Nymphomaniac looks like nothing less than a career overview, touring each era of the director’s development.

By the end, audiences may end up craving a more charitable, less dour study of teenage mating habits — one, like the less “realistic” Raising Victor Vargas, that doesn’t portend trauma for any sapling trying to blossom too soon.

Enemy dives into material Villeneuve has described as “personal.” But it’s hard to see much more than platitudes in the metaphoric muddle of its plot.

The Missing Picture might have felt academic, even coldly removed, were it not for its scathing narration, penned by Panh (with Christophe Bataille) and read by Randal Douc.

Even when Bad Words is bad in the wrong way, it tends to be bad in the right way, too.

For the most part, Veronica Mars plays like a very solid episode of the series, the kind unlikely to rank among fan favorites. It could, however, serve as fine fuel for a sequel, one that wouldn’t find Veronica resisting — for half of her time on screen — the urge to do what she does best. Keep your hearts (and wallets) open, marshmallows.

In Haunt, scares are scarce and tropes are liberally lifted from better movies.

For all its virtuosic showboating, the film belongs as much to its screenwriter, Damien Chazelle, as it does to its director, Eugenio Mira.

The most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, with its cock-shot montages and frankly descriptive narration, is how flat-out funny it often is.

Anderson’s latest invention, The Grand Budapest Hotel, may be his most meticulously realized, beginning with the towering, fictional building for which it’s named.

What May is really after, in other words, is a glimpse at a post-Columbine America, where punishments don’t always fit crimes, cures are often worse than diseases, and the courts are frequently being used as a catchall solution to very normal discipline problems.

Costner, by contrast, is too laidback to intimidate; he seems less battle-wearied than simply weary, nailing only half of the profitable “aging ass-kicker” equation. Firefights and car chases just don’t suit this movie star of advancing years.

True to its franchise roots, the film is atmospheric, well acted, and frustratingly intent on draining every last drop of pleasure from the genre-movie conventions it cannibalizes.

Despite a few deviations, About Last Night is basically the same sanitized rom-com, bearing the slightest hint of resemblance to its source material. In other words, most of the perversity of Perversity has again been excised — the Chicago too.

This RoboCop earns its stripes, mostly for the seriousness with which it treats its Frankenstein story.

The Monuments Men feels not just self-conscious but also a bit self-congratulatory, its creator squashing the spirit of adventure with too many grandiose lines about the Importance Of Art.

Improbably, this saccharine melodrama comes courtesy of Jason Reitman, the Hollywood scion director who made "Juno" and "Up In The Air." Clearly, he’s chasing a change of pace, a hard right turn away from the sardonic redemption stories that have previously sported his byline and into the unfamiliar realm of Sirksian soap.

Believe it or not, some of this mayhem—muscularly orchestrated by directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, who made 2010’s "Rabies" — does provoke laughter.

Blending supernatural hokum with real horrors of U.S. history — namely, the MKUltra experiments performed by the CIA in the 1950s — The Banshee Chapter superficially resembles some lost episode of "The X-Files."

For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.

There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.

For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later.

Instructive mainly for screenwriters looking for tips on what not to do, Walking With Dinosaurs takes the education out of “educational entertainment.” The entertainment, too.

Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet.

The irony of Saving Mr. Banks is that it takes this true story of Hollywood conflict, of artistic integrity pitted against studio moxie, and gives it the same warm-and-fuzzy treatment the company gave Poppins. One woman’s failed battle to stop her work from being Disneyfied has itself been Disneyfied.

American Hustle turns out to be a freewheeling party of a movie, one that never stops adding complications and wrinkles and hungry new players to the mix.

This Hobbit is, in other words, a much more eventful affair than its year-old predecessor. And yet for all the fine spectacle Jackson crams into his lengthy sequel-within-a-prequel, it’s still hard not to mourn the single, self-contained movie that could have been.

Beautifully shot by Amélie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis is instantly recognizable as the work of its sibling auteurs. But it’s also something of a departure — looser and more rambling than the average Coen concoction, with a lovingly recreated period setting.

Sometimes resembling a cross between "Winter’s Bone" and "Warrior" — but without the stylized language of the former or the male-weepie conviction of the latter — Out Of The Furnace gets by on the commitment of its cast.

Were Mandela solely interested in that early chapter of its subject’s life, when he was reluctantly turning to violent tactics in the war on apartheid, the film might have achieved a uniquely complicated perspective. Alas, the first passage is just a portion of what turns out to be a typically sprawling, bloated biopic.

For better and worse, Lee’s Oldboy is a more somber affair.

Delivery Man may be a change of pace for Vaughn, but it’s the exact opposite for its creator, the Québécois filmmaker Ken Scott. Belonging to the Funny Games school of carbon-copy remakes, the film is an identical Hollywood retread of Scott’s 2011 festival favorite Starbuck. Every scene, every joke, nearly every shot of the movie is straight out of the original.

Like too many franchise installments, Catching Fire builds to more of an ellipsis than a period, teasing the next chapter instead of providing closure. But isn’t that true of "The Empire Strikes Back" as well? At least casual fans will only have to wait a year, not three, to see what happens next in this galaxy not so far away.

Just as it’s impossible to capture in a 600-word review what made Calvin And Hobbes so special, no 100-minute film on the subject can really hope to convey its magic either. But Dear Mr. Watterson does its best, relying on choice excerpts of the work and enthusiastic talking-head interviews.

Payne, who never met pathos he didn’t feel inclined to puncture with slapstick humor, has somehow made his best drama and his worst comedy rolled into one.

Birth briefly staggers to life when the topic of race comes up — not because that angle on Night hasn’t been covered ad nauseam, too, but simply because it seems to inspire the most provocative discussion.

Ronan acquits herself nicely. Believable as both a smitten leading lady and a resourceful action heroine, she’s the ideal young-adult starlet — though after this and "The Host," maybe it’s time the actress lent her piercing baby blues to a plain old adult project again.

Forget the fairy-tale romance between Jane and her hammer-wielding hunk. The real emotional center of the Thor series is this sibling rivalry, more compelling than any climactic battle royale or winking teaser for the next chapter.

There’s something undeniably affecting about that trajectory, which allows McConaughey to turn his character into an empathetic figure — one whose prejudice fades as his fighting spirit intensifies — without sacrificing his rapscallion spirit. He’s the same loudmouthed macho braggart at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning, but now he’s a loudmouthed macho braggart with purpose.

The movie is written and directed by the British filmmaker Richard Curtis, who specializes in fantasies — the dozen intersecting rom-coms of "Love Actually" the fairy-tale courtship of "Notting Hill", the endless receptions of "Four Weddings And A Funeral." At a glance, About Time appears to be of a piece with those crowd-pleasers.

This as one of the director’s most pitiless visions—a drama as pitch black as the night that envelops its characters.

Explicit lesbian lovemaking aside, Blue is, at heart, a somewhat ordinary coming-of-age romance, pulled and stretched nearly to its breaking point.

No amount of needless chatter can quite dilute the power of The Counselor’s grim endgame, especially given the way its writer and director conspire to keep the threat offscreen, like some terrible, unseen force of nature.

It’s a strange thing to say about a movie so obsessed with the red stuff, but this Carrie is bloodless.

If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread — the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.

Destined to please only "Rock Of Ages" fans who wished Hough and Brand had more screen time together, Paradise boasts the broadest, most saccharine tendencies of its writer and first-time director. In Cody terms, it’s a doodle that can’t be undid.

The saving grace of Kill Your Darlings is its sordid romantic angle, a narrative thread that pulls the film away from wink-wink allusions and into more serious emotional territory.

An eye-opening, often-infuriating new documentary.

That it never quite sinks into caricature is thanks to the imposing presence in the lead. Refusing to fish for sympathy, even as his character circles the drain, Eidson delivers a complex, bravely off-putting performance.

The more outlandish the film becomes, especially in its off-the-rails second half, the less crucial its unique setting seems.

More often that not, however, Captain Phillips is riveting. Though he remains unfortunately convinced that violently shaking his camera is the best way to achieve visual urgency, Greengrass nevertheless excels at pressure-cooker scenarios.

In different hands, Runner Runner might have worked as sleazy tropical noir, but director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) never quite embraces the tawdriness of his material.

Drenched in the evening glow of its urban and suburban backdrops, Darker comes alive in the dark, when its characters are drowning their sorrows in song, the sauce, or conversation.

The bloodshed is fast and brutal — the flash of a knife, a splash of crimson in a backseat, an opening robbery gone horrifically awry. There’s even a little Tarantino in the staging, as when a blood-splattered wallflower unleashes her Kill Bill-style vengeance straight into the camera lens.

Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.

If nothing else, Gravity makes the case for throwing immense resources at true visionaries; the blockbuster craftsman as adventurer, Cuarón expertly blends the epic with the intimate. For every stunning 3-D setpiece involving a dangerous hailstorm of metallic debris, there’s a moment of small tenderness.

What a pity, then, that almost no imagination has been expended on the narrative.

This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.

To Gordon-Levitt’s credit, he neatly sidesteps the moralizing message his film seems to be building toward. The hero’s problem is not that he jerks off too much; as articulated by widowed, pot-smoking classmate Julianne Moore — the only real human being onscreen — it’s that he’s never actually connected to another person through sex.

As a primer on its topic, Inequality For All is informative, plainly argued, and — in some of its more poignant anecdotes — suitably enraging.

Narrowness of focus keeps the movie from becoming bloated with self-importance, but it also leaves it feeling a little inconsequential.

There are some who have complained that C.O.G. ends too abruptly, but it has the bracing, devastating punctuation of a fine short story.

Oddly, counterintuitively even, what’s most endearing about the film is how middle-of-the-road it is. While 2011’s "Shame" treated the same subject with too much seriousness, and next week’s "Don Jon" treats it with too little, Thanks For Sharing acknowledges that sex addiction, like most other problems in life, can be a source of both suffering and humor.

Sharp as the dialogue is, it’s hard to imagine any of this working as well without the late, great Gandolfini.

Mother Of George is rarely boring to look at, but it might still have been better served by a starker, less showy aesthetic.

A candy-coated French throwback to the Hollywood rom-coms of the ’50s — especially the ones starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day — Populaire is old-fashioned in more than just its pastel color scheme.

The results are akin to seeing the Nixon presidency through the eyes of his top aides; it’s as much a portrait of innocence lost as a behind-closed-doors exposé.

Mostly, however, This Is Us counts on the musicians to supply the personality—a strategy that makes it feel more like an anonymous mash note than a warts-and-all glimpse behind the curtain. Then again, what warts?

Closed Circuit may be little more than a high-minded, shrewdly topical gloss on a shopworn genre, but its cynicism is bracing.

At the end of the day, the pesky imperative to convey information is still a driving force; more than anything Wong has ever made, the movie chokes on exposition, its more poetic concerns stifled by its surfeit of plot.

Written by Simon Barrett, another purveyor of micro-budget carnage, You’re Next boasts a sometimes-uneasy blend of comedy and horror.

Easily one of the year’s best comedies, the movie thrives off the chemistry between its leads, with Pegg painting a very funny portrait of emotional paralysis and Frost demonstrating a heretofore unseen talent for intimidation.

Borrowing every single component of its complicated plot from other sources, The Mortal Instruments is hodgepodge claptrap, but there’s a faint flicker of fun in its introducing-the-world passages.

The film works only, if at all, as an unofficial Air Force One reunion, with Ford stopping just short of bellowing “Get off my jock!” during a pair of gritted-teeth encounters with Oldman. Some pleasures never go out of fashion.

Even with its edges sanded down, Kick-Ass 2 is unmistakably Millaresque — a juvenile comedy of excess, in which skewering adolescent power fantasies looks an awful lot like indulging in them.

Lowery, it can’t be denied, has Malick’s moves down pat. It’s the Malick touch that eludes him.

In Austenland, her directorial debut, Hess adapts a 2007 beach book into another broad comedy of caricature. It’s a truly half-assed satire, one whose senseless sensibility seems less informed by the best of English literature than the worst of Saturday Night Live.

By going back to nature — and to his indie roots — the director of "George Washington" has reconnected with his poetic side. The Malick comparisons seem appropriate again.

Perhaps one of the two already-in-the-works Planes sequels will crack one of these unholy machines open. That’d be about the only reason to return to this nose-diving franchise.

Here and there, some of this starts to feel a little less like homework and more like fun. Though part one used up many of the good monsters—like Medusa and the hydra—part two is a fleeter entertainment, free of origin-story requirements.

With Elysium, the director proves that he still has one hand on the X-Box controller; maybe he should give the allegories a rest already and just get back in the game.

As directed by Ecuadorian filmmaker Sebastián Cordero (Chronicles, Rage), Europa Report manages a few striking and intense sequences — most notably, a fatal drift into the endless vacuum of nothingness, filmed from the perspective of the disappearing spaceman.

If Ponsoldt can step beyond the 12 steps, he might make something truly spectacular.

The film’s as clumsy yet earnest as a nervous first-timer, groping gracelessly in the dark for ecstasy and meaning.

Now here’s a comic-book movie. In a summer that’s delivered one overstuffed Phase Two sequel and a bloated reboot designed to establish a whole new universe of interconnected franchises, The Wolverine has a self-contained efficiency that’s hard to resist.

Nothing short of wiping their memories with a real-life neuralizer is going to convince moviegoers that the supernatural buddy-cop comedy R.I.P.D. is anything more than a thinly disguised "Men In Black" ripoff.

The blame belongs most plainly with Michelle Morgan’s script, which requires this gifted comedian to play straight woman to a supporting carnival of Indiewood types.

As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective.

The results are sometimes striking, in pure visual terms, but rarely engaging; even as a brutish saga of underworld retribution, the film fails to get the heart pounding.

For all its chronic familiarity, the movie has its minor pleasures, many of them visual. Though at this point it's basically a given that a new studio-animated movie will look good, Turbo often looks downright exceptional.

Putting a human face on a public tragedy that already had a human face, Fruitvale Station plays like an uncomplicated eulogy, with little more to say on its subject than “what a shame this bad thing happened.”

In nearly every respect, V/H/S/2 improves on its predecessor. Free of poky mumble-horror filler, it offers four fruitful variations on the original’s best chapter.

For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.

Yet for all its expensive grandeur, almost too epic even for the vast canvases of IMAX, Pacific Rim is unmistakably a Del Toro creation.

There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.

Just about everyone and everything in The Way, Way Back feels programmed, as though the film were written using Mad Libs.

What’s missing — and this was the crucial component of part one — is a little sour to undercut the sweet. Like its protagonist, a bad guy gone boringly good, Despicable Me 2 has no edge. It’s fatally nice and insufficiently naughty.

For once in a Dolan film, an actor upstages the camera moves. That’s a promising precedent, as well as a hint that artistic adulthood won’t spoil this hotdogging prodigy.

With her piercing baby blues that never seem to settle on a subject, even when she’s locked in conversation with it, Ronan seems just… off enough to play a vampiric vixen.

True to its name, Monsters University brims with cleverly designed creatures, a student body worthy of the recently deceased Ray Harryhausen. What the movie lacks is its precursor’s human ace-in-the-hole—that pint-sized, inadvertent agent of chaos, Boo.

If it’s possible to be both impressed and appalled by a movie’s pull-no-punches savagery, Maniac earns that dubious distinction.

Unfinished Song is basically two movies inelegantly stuffed into one. Both are about aging — its setbacks and second chances — but only one of them feels like an honest exploration of the topic. The better half of the film is a kinder, gentler cousin to 2012’s "Amour."