Inkoo Kang

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

Starring a vivacious Dakota Johnson and a game Jamie Dornan, Taylor-Johnson’s erotic romance is a skillful distillation of James’ first book that captures the heady exhilaration of being someone’s fixation.

A misguided attempt to spin a nightmare scenario into a cutesy rom-com premise, this British production takes place in a harrowingly claustrophobic world where personal growth ends at age 18, and you meet everyone you’ll ever become friends with in your whole life during high school.

Save for a few standout scenes of carefree elation and daring camaraderie, Girlhood is largely a grim and stilted study of oppression.

A thoughtful and frequently moving drama that insightfully illuminates what it’s like to live with illness and agony at least as well as last year’s other Best Actress vehicles like “Wild,” “Still Alice,” and “Two Days, One Night” do.

Red Army is a thoughtful and cheer-worthy examination of how sports can shape cultures, redraw borders and change history.

Despite stilted camerawork often locked in the medium shot, Salvation Army is a touching ode to the freedom to finally be who we want to be — if we can ever find where we belong.

Neither good nor bad, nor campy nor scary enough to be in any way memorable, The Boy Next Door is a lot like our own neighbors, just there. You could make the effort to sneak a peek, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.

Unabashedly truthful and restlessly intelligent, Akhavan’s remarkable, near-perfect debut has wit and charisma to spare. Miss it at your own risk.

The writer-director never finds a coherent point of view (or a way out of Strindberg’s three-wall play structure), and Miss Julie ends up merely a whirlwind of moods without a center, as changeable and as random as a TV flipping channels.

A timid and slapdash musical.

No amount of self-referential jokes can make up for a lack of heart and spirit. Thankfully, Annie lacks neither.

Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service.

The romance of patriotism and pain, depicted here in lush greens and velvety blues, makes “The Imitation Game” enjoyable enough to render it a vindication of the formula. It disappoints as biography, but makes for a great yarn, even if you've heard it before.

The Babadook is the rare horror tale that's also a triumph of empathy.

Jones’ riveting Western is bleak and very nearly misanthropic, but it's also passionate, earthy, unpredictable, sensitive, and gloriously distinct.

Especially in a year so devoid of serious female-led dramas, it's invigorating to see a feminist crowd-pleaser with the force of moral righteousness on its side. But Big Eyes is good, not great. What keeps it from excellence is its reluctance to explore the very questions it raises.

The visuals remain homely and brutally efficient, the plot convoluted but the pacing brisk, and the humor often inventive and resourceful — and just as often tired or offensive (to women, people of color, gays and lesbians, old people, take your pick).

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Director Clint Eastwood‘s focus on Kyle is so tight that no other character, including wife Taya (Sienna Miller), comes through as a person, and the scope so narrow that the film engages only superficially with the many moral issues surrounding the Iraq War.

Admirable throughout is the balance that Ribeiro strikes between dewy eroticism and the contextualization of sexuality as just a single aspect of one's identity, albeit an essential one.

Unfortunately, it's just when Jessabelle looks like it might transcend its haunted-house trappings that the Southern Gothic clichés rear their tortured, screaming heads.

The dramatic weight loss Gyllenhaal endured for the role, which transforms his dreamboat looks into a bat-like mask, is startling. But the actor's performance is just as impressive, nimbly selling Gilroy's occasionally overwritten lines while Louis’ punishing optimism finds new gradations of sadism and rage. Nightcrawler is the arrival of a thrilling character actor.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

An exquisite, hand-drawn marvel and an alternatingly jubilant and heartrending epic pastoral.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

Shelton's comedy isn't just smart, but cheerfully wise; not just funny, but cleverly and endlessly so.

The four main actors, all uniformly excellent, can wrap their tongues around Simien's verbose dialogue, but some of the minor actors have a harder time, resulting in several jokes falling flat.

The Judge is tailor-made for Downey's gift for delivering a quippy, arrogant put-down like he's doing his target a favor. Hank's anti-heroism is a refreshing splash of lemon juice with an occasional spritz of sour vinegar. But much of director David Dobkin‘s cynically cloying legal and family drama goes down like a lump of aspartame.

The thing that catastrophically sinks “Him” – or “Her,” if that's the film you see second – is that the two films are enough alike that sitting through the second immediately after the first is a slog.

They're thematically richer and more tonally cohesive than their hybrid. But because the two films are so similar to one another, they fail to deliver on the promise of their unique structure, rendering the “he said, she said” complementary design of the two films a dull, self-indulgent gimmick.

Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.

The late-60's Satanic panic and housewifely ennui make for a surprisingly complementary mix of fear and paranoia in Annabelle.

Rather than the currency itself, the film's most compelling subject ends up being the separatist psychology of its self-regarding fanatics.

Bolivar is eye-rollingly romanticized as a wonderful lover and an even better fighter in Alberto Arvelo's lushly produced, dully reverential The Liberator.

In its conflation of happiness and self-knowledge, “Hector” often feels like the visual approximation of a therapy session. And just as therapy is work, enduring this mess is exertion, too.

As nauseating as the film's inventive sadisms can be, Frank succeeds far more in the details than in the larger picture that tries to relate this world to ours.

[A] perfectly serviceable thriller.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

The whole thing just works; the film gets pretty close to the Platonic ideal of accessible but still meaningful edutainment. And in a movie landscape that's aggressively dumbed down and cynical, a little integrity goes a long way.

"When the Game” is like a bad seven-layer salad: it's tempting in theory, but it's really just a jumble of random ingredients that wind up supremely unappetizing in the aggregate.

Love is Strange boasts an abundance of patience and kindness — but not much of a pulse.

There are too few real humans in Life After Beth, resulting in a lack of both brains and heart.

The Giver is an anti-totalitarian allegory so farcically hyperbolic it feels like only a teenager could have come up with it.

The film has a muscled buoyancy and thrilling, joyful spectacles that make the fifth installment of the popular franchise an energetic crowd-pleaser.

Though The Dog can be seen through any number of lenses — a study of media distortion, an illustration of life-sustaining grandiosity, a love story gone deliriously wrong — it's perhaps most meaningful as an exploration of the limits of the gay rights movement's political correctness.

There's just enough compelling reversals and anything-could-happen suspense to make this increasingly claustrophobic work effective.

Though Page-Lochard manages to make his passive participation in violence compelling, Around the Block remains more lecture than drama about racism and its tragic consequences.

It's a supernatural epic that never feels quite colossal or consequential enough, as well as an utter waste of Dwayne Johnson‘s unique dopey-flirty charm.

A rapidly wearying comedy that mistakes crudeness with humor.

Douglas and Keaton conjure just enough empathy and optimism and cozy charm between them to make us believe that anything can happen at twilight.

Ultimately, “Anarchy” is too cartoonish in its politics to gain the allegorical resonance it clearly strives for — and worse yet, it's just no fun.

Emma Stone couldn't be more charming, but her on-screen romance with Colin Firth couldn't be more contrived or ickiliy age-inappropriate.

Closed Curtain is richly allegorical, but the film succeeds even more as an exiled artist's reassurance that the law can't stamp out art.

The death- and religion-obsessed Wish I Was Here is such a manifestly personal project that it's a shame it isn't even more idiosyncratic.

Sex Tape is a hustler of a film — it works very hard for its laughs — but it's so haphazardly directed (by Jake Kasdan) and written (by Kate Angelo and Segel and Nicholas Stoller) that it can easily be divided into three distinct sections.

The apocalypse is no fun for anyone, but the dreariest possible scenario probably entails being stuck in a house without a functioning toilet and with nine of the dullest people left alive.

Billed as a comedy but nothing more than a shallow and exasperating portrait of female self-loathing, Dean Pollack's Audrey puts its protagonist through hell -- and its audience along with her.

Writer-director Terry Miles' revisionist homage is a thoughtful thesis on the melodrama but a letdown in its attempt to serve as an affecting example of that genre.

For all its embarrassment of riches, “Deliver” never manages to transcend its bloody, screechy, pulpy origins. That makes the film both a horror tale and a tragedy.

In superlative previous films like “The Host” and “Mother,” Bong elevated, then transcended, the humble genres of the monster movie and the murder mystery by refashioning them into exquisitely heart-wrenching human drama. Disappointingly, then, his alchemical touch is absent here. Snowpiercer warms the heart, but doesn't penetrate it.

Director Martin Provost's epic portrait of novelist Violette Leduc is so compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook his film's shaggy, uneven plotting.