Alonso Duralde

The Legend of Tarzan isn’t as singularly joyless as many of this summer’s other current offerings, but it also feels distinctly like a missed opportunity. Even when Skarsgård offers up the character’s famous jungle cry, it sounds more mournful than enthusiastic, and that sentiment seeps into the entire enterprise.

The movie is not going to make anyone forget “Jaws,” but it delivers the kind of breathless tension that justifies its existence.

There’s plenty of fart jokes, forward motion and bright colors to engage easily-entertained children, but their parents will be subjected to yet another movie that has all the zing of watching evolution in real time.

Finding Dory never quite hits that sweet spot of sadness. The film definitely pushes our buttons as it portrays loss and separation, but it never slows down enough to let us ache. Even so, Finding Dory is rousingly entertaining.

This sequel might lack the delightful jolts of its predecessor, but it nonetheless maintains a slow boil of terror that’s consistently unnerving.

This new movie feels more like a series of sketches that all happen to revolve around the same handful of characters. That said, those sketches are fairly funny, and if this comedy has all the depth of a summer jam, it will eventually be the kind of late-night download that will inspire giggles for years to come.

Imagine “Battlefield Earth” without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious.

Forget art, or even craft: This is the kind of movie that can’t even get its shameless audience-pandering in order.

If Personal Shopper doesn’t spell everything out for its viewers, it’s no more accommodating to Maureen; she, like us, must use her skills to intuit what’s happening around her and what the future will hold. It’s a captivating swirl for all involved.

There’s a tipping point at which comedy goes from black to bilious, and that’s a balancing act that The Nice Guys doesn’t always nail. The laughs from this frequently entertaining action comedy get stuck in the throat, keeping this altogether good movie from being a great one.

What Alice Through the Looking Glass constantly underscores, however, is that even the greatest cinema trickery serves little purpose without stories and characters to support. The pictures are pretty (or scary or awe-inspiring) but they ultimately don’t mean anything.

X-Men: Apocalypse provides a hint at what might one day take down the ubiquitous superhero genre: utter dullness. For all its bangs, the movie is ultimately a whimper.

The Angry Birds Movie basically hits all the squares on the Lazily Conceived Family Cartoon bingo card.

This crime comedy doesn’t consistently deliver, but the highs make the lows worth enduring.

Neighbors 2 never lags, and the laughs keep coming, even though they’re coming from a fairly familiar place. If that’s all you want, that’s what you get. But, hey at least you get it, which is more than you can say for most sequels.

The film constantly reveals itself as having no idea how human beings speak or behave.

Everyone’s so damn happy and grateful to have been meddled with that it undercuts both the comedy and the drama in this film from writer-director Lorene Scafaria.

If you’re put off by the filmmaker’s previous work, then the autobiographical Sing Street isn’t going to be the movie that wins you over. But fans of Carney’s lush romanticism and hook-laden lyricism will be thrilled to add this one to their playlist.

With its combination of workplace sitcom and social activism, Barbershop: The Next Cut feels more like a binge-viewing of multiple episodes of a TV series than a movie, but even on that level, it’s a show worth watching.

Despite the title, this is a quiet, intimate story of a family reeling from tragedy, but it’s no less loaded with revelations and breakthroughs, all set at a recognizably human volume.

Demolition strikes a tricky balance; it’s a comedy of manners that never judges its hero’s bizarre behavior. Had it stuck to its emotional guns, it would stand much taller, but even its ultimate flaws can’t erode its sturdy foundation.

It’s a testament to the total-immersion powers of The Jungle Book, from its visual splendors to its sound design, that the seams never show; even more impressive is the film’s use of its craft not merely to dazzle us but also to further its dramatic agenda.

Take Me to the River isn’t a horror movie, but then it’s not not a horror movie, either. It’s a slowly tightening vise, all about suspicion and hostility and resentments and what people aren’t talking about when they talk to each other. A stunning debut feature from writer-director Matt Sobel, Take Me to the River is Polanski, with cicadas.

That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling. The trio do manage to cough up an acceptable number of ooh-that’s-cool moments, and fans who will be satisfied with those will be satisfied with those, but any other ideas and characters the movie might offer get lost in the rubble.

Unsettling and bizarrely humorous, The Clan is the sort of film that ups the ante of any movie that dares open with those dreaded five words: “Based on a true story.”

Midnight Special goes off its own narrative cliff, capping a compelling story with a third-act resolution so misguided that’s it’s the dramatic equivalent of punching the gas and plunging into the abyss.

Field uses her considerable powers as an actress to imbue some humanity into Doris, but the film kneecaps her efforts at every turn.

It doggedly follows the well-worn rom-com path, down to saving all the personality and occasional laughs – very, very occasional ones – for the supporting cast.

Even if this material might have been better served as a 40-minute short than as a full-length movie, first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg has cast a trio of actors at the top of their game, and they elevate the material.

The acting is universally excellent, particularly Fey, who’s shrewdly fulfilling our expectations while playing off them.

Gods of Egypt might have merited a so-bad-it’s-good schadenfreude fanbase had it maintained the unintentional laughs of its first 10 minutes. Instead, it skids into dullness, thus negating the camp classic that it so often verges on becoming.

A howlingly inane movie that somehow managed to collect an impressively A-list cast on its way toward becoming a cop movie that’s not just dumb, it’s disastrous.

Writer-director Tobias Lindholm knows how to keep a human perspective in his storytelling, no matter how outsized the drama or the dilemmas facing his characters.

The script offers enough laughs to keep the movie from feeling completely disposable...and it outshines many of its genre peers through little touches like not punishing its female characters for enjoying sex and casting Damon Wayans Jr. (as a romantic interest for Alice) in a role in which his race is thoroughly irrelevant.

There are no build-ups or pay-offs here, just a lot of random moments of people saying stupid stuff, and fashion people being gently lampooned.

Deadpool is one of those movies that’s all the more successful for how easily it could have gone so very wrong. It’s suffused with an arch, self-aware wit...yet it takes its romance and revenge storylines just seriously enough to keep us engaged.

The Coens revel in both the glamour and the squalor of post-war Hollywood with a film that more than makes up in wit and flash what it might lack in substance.

Jane Got a Gun takes long pauses in the action to chronicle through flashbacks how this love triangle comes to defend a single home. The film’s greatest surprise is that these unabashedly emotional flashbacks work.

A slapdash movie that’s more unbearable than the heavy-breathing best-seller and its emotionally timid screen adaptation.

As cinema, it’s an avalanche of feel-good clichés, but as an audience-pleasing machine, it relentlessly pursues its goal and will probably win over viewers who surrender to it.

Certain Women gives us female characters who are smart and complicated and funny and imperfect, and it never hand-delivers a message regarding what we’re supposed to think about them.

The movie really belongs to Mortensen, who allows Ben to be exasperating, arrogant and impatient but also warm, loving and caring. He’s a tough but adoring father, a grieving widower and an angry defender of his wife’s final wishes, and Mortensen plays all these notes and more with subtlety and grace.

Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny spin intrigues, break hearts and flirt with scandal just as effectively in the 1790s setting of “Love” as they did in “Disco,” which took place in the early 1980s.

Along with an ending that some will find either enigmatic or unsatisfying, the movie could benefit from some minor re-editing. But there’s still much that works here, from the chillingly droning score to a uniformly strong cast.

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

It’s cohesive and cathartic enough to make a fourth entry unnecessary, but at the same time, it’s entertaining and gorgeous enough to make the prospect of same something to welcome.

The film’s most genuinely funny moment involves A.J.’s ringtones, which should perhaps come as no surprise — the stakes, and the laughs, are so small that Ride Along 2 was apparently designed to be watched on your phone.

The accusations of cultural tone-deafness wind up being fairly moot, since The Forest turns out to be so generally inept and non-scary that to boycott it would give the film more attention than it deserves.

Most essential to telling this story are Rampling and Courtenay, both of whom convey pages and pages of backstory and emotion with the most fleeting of glances.

The first “Point Break” was absurd and hyper-macho, but the director committed to the story enough to make it, at the very least, vibrantly watchable. This remake offers nothing but the absurdity, along with a handful of impressive stunt sequences that are both its reason for being and a complete distraction from what little story is happening here.

Ferrell and Wahlberg are both game, but the material only sporadically lets them let loose and do something truly creative, while poor Cardellini transitions from naggy to unreliable.

Abrams had the benefit of learning what didn’t work in Lucas’ prequels, and he’s gone in the opposite direction. He’s also set an interesting course for moving forward with this engaging cast playing new characters making their way through this beloved universe.

The Hateful Eight may frustrate some of his more literally sanguine supporters, but it’s nonetheless an entertaining piece of dialogue-driven theater — with the occasional rifle-shot to the head.

Delicate and restrained, the film offers the messages of redemption and renewal we so often crave from a Christmas movie without wrapping its themes and characters in tinsel.

This is a rare misstep for Russell, who in the past has sold us on all kinds of stories, whether they’re as indescribable as “I Heart Huckabee’s” or as traditional as “The Fighter.” Unlike his indefatigable heroine, however, Russell just can’t seem to close the deal on Joy.

The film has a killer case of the cutes that only Smith’s acidity can cut, and only so much.

Lovers of spectacle for spectacle’s sake will come away from the film with many discrete sequences to admire, but there’s not enough of a human element to bridge them together. In terms of its lasting power, In the Heart of the Sea roars in like a great tide, but then just as quickly dissipates.

Whether or not one should tamper in God’s domain remains a matter of opinion, but Victor Frankenstein provides evidence that mere mortals should not mess with what Ms. Shelley hath wrought.

Both haunting and sweeping, Carol represents another masterwork from one of this generation’s great filmmakers.

“Secret” contains a passel of interesting ideas and effective scenes that don’t add up to an interesting whole.

If By the Sea weren’t so aggressively humorless, it might almost qualify as camp, so unsuccessful is its pursuit of weighty drama. Unintentional laughs are hard to come by here; instead, there are yawns aplenty.

Roach and McNamara fall victim to the occasional phony biopic moment or straight-up moment of didacticism, but overall Trumbo is a lively history about the day-in-day-out drudgery of survival during oppressive times. Screenwriters are so rarely taken seriously by the film industry that it’s a nice switch to watch them be the heroes.

This is a film that dares to be about something while still delivering as a piece of straightforward entertainment.

This is sweet, sentimental filmmaking of the old school, but it’s too sincere to get sticky. If “nice” isn’t the kind of adjective to put you off a movie, you’ll probably enjoy Brooklyn, even if you’re occasionally aware of its masterful manipulations.

If The Peanuts Movie never quite reaches the melancholy of earlier films like “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy Come Home,” it nonetheless respects the importance of failure and disappointment that Schulz always included in his storytelling.

Even a better political satire would have a hard time keeping up with the bizarrely eccentric vaudeville currently taking place on cable news, but Our Brand Is Crisis can’t even come close.

Sheridan proves he can still act the crap out of a movie, even when crap is all the movie has to offer.

The movie’s climactic exorcism jamboree provides some relief from the movie’s overwhelming dullness, and the final segments put the movie’s 3-D to use, but overall, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension feels like the last wheeze of a played-out series.

This new “Jem” might be pure cubic zirconium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a fun night out.

The cast of old pros (including Bruce Willis as a soldier of fortune) amble through amiably enough, but a few laughs here and there aren’t enough to make this movie come together in a satisfying way.

Burnt ultimately feels like those sous-vide bags that Adam finds so worthy of mockery: trapped in plastic, with the air sucked out of it.

Hou’s brand of reserve might not be for all audiences, but arthouse admirers of cinematic stillness will find themselves enraptured by this hypnotic tale.

Blanchett, as you’d imagine, is riveting, even when she’s saddled with the movie’s on-the-nose dialogue, not to mention a handful of fairly contrived domestic scenes.

While the digital effects are undeniably contemporary, Crimson Peak is otherwise a period homage that mostly plays like a period film, rarely giving in to contemporary notions of pacing and payoff. When the scares do arrive, however, they’re effectively unsettling.

A movie that feels like a series of beautifully and meticulously crafted tiles in a half-finished mosaic; you can admire the pieces but still come away feeling like you’ve been deprived of the whole.

If you can overlook the three or four endings of Bridge of Spies, each more overdone than the last, there’s a lot to like here.

While it’s an undeniably powerful film, it also seemingly feels the need to tread carefully.

Perhaps most importantly, not only does the film stress the importance of using math and physics and botany and chemistry to solve problems, but it also makes a plot based on scientific inquiry and audacity just as exciting and even more unpredictable as the movies’ usual brand of problem-solving, the kind that involves punching everyone and then blowing everything up.

Whereas the jokes in the “Grown Ups” series feel reactionary and bullying, the family-friendly Hotel Transylvania gags (in the script by Sandler and Robert Smigel) instead come off as clever and humane, even when they’re making fun of helicopter moms and lawsuit-sensitive summer camps.

Stonewall somehow manages to be simultaneously bloated and anemic, overstuffed and underpopulated.

A thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Sicario calls to mind the films of the 1970s — not necessarily the ones we think of as capital-I Important, but the seamy, sweaty thrillers that subtly slipped in anti-establishmentarian messages amid the violence. It mixes arthouse and grindhouse into a most satisfying cocktail.

It’s a lush and intriguing experience that works so well for so long that it can’t be undone by a few flaws.

You don’t have to love De Palma’s movies to find De Palma a fascinating look at a vital period of American film history, through the eyes of a controversial artist.

Even if you think you’ve seen this movie before, Headland’s gift for outrageous dialogue... and Sudeikis and Brie’s comic chemistry make Sleeping with Other People a treat from start to finish.

Ultimately, Equals fails because Silas and Nia aren’t all that much more interesting as a romantic couple than they are as zombie-like individuals.

Director Tom Hooper shakes things up a bit with The Danish Girl, proving that he’s capable of making a movie that’s both steeped in awards-season prestige and in possession of a pulse.

Beasts of No Nation is the kind of sincere, powerful filmmaking that gives socially conscious drama a good name.

This is Depp’s show all the way, featuring his best dramatic performance since another organized-crime movie, 1997’s “Donnie Brasco.”

Spotlight is that rare journalistic procedural that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as “All the President’s Men,” and while the movie never glamorizes or makes saints of its hard-working newsgatherers, it does stand as a reminder of the power and importance of a free press, particularly in ferreting out local corruption and malfeasance.

This is one of those cases where fictionalizing a true event, or at least fusing two or three real people into one composite character, might have resulted in tighter storytelling.

Z for Zachariah feels like a genuine rarity: an American movie that doesn’t tell you what to think or how to feel when the credits start rolling. Contemplating our doom doesn’t seem like a bad idea when it’s done this skillfully.

Besides Bentley’s performance, the only thing “We Are Your Friends” has going for it is the occasional directorial flourish, with words on screen or characters addressing the camera or that painterly drug trip. These jolts are few and far between, but they’re most welcome when they arise.

Between the script and the superior editing by Elliot Greenberg (“Chronicle”), there’s an enormous amount of tension and thrills to be found here; unfortunately, they’re all in the service of a movie that’s reprehensible to the core.

Grandma is both smart and sweet, mature and bawdy, knowing its characters’ flaws yet open to the possibilities of people acting upon their best instincts. It is without a doubt one of the year’s best films.

Nourizadeh and Landis are clearly going for a Tarantino level of blood-soaked dark humor, and while their cast is game, the film’s bursts of violence grow tiresome as its plot gets more and more ludicrous and hard to swallow.

What makes Mistress America so lovely — and so of a piece with “Frances Ha,” my favorite film of 2013 — is its balance of compassion and scrutiny: Baumbach and Gerwig don’t let these characters get away with their shortcomings, but neither does the film condemn these people or present them as irredeemable.

This new Man from U.N.C.L.E. would be an instant masterpiece if it were consistently as good as its best parts, but even as a hit-and-miss affair, it’s a bracing bit of late-summer fun for anyone who has given up the notion of a major studio offering anything truly revelatory until at least October.

Director Josh Trank, whose debut feature “Chronicle” put a smart new spin on superhero tropes, has assembled a quartet of engaging, charismatic performers and stranded them in a miasma of exposition and set-up that sinks the movie.

It’s fine to forfeit elements like stakes or suspense for a character piece, but when the characters are this vague, there’s nothing on which to hang your hat (or headband, for that matter).

End of the Tour refrains from depicting the process of writing, but what it has to say about the act of creation, not to mention the act of talking about it to an interviewer, is rich and fascinating.

Vacation does occasionally spring to life, delivering the kind of ouch-inducing humor of personal humiliation and bad luck that we’ve come to know from the ongoing adventures of the Griswold family. But while those laughs are welcome, there aren’t quite enough of them to sustain the experience.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation never pretends to be anything but a solidly entertaining collection of fighting, chasing, driving, falling and going-to-the-place-and-getting-the-thing. But at that level, it delivers completely. Choose to accept it.

While her debut as a screenwriter and leading lady doesn’t quite reach the outrageous heights of her TV work, Trainwreck remains hilarious and provocative, heralding what we can only hope will be a pot-stirring new voice on the big screen.

There are individual pieces of the movie that work wonderfully.... Unfortunately, this is also the kind of movie where talented actors do some of their least notable work.

About the best that can be said about the sluggish Self/less is that it’s a better Ryan Reynolds body-switching movie than “The Change-Up”; still, you’re better off seeking out “Seconds” — or heck, “All of Me” — instead.

As slick and contrived as the plotting may be from time to time, the writers and director Jake Schreier (“Robot & Frank”) throw in enough charming character moments and literal forward motion (this is a road movie, after all) to avoid getting bogged down in whiny teen solipsism. You might not believe that any of these kids exist, but you’ll enjoy hanging out with them.

Revisiting this material to make a “let’s put on a show” musical is all well and good, but that musical would benefit from more energy and tighter editing.

While the minions are certainly little, yellow and different, Minions has probably mined them for about as much comedy as they can provide as leading men.

So many movies play it safe and predictable that you have to give it up to Dope for making consistently bold moves — even if they don’t always pay off. This vibrant film is a bit of a mess, but it’s a beautiful one.

Southpaw is so simultaneously entertaining and unsurprising that it could go straight to ESPN Classic, but if these are the extremes it takes for certain people to notice that, hey, that guy from “Bubble Boy” has turned into a heck of an actor, then so be it.

A stronger structure underpinning these emotions run amok would have benefitted the film, but then what would feelings be without a little messiness? For many viewers, giving their own Joy and Sadness a workout will be enough to make Inside Out a valuable experience.

Jurassic World never works all that hard to wow us, either with groundbreaking effects or with a story that remotely holds our attention.

As a vehicle for Shaye, a veteran character actress getting the most screen time she’s ever been given, it’s a blast to watch her anchor this atmospheric look at the personal costs and triumphs of devoting your life to duking it out with nasty presences from the other side.

Piven’s Ari is so over-the-top in his narcissism and megalomania that he’s fun to watch, but the other lead characters are the kind of bros who should be having drinks thrown in their faces on a regular basis.

Whether you’ve read Flaubert or not, it’s a sharp comedy of manners anchored by two wickedly witty performances.

From “Vanilla Sky” onward, unfortunately, Crowe seems to have been stricken with some form of tone-deafness that curdles quirky into shrill.

It’s not the predictability that’s disappointing as much as the pat resolutions and emotional fixes provided to Anna. If you’re going to set up a young character who’s this complicated and in this much pain, you owe her a similarly complex catharsis.

There are big, loud entertainments like “Mad Max: Fury Road” that I find myself enjoying even with my critical-thinking cap on, and then there are movies like San Andreas that somehow go straight to my lizard brain; this movie’s dumb, and its portrayal of urban devastation borders on the pornographic, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained.

Poltergeist ultimately plays like the most perfunctory of remakes, one born of rights ownership and title marketability rather than a burning desire on anyone’s part to do something interesting or provocative with a classic. The 1982 original remains unassailable, all the more so when stood side by side with its pipsqueak descendant.

The one element of “Pitch Perfect” that this new film can’t provide is surprise; if you’re willing to forfeit discovery in favor of some breezy déjà vu, however, Pitch Perfect 2 is totally playing your song.

Where Fury Road stands apart from so much of today’s action cinema is that the human element remains front and center.

There’s a sketch, or a short film, or even an Adult Swim series to be mined from these characters and situations, but as a feature film, Welcome to Me comes off like taunting followed by hugs, where neither feels genuine.

For those looking for regrets or profundity, Iris doesn’t dig particularly deep in that regard. But if you want merely to revel in the life of a singular figure who approaches her look and her life very much on her own terms, you’ll be charmed and delighted — and maybe even inspired to try something risky next time you get dressed up.

Far From the Madding Crowd will no doubt captivate future generations of tenth-graders who couldn’t be bothered to read the book, but it flattens the complex characters and grand scope of Hardy’s novel into an airless and overly truncated CliffsNotes version.

It may well be that we’ll eventually stop looking at these Marvel films as discrete, individual experiences rather than chapters in an epic binge-watch, but even by those standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron feels like a solid but overstuffed episode, one more concerned with being connective tissue than anything else.

The humor level in the film is so moribund that it doesn’t even inspire groans or eye-rolling; instead, it figuratively puts its hands on your shoulders and pushes you deeper into your theater seat until you’ve been completely subdued by all the nothingness it has to offer.

Unfriended commits to its idea and continually finds new ways to creatively exploit it, building the tension as each character reveals his or her own dark deeds, thus justifying the brutal vendettas visited upon them.

Assayas clearly loves actresses — their spontaneity and their self-doubt, and the mercurial way they can switch from one to the other — and Clouds of Sils Maria offers both a compassionate exploration of their lives and a powerful showcase for three of them to do some of their best work to date.

Overall, The Longest Ride feels cloying and contrived; the only time it’s unpredictable is when the plot takes a turn so utterly unbelievable that, admittedly, no one would see it coming.

If incoming director James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Saw”) falls the tiniest bit short of what Justin Lin brought to the third, fifth and sixth entries, Furious 7 nonetheless ranks a very successful fourth place overall, with at least one gargantuan set piece that ranks among the series’ finest.

If you’re going to make propaganda, fine, but at least make good propaganda.

On the one hand, the story goes pretty much exactly where you think it will, but at the same time, Danny Collins generates its funniest and most dramatic moments precisely when the characters behave more like human beings and less like moving parts of what’s clearly intended to be a feel-good hit.

There’s a lot to like about director Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeously fanciful tale.

Spy would be a standout if only for its ability to keep me laughing while also keeping me from figuring out who was really double-crossing whom. Add to that this extraordinary ensemble of actors (who knew Jason Statham could be this funny?), and you’ve got another memorable offering from McCarthy and Feig.

When it seems like the movie can’t get worse, it does, with a finale that’s just cringe-inducing and far too neat and tidy. It’s the kind of climax that undoes all of McCarthy and Sandler’s efforts to make us invest in Max and his story.

Take everything annoying about a cobbled-together, overly familiar YA adaptation, add the built-in wheel-spinning of a sequel, and you’ve got Insurgent, a film that works best when it places its heroine inside virtual-reality situations — at least then it has an excuse for eschewing logic and context.

There’s not much new in this tale of grim men staring, and then shooting, each other down, but this cast and crew know how to spin this yarn with efficacy and economy.

It’s one thing to bring a gravelly gravitas to characters like this, but Penn suffers and glowers so much that it weighs down the material. If he plans to strap on the Kevlar in future, he might consider lightening up a little and saving the intensity for more serious movies.

Unfinished Business isn’t a laugh-free experience — Nick Frost steals every scene as a business underling with a kinky side — and some of the comic set pieces actually work.

Breeziness is a quality Queen and Country has plenty of, making for a lovely journey that never ends up anywhere particularly groundbreaking.

Wild Tales represents the work of an exceedingly skillful storyteller.

If the undemanding silliness of the first “Hot Tub Time Machine” was your cup of comedy, then you may well enjoy another plunge in these waters. Apart from a few laughs, however, I found the experience tepid and soggy.

At a brisk 86 minutes, What We Do in the Shadows never sags or drags, delivering its comic punches with surgical precision and then getting off the stage. Being immortal doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of timing.

Who cares if the story is occasionally impenetrable or if some gags land with a thud when the thrills and the eye candy keep coming at such a breathless pace? Jupiter Ascending doesn’t break the new ground that the Wachowskis have managed in the past...but the film never slacks in its efforts to wow us.

The jokes are consistently hilarious, with enough variety to tickle the funny bones of old salts and young fishies alike.

This silly chamber piece about sex and murder elicits only yawns, interrupted by the occasional unintentional giggle.

The three lead performances cut through Dolan’s showier tendencies, creating relatable, empathetic characters; we share in their glimmer of optimism for a better future, making it all the more painful when reality comes crashing down.

Mortdecai is by no means a disaster — the occasional joke lands, and there’s at least some fun to be found in the frenetic farce of all the conspiracies and the running-around... Still, I spent most of the movie waiting for it to find its rhythms and set a witty pace for itself that would allow the humor to build and the outrageous situations to pay off grandly.

Terrible character design, combined with a painful lack of laughs and a crushing plethora of ghastly songs, makes Strange Magic perhaps the worst animated feature ever to come out of Disney (which might explain why the studio is releasing the film under its now-rarely-used Touchstone label). Compared to other Lucas missteps of recent years, it’ll make you nostalgic for Jar Jar Binks.

There are plenty of laughs — and nothing that goes over a kid’s head to an adult funny bone is smutty or smarmy — and the sentiment never feels strained or artificial.

While The Wedding Ringer isn’t the total waste of time that its painful trailer (and January release date) threatens, it’s also a movie whose occasional good ideas are ultimately drowned out by sloppy, contrived screenwriting.

Blackhat is such a massive fiasco that it’s hard to know where to begin analyzing it.

Audiences the world over made Neeson an action star when they fell in love with his “particular set of skills” in the first “Taken,” but this third go-round finds both cast and crew opting not to exercise any of them. Everyone involved seems to be determined to quash anyone’s interest in a fourth chapter.

The chasm of the wealth gap and the slow destruction of the middle class should matter to us all, and films like Two Days, One Night remind us of the human faces affected by corporate greed.

Every good idea this sequel has to offer winds up taking a backseat to the most obvious cat-in-the-closet “BOO!” moments imaginable.

Marshall deserves credit for knowing how to shoot and cut (alongside editor Wyatt Smith, “Thor: The Dark World”) a musical number, and his work here ranks much closer to his success with “Chicago” than to his dismal “Nine.”

While The Interview never slacks in its mission to tell jokes, it's such a messy and meandering movie that it never quite lands as a satire of politics or the media or anything else.

It's hard to get invested in the father-son dynamic here, even it when it represents a diversion from the limp comedy bits and the flatlined suspense.

The paucity of new ideas is evident from the opening crawl.

For director Jean-Marc Vallée, the film's smarts and soulfulness give him a leap upward from “Dallas Buyers Club” that puts him head-to-head with Tate Taylor (“Get On Up”) as 2014's Most Improved Filmmaker. The other big surprise of Wild turns out to be Reese Witherspoon, going far from her usual comfort zone here.

Ultimately, the strengths of Unbroken far outweigh its flaws.

This stodgy adaptation creaks with solemnity — not to mention reactionary casting choices — and apart from some nifty frog and locust infestations, even the special effects pale next to a wind-blown Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea.

Director Doane offers no storytelling pizzazz; the lighting is careless, the pacing is deadly, the occasional stabs at comedy fall flat. Ultimately, Saving Christmas has nothing to share that Linus Van Pelt didn't already say better on “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Like so many memorable yet hard-to-describe movies, Why Don't You Play in Hell? takes a ridiculous concept and commits to it fully. You might laugh with surprise or shriek in horror — both, most likely — but you certainly won't dismiss it.

A cover version is pretty much what this do-over of The Gambler represents, with the rougher edges mixed out and sweetened. It's no mystery why actors and directors want to relive the magic of American studio movies from the fabled 1970s, but if you're not going to take the risks that the originals did, or illuminate as much about the characters, why redo them at all?

Suffice it to say that while Mockingjay, Part 1 might not be as consistently thrilling as “Catching Fire” — the second movie always has the luxury of being all PB&J and no crust — it's the movie equivalent of a page-turner, consistently suspenseful and filled with surprises and illuminating character moments.

In attempting to work through its family issues, it arrives at catharses that are contrived and unearned, and in attempting to find humor in this pungent situation, it fails to deliver laughs.

The pacing, the performances (Albert Brooks is a stand-out as Abel's lawyer), and every facet of the production serves the story and the film's larger ideas.

Much of what makes Horns so impressive, and such fun to watch, is the film's ability to juggle a variety of genres.

For much of the film, Nolan (who co-wrote with his brother Jonathan) seems to be unafraid to allow this big-budget extravaganza to tell a story that's about pain and loss and melancholy and sacrifice. Until it's not that anymore, and Interstellar becomes thuddingly prosaic.

Camp X-Ray never makes the bond between this particular woman and this particular prisoner feel genuine or organic. Their relationship (platonic, obviously) smacks more of screenwriter contrivance than of two put-upon souls finding each other under duress.

Citizenfour finds its strength in both the story and the telling: The information about government spying is chilling, of course, but the movie also gives us the opportunity to get to know the elusive Snowden.

Writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“Play”) brilliantly mines this dark material for awkward hilarity.

Given its double burden of being both a toy adaptation and a bloodless kiddie horror show, Ouija winds up being more fun that you might think, even if it's the sort of film you can't really take seriously for a second.

Sweet and sharp and exciting and hilarious, Big Hero 6 comes to the rescue of what's become a dreaded movie trope — the origin story — and launches the superhero tale to pleasurable new heights.

Those willing to commit to a fascinating story about talented and intelligent people who can also be selfish, vulnerable, strong-headed, short-sighted, and emotionally needy, however, will want to pull this one off the shelf.

The Book of Life manages to be genuinely surprising and engrossing.

Whiplash redefines the teacher movie (to say nothing of the young-musician movie) with a brutal energy and no easy resolutions. It's a challenging tune that will nonetheless get stuck in your head.

For a comedy set around one epic catastrophe of a rotten day, this wisp of a farce feels strangely chaos-deficient.

The intent of the film, and its timeliness, are beyond reproach, but that doesn't make Kill the Messenger as stirring or inspiring of indignation as it clearly wants to be.

At its best moments, Pride makes the chest flutter and the neck hairs stand up with the revolutionary adrenaline that comes from a potent protest song.

It's not even that the film shifts wildly in tone as much as the fact that none of those tones work at all: the horror parts aren't scary and, surprisingly for Smith, the comedy bits aren't funny.

“ASIII” feels like the most scattershot entry in the trilogy, despite a relative rally toward competence with the second movie.

For its first half or so, The Maze Runner tells a captivating tale of survival and weaves a potentially interesting mystery. Once its path become clear, however, you realize this is a puzzle you've worked out before.

This is Tom Hardy‘s show, and any opportunity to see this actor exercise his skills merits attention. He, along with the rest of this top-notch ensemble, give “The Drop” far more than they get back.

Credit must be given: run-of-the-mill mediocrities come and go, but The Identical is the most woozily misguided flop to grace the screen since the “Oogieloves” movie. Connoisseurs of the most wonderfully terrible cinema need to run out and catch this one early and often.

The ingredients steadfastly refuse to whip up into the froth this film so clearly wants to be.

The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.

Bahrani (and co-writer Amir Naderi) want the audience to go to the dark side with them without losing their faith in the system. To anyone who has watched this crisis unfold over the last decade, it will feel like a cheat.

Green operates in a smarter mode of storytelling, giving the audience the benefit of the doubt that they'll notice the details, and he's clearly whispered Pacino into giving a nuanced and human-sized turn.

Lacking appealing characters (or character design), this misfire will, with any luck, eventually become a forgotten footnote among the output of a production company that has, up until now, shown real promise at making films that defy the usual tropes and storytelling mechanisms in contemporary family-friendly animation.

There is some humor to be found here, of course, and a bit of exploration of the sheer boredom of being trapped for days inside four white walls, and moments of real connection between Bahari and both his family and the political revolutionaries he gets to know on the street. But Stewart doesn't pursue any of these ideas enough to stick, resulting in a film that relates incidents without ever really telling much of a story.

The director has wisely assembled an ensemble of performers who know how to handle a long take; this will certainly rank among Keaton's career highlights — in a role that allows him to completely dump out his paintbox and show a vast range of emotion — but everyone shines.

For a film loaded with decapitations and gun-toting ladies in bondage gear, Sin City gets really tedious really quickly.

While many of the big moments of If I Stay can be easily dismissed, it's the little ones that elevate the film to at least mixed-bag status.

Winterbottom and cinematographer James Clarke use the gloss of both food porn and travel porn to occasionally distract us from the darker elements of the story, in the same way that Coogan and Brydon will turn to humor to lighten up their roiling inner conflicts. In this case, however, both the sugar coating and the bitter pill are a treat.

This is the sort of film where the plot and even the action become so uninteresting that you start asking plausibility questions.

With a combination of jokes that don't land and a constant flurry of exposition and plotting to keep these flimsy plates spinning, Let's Be Cops more often than not feels more like a court-ordered defensive-driving class than a rousing high-speed chase.

Even if the big numbers in Step Up All In don't always hit the heights of its immediate predecessors, there are enough exultant moments – during the crew battles or Sean and Andie's pas de deux on a carnival ride — to tide you over until the inevitable Part Six.

The Expendables 3 is silly and overblown, yes, and it could definitely do without Antonio Banderas‘ motor-mouth routine (not to mention an out-of-nowhere reference to Benghazi), but it's less silly and overblown than “The Expendables 2,” for whatever that's worth.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie that takes its characters and its premise seriously, until it doesn't, and that operates at two speeds: tortoise (ponderous) and hare (head-spinning).

A National Geographic special writ large, Deepsea Challenge 3D is watchable and engaging throughout, even though it's pretty clear how everything is going to come together.

Get on Up belongs, as it must, to Boseman, who delivers the kind of charisma, showmanship, sex appeal, and tireless energy that allows us to believe him as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

It delivers the kind of sentimental sledgehammering I found myself willing to forgive — the presence of Helen Mirren goes a long way in that regard — but once the story goes off on a pointless tangent, the whole soufflé collapses.

Hoffman doesn't get a lot of flashy, awards-show-clip moments, but he's all the more engrossing for underplaying and revealing volumes with the slightest of reactions and inflections.

Lucy is a confounding experience, but at a brisk 85 or so minutes, it manages not to outstay its welcome. Those not enamored of Besson's particular brand of Euro-schlock grindhouse existentialism, however, may find their brains more stimulated elsewhere.

For its few visual and many script flaws, however, director Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” “Let Me In”) balances the splashy set pieces with quieter moments (sullen teen Kodi Smit-McPhee gives a copy of Charles Burns’ “Black Hole” to a wise orangutan named after Maurice Evans!) in such a way that “Dawn” never feels dull or draggy.

As he has throughout his career, from “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” to the lovely “Bernie” to the “Before” trilogy, Linklater proves himself as a filmmaker unconcerned with flash and dazzle but thoroughly compassionate and empathetic to a wide range of characters.

Life Itself paints a captivating portrait of a man who embraced life and art, whose spirit never flagged even when his body did. You don't have to be a film critic to find inspiration from Roger Ebert's extraordinary life.

While the provocative title promises a film that will reveal new information about the infamous Koch brothers, there's little on display here that regular viewers of “The Rachel Maddow Show” won't have already heard.

[McCarthy] and her husband Falcone (who also directed) have created a character comedy that's missing both comedy and character.

Begin Again is as uncynical and unironic a film as I've seen in a while, which will no doubt be a turn-off to many. But like a catchy summer jam, it doesn't need to apologize for being exactly what it is, nor do its fans have to feel guilty for getting it stuck in their heads.

The battling, metallic heroes have never looked better, but Michael Bay's choppy, dissonant storytelling methods remain as audience-punishing as ever.

What makes this film go astray are the problems that plague so many screen biographies: too much narration, too much telling and not enough showing, and presenting an artist's accomplishments in lieu of exploring his perspective.

Whether it's the closest you'll get to the beach this year, or you have to tear yourself away from the dunes to enjoy it, it's an essential part of any movie-lover's summer.

There are moments of fun to be found in Think Like a Man Too... It's just a pity that the movie does better by members of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority than those of the Screen Actors Guild.

The characters, the situations, and the story are whatever they need to be in the moment to launch whatever joke the movie feels like telling at that moment. This is Wain and Showalter working in “Wet Hot American Summer” spoof mode, and if you're a fan of that movie, you may well like this one as well.

It works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn't do is answer the question, “Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of ‘Behind the Music'?”

A little more deviating from the playbook would make Hellion stand out more amidst an ever-growing pack of similar films.

The only agenda of this scruffy and urbane comedy, about a young comic contemplating abortion, is to be true and funny.

You don't have to like punk rock to fall in love with We Are the Best!; if a more joyous film comes along in 2014, then it's a good year indeed.

The moments of absurdity land with a wonderfully weird grace, while the desperately vulgar gags about sex and scatology echo and crash as though they were being uttered in a middle-school boys’ restroom.

The aggressively unpleasant visuals certainly detract from the overall film, but Maleficent makes for a fascinating entry in an ongoing wave of projects that give “bad” women of literature a chance to present their side of the story.

For a film about repetition, Edge of Tomorrow never feels tired or familiar.

Words and Pictures never accrues enough emotional resources to bear out the darker, heavier moments, which turns its big dramatic moves into clunky embarrassments.

While there are fun moments and a continuation of the franchise's main idea — Professor X's peace, love and understanding vs. Magneto's fight the power — Days of Future Past ends up feeling more exhausting than exuberant.

Director Gareth Edwards (“Monsters”) gets the money shots right, but neither he nor screenwriter Max Borenstein (working from a story by David Callaham) makes the human characters interesting enough to get us through two mostly Godzilla-free acts.

These characters and their dilemmas could be the stuff of great, or at least good, drama, but Slattery's insistence on accentuating their sorrows with clinically depressed art direction wears thin rather quickly.

Coppola doesn't let these kids off the hook for their stupid decisions, of which they make many, but she's not judging them for their folly, either. Unchecked privilege and clueless parents are trotted out as part of the problem, but Coppola seems more interested in exploring human frailty and vulnerability than she is in digging for a social statement.

The Disneynature movies shouldn't be mistaken for traditional documentary, but if they act as a gateway drug for young children to learn more about the animal kingdom — and to open themselves up to more informative non-fiction cinema — then the films are serving a real purpose.

If anyone walks away unblemished from Walk of Shame, it's Banks, who throws herself into every bit of physical comedy and humiliation the movie sends her way. If the movie had gone for broke as often as its lead actress, the results wouldn't feel so disposable.

This “based on a true story” underdog tale is infectiously determined to make you fall in love with it, like a mangy dog that plops its head in your lap and gazes adoringly at you until you scratch it behind the ears. Eventually, you give in and scratch. And then you wash your hands.

Hardy might be past needing a star-making performance, but this is the kind of work that raises him to highest echelon of actors working in film today. He and Knight remind us that artists can astonish with the simplest of methods.

A smiling Cameron Diaz and a weeping Leslie Mann bring a lot to any movie, but they aren't enough to overcome the mix-and-match mania of these proceedings. Girls just wanna have fun, but they'd also like a coherent night at the movies.

If A Haunted House 2 is a step up from the previous go-round, it's either because a slightly more talented crew of comic actors are being asked to waste their time or because 2013 offered a better crop of horror films (“The Conjuring,” “Sinister,” etc.) to be lazily parodied.

You can feel this movie's attempts at Big Ideas about technology get weighed down by a dopey, nonsensical plot.

The buoyancy and electricity of Give Me Future will no doubt win Major Lazer new converts, but the film also offers hope that political and social gaps can always be bridged. Especially when there’s a good beat, and you can dance to it.

Skate Kitchen is a funny and stirring saga of female empowerment that will no doubt delight young women who skate while inspiring many more to pick up a board. It also heralds Moselle as a director who can easily switch stance on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide.

Between the camerawork and the subtle performances, Lizzie could very easily have been a silent film while still telling its story as effectively. But Kass’ dialogue is terrific.

If Emma Thompson can’t make The Children Act...into something interesting and meaningful, then no one can. And she can’t.

The anguish and determination that Plummer can display with just a look or subtle motion is heartbreaking; this is the kind of naturalistic acting that can just kick you in the stomach.

It’s a film that, early on, feels like a standard catch-a-rising-star celebrity hagiography, but as the story continues — and the impressive line-up of interviewees get deeper into their memories of Williams — the film achieves a balance between celebration and unfiltered recollection.

Griffin juggles her many characters well, and she’s very smart about weaponizing the coziness of Christmas movies to make uncomfortable points. Silent Night may wind up being a successful calling card for her (as a director if not as a screenwriter), but for all the beautiful wrapping, it’s mostly an empty box.

Co-stars and co-writers Daveed Diggs (“Wonder”) and Rafael Casal have a lot to say, much of it funny and/or provocative, but neither they nor first-time feature director Carlos López Estrada can figure out a way to shape all this material into a cohesive film.

Paul Schrader has always been a faith-based filmmaker in the truest and most challenging sense, and First Reformed is the sort of stimulating work that a writer-director of a certain age can deliver when he returns to his creative sweet spot; rejoice, Schrader fans, rejoice.