Joe Leydon

“Portrait” abounds in the sort of ironies and contrasts that can make a biodoc fascinating even to auds totally unfamiliar with its subject.

Deftly balancing twin goals of informing and entertaining, the pic matter-of-factly details the various ways that marketers, multinational corporations, police departments and government-run intelligence-gathering organizations obtain and exploit info.

Once you get past an incredibly self-indulgent intro — an uncomfortably long mash-up of comedy sketch and road-trip-with-entourage doc that seems simultaneously apologetic and arrogant — you can enjoy approximately an hour of boisterously freewheeling and unabashedly raunchy funny stuff in Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain.

There’s something curiously underwhelming about the blood-soaked mayhem on display in Hatchet III.

Each member of the ensemble offers a vividly detailed performance resounding with emotional truth, delivering lengthy swaths of LaBute’s sometimes savagely furious, sometimes shocking funny dialogue with pitch-perfect degrees of intensity.

Not so much a probing examination as a fulsome celebration.

Boasts way better production values than the penny-pinching 1981 original and conceivably could delight genre fans who have never seen the first version or its previous remakes/sequels. But it’s bound to play best with those who catch Alvarez’s many wink-wink allusions to Raimi’s picture.

Neatly balancing brightly sentimental comedy with slightly edgier funny business, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone pulls off the impressive trick of generating laughs on a consistent basis while spinning a clever scenario about rival magicians waging a Las Vegas turf war with a wide multi-demographic appeal.

A lightweight, warp-speed, brightly colored trifle.

The helmer generates suspense with shrewd pacing, deft emotional manipulation and efficient use of familiar tricks -- jittery editing, flickering lights and unsettling sounds -- common to haunted-house pictures.

An appalling misfire that tries and fails to evoke the anything-goes spirit of such '70s sketch-comedy concoctions as "The Groove Tube" and "Kentucky Fried Movie."

Agreeably amusing but unduly extended, Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola suggests what might have resulted had Rodgers and Hammerstein lived long enough to attempt a Broadway musical about the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The hit-to-miss ratio is less than impressive throughout A Haunted House, a frenetic and freewheeling satirical comedy that only sporadically scores a bull's-eye while aiming at easy targets.

A boisterously Tarantinoesque mash-up of cliches, archetypes and bodacious craziness in the tradition of Southern-fried '60s and '70s drive-in fodder, The Baytown Outlaws is the sort of cartoonishly violent and swaggeringly non-PC concoction that defines guilty pleasure for many genre fans.

While there's something undeniably fascinating about the way Fairhaven repeatedly avoids predictable payoffs for portentous dramatic setups, narrative momentum is conspicuous by its absence.

Helmer John Luessenhop ("Takers") and a small army of scripters go back to the bloody roots of the long-running franchise to concoct a better-than-average horror-thriller that relies more on potent suspense than graphic savagery or stereoscopic tricks.

A slickly produced and brazenly clever piece of work that could attract a cult by sheer dint of its ingenious nastiness and self-aware snark.

The picture all too obviously recycles bits and pieces from "Madagascar," "The Lion King" and other made-in-America toons. Unfortunately, much gets lost in the translation.

Trouble is, apart from some modestly inventive carnage and an undeniably humorous hambone turn by Malcolm McDowell, there's really nothing here to make genre fans dash through the snow (or maneuver through traffic) to megaplexes before the low-budget, high-concept Canadian production's Dec. 4 homevid release.

A slickly produced, unabashedly celebratory picture about professional skateboarder Danny Way.

When a documentary begins with its subject using his crutch to deliver a vicious blow to the director's nose, it's reasonably safe to expect less-than-smooth sailing ahead.

Even by the freewheeling, mood-swinging standards of Bollywood, the pronounced disparity between the pre- and post-intermission halves of Jab tak hai jaan is more than a tad jarring. Indeed, viewers may feel they've been treated to an oddly matched double bill -- a delightfully vivacious romantic dramedy, followed by an Old Hollywood sort of psychological melodrama.

Writer-director Ciaran Foy skillfully taps into primal fears and urban paranoia to keep his audience consistently unsettled in Citadel, an intensely suspenseful horror-thriller.

Although it traffics freely in stereotypes and sitcom-style one-liners, Gayby is never less than likable.

Affecting performances and effective storytelling are the hallmarks of Fat Kid Rules the World.

There's something perversely fascinating about helmer John Hyams' freewheeling yet deliberately paced mashup of noirish mystery, splatter-movie intensity, first-person-shooter vidgame and "Apocalypse Now"-style surrealism.

Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.

Passably pleasant but thoroughly predictable.