Joe Williams

Co-directors Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos let the painful stories emerge naturally, without prodding questions or talking-head experts who place the boys’ grim lives in the larger context of the post-industrial economy.

Although the outcome is as predetermined as a prix-fixe menu, the storytelling is as smooth as goose-liver pate through a pastry nozzle.

Surrender, earthlings. It’s the Guardians’ world and you’ll be happy to live in it.

The film would be incalculably different if the lead role had been divided between two or three young actors for a conventional shoot. But Linklater’s patience allows us to see a thoughtful personality being formed both on and off the screen.

Like black coffee that's flung in our face, The Killer Inside Me silences the question of whether it's good or bad. But for darn sure, it's strong.

A film that aims for the stars and may have found one here on earth.

If cranking out this kind of mediocre, head-scratching blarney is the only option available to Hollywood veterans like Reiner, we have some friendly advice: Open a haberdashery.

Although Besson, the director of “La Femme Nikita” and the producer of “Taken,” indulges in some operatic violence, the film is more spacey than pacey.

Mainstream audiences will note that Hudson has never been better and that the tearjerking taps into something universal. For audiences seeking shelter from superhero carnage, Wish I Was Here is a lovely place to be.

Without the kindling of character development, Planes: Fire and Rescue is no smoldering success, but if Disney’s flight plan is to share Pixar’s airspace, it’s getting warmer.

Directed by Steve James, whose “Hoop Dreams” Ebert hailed as the best film of the 1990s, it’s the kind of documentary the dying man wanted — honest, humane and inclusive.

In one of the most wickedly funny scenes in sci-fi history, Koba uses monkeyshines to bamboozle some gun-toting yahoos and scuttle the peace treaty.

Doggedly indie but unpretentious, Begin Again is one of the best movies I’ve seen about the music industry and the ways it changes people whose paths diverge.

McCarthy and first-time director Falcone must have assumed that tossing a drunk and a dunce into a Cadillac would negate the need for a motive or even a script.

Chartered to provide both sides of every debate, CNN has positioned itself as the middle ground for discussions of current events. But without a knowledgeable teacher (or filmmaker) to lead such discussions into new territory, they devolve into noisy bull sessions.

Sorry, partisans, but there’s nothing obvious about Obvious Child.

Because the affable Wahlberg is making the sales pitch, you could kid yourself that this is just a high-tech vacuum cleaner, built to siphon loose change like popcorn. But our failure to understand the terrifying significance of the “Transformers” series is why we're in the age of extinction.

For real balance, the debate needs fiercely leftist truth-tellers in tri-corner hats, calling themselves the Organic Chai Tea Party.

The Rover is a sterling example of the new Australian noir.

The worst thing about this multifaceted failure is the two-time Oscar winner behind the camera. Where there ought to be a director, there’s nothing but an empty chair.

The sharp writing and tag-team antics lift 22 Jump Street to a high level.

This movie is so tone-deaf it would only make sense in Vincent van Gogh’s missing ear.

The movie looks like it was made for broadcast television, the place where words and pictures go to die.

By design it’s monotonous, and with so much clunky hardware, Liman can’t generate the same pace he produced in the “Bourne” movies. Edge of Tomorrow has neither an edge nor a vision of tomorrow that matters today.

Although Steadman’s artwork seems like sloppy pen-and-ink caricature, there’s a method to the madness.

’Round these parts, when a movie promises a million laughs but only delivers a dozen chuckles, that’s a hanging offense.

The Immigrant is not unlike a Prohibition-era “Taxi Driver,” with Cotillard as the apprentice hooker, Phoenix as the sweet-talking pimp and Jeremy Renner (playing the theater’s magician, Orlando) as the would-be savior.

Best of all is Favreau. Instead of mass-producing another superhero epic, he has given the overfed public a dish of right-sized comfort food.

As usual for the comedies he produces, Sandler keeps pooping in the sandbox, and he expects the audience to give him a cookie for it. It’s a shame that he forces Barrymore to get soiled too.

How could you not marvel at a movie that includes a revisionist explanation of the JFK assassination, a football stadium floating over the White House and the sight of Richard Nixon firing a .45 at a villain in a Christ-figure pose?

You can tell by some loose threads and hurried workmanship that God’s Pocket is a knock-off, but it’s so stuffed with value, it’s an offer you can’t refuse.

As predictable as a 3-and-0 pitch down the middle, but when it’s baseball season, who wants dark clouds?

The latest Hollywood version of the Godzilla story is neither fun nor fearsome. It’s an empty spectacle in which the humans are as meaningless as the monster.

With stately surroundings and hissable villains, director Amma Assante imbues the finale with such dramatic resonance that Belle becomes a ringing proclamation of human dignity.

Yet if you’re old enough to read this and you find yourself at a screening, try thinking about the munchkins who worked so hard on the psychedelic scenery.

With a mad captain at the helm, this documentary version of Jodorowsky’s “Dune” is probably more entertaining than what Hollywood would have done to it, with a clearer message: Our lives are like sands though an hourglass, so dream the impossible dream.

Fading Gigolo is like two different movies on an awkward blind date at a jazz club. While Allen charms us with a parody of “Broadway Danny Rose,” Turturro is off-key in his lounge-lizard riff on “The Piano.”

It’s a party where we want to stay, until we’re dragged out kicking and screaming.

Easy to watch but hard to pin down, like a creature with eight legs going in different directions.

Colin Firth is an Academy Award winner, so perhaps his lack of chemistry with fellow honoree Nicole Kidman is a carefully laid clue that his middle-aged newlywed Eric Lomax is damaged goods. Yet to the drama’s detriment, Lomax is about as poisonous as a week-old crumpet.

One part personal mystery and one part art-appreciation class.

The movie is best enjoyed as a minor-key operatic, not a coherent story. While Law bellows blasphemous poetry, his director orchestrates a noirish light show with a cockeyed rhythm.

An ambitious movie, but ultimately there’s too much “artificial” and not enough “intelligence.”

Written, directed and acted by Hollywood pros, Heaven Is For Real is a polished little movie with a hopeful message, but when it literalizes the divine mysteries, it opens the door to a Doubting Thomas.

The plot is murky, the acting is melodramatic and the movie is way too long, but the target audience will salivate over the inventively choreographed set-pieces.

For better or worse, the whole exercise in lurid leg-pulling goes out with a bang.

While Green is force-feeding us this hard-boiled hokum, he doesn’t distract us with many memorable images, as he did in his earliest films.

This hand-drawn French import is fresh evidence that you don’t need computers and singing princesses to make a charming animated movie.

Draft Day isn’t quite a comedy, but it’s got a similar kind of flow that makes it as easily consumable as lite beer.

The debut creation of director Ritesh Batra, it’s a lovely little film from a place where the little things linger.

Presented as a stand-alone film, but without an explanation for the protagonist’s physical and emotional injuries, it’s a head-scratcher. As with Joe’s sexual compulsion, scratching can’t cure the itch.

With his glorified Frisbee and good-guy smile, Evans is engaging, but “The Winter Soldier” might be stronger with a little less Captain and a little more America.

If we want a bigger picture, we’ll have to wait for God to green-light “Noah: The Next Generation.”

This is an extremely gory flick, with autopsy scenes to complement Schwarzenegger’s usual shoot-first sensibilities. After 30 years, it’s pointless to complain about the collateral damage in his movies, but here Schwarzenegger is taking vigilante justice to dark new levels that can only be reached via plot holes big enough for a Hummer.

The way that Muppets Most Wanted grabs for the green is criminal.

After feeding on this sweet buffet, sated cinephiles will want to call the front desk to extend their stay.

Bad Words is often very funny, thanks to Bateman’s brick-wall malevolence and screenwriter Andrew Dodge’s inventively rude dialogue.

Periodically deviating from its fly-on-the-wall aesthetic, the film does a noticeably better job than the Joan Rivers movie of incorporating old footage and photos to underscore its subject’s importance.

What the movie crucially lacks is the clockwork complications that produce a payoff.

Jenison, who had never painted a thing in his life, does indeed produce a beautiful work, but we should never forget that Penn and Teller are professional bamboozlers, and their attempt to re-frame the definition of genius might be nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Typically lovely to look at, with big-eyed young people espousing high ideals amid natural splendor. But outside of their bubble, a prickly history looms, and Miyazaki’s dubious attitude toward the wartime role of his hero makes the movie a mixed blessing.

Non-Stop: It is what it is.

In Secret is so stifled, it makes “Les Misérables” look like “Amélie.”

This stinker is only good for endless laughs.

A faithful remake of RoboCop would be timely. Instead, the producers of this new version have retreated back to the lab, concocting a creaky hybrid of “Frankenstein” and “Call of Duty.”

A marvelous piece of work.

It’s admirable, but Monuments Men just poses on a porous foundation like a statue.

Garcia’s performance, which won the best actress award at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, is a marvel of self-effacing artistry.

With Labor Day, director Jason Reitman turns a Nicholas Sparks scenario into an Alfred Hitchcock creep-show.

Although it’s superficially grungy, this true story isn’t much more substantive than something that star Vanessa Hudgens might have made for the Disney Channel and considerably less shocking than her career gambit in “Spring Breakers.”

Kevin Hart hits the vicinity of humor with a few of his drive-by wisecracks, but the movie itself has nothing under the hood.

This dead-on-arrival ’toon is some of the worst p.r. for rodents since bubonic plague hit medieval Europe.

Her may be the most technologically astute movie since Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: a Space Odyssey.” And as the friendly ghost in the machine, Samantha is a more inviting companion for the great leap forward than HAL9000 could ever dream of being.

For those who appreciate fiery dialogue delivered by fine actors, August: Osage County is heaven-sent.

A good and necessary film, but like the man himself it’s not immune to scrutiny.

The most exhilarating film of the year is also the most exhausting.

Strange hybrid of science lesson and Saturday-morning cartoon.

As much as anything, the wildly entertaining ’70s flashback American Hustle is a triumph of style.

OK, the musical ode to Doby the shark elicits a grin, but the low-percentage script is loaded with buckshot, not harpoons, and Anchorman 2 ends up sinking.

On a moral-justice level, we’d like to see this worm squirm a little more over his treatment of ex-colleagues before we let him off the hook to say that everyone else was cheating too.

We were promised desolation, but “The Hobbit” just keeps dragon on.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

A co-star deserving special mention is Nebraska itself, which Payne films in black-and-white to mirror the austerity of life on the de-populated prairie. These corners of the Cornhusker State are as empty as the promise of a sweepstakes prize. In this land of ghosts, one old pioneer tries to grab his stake before he becomes another windblown husk.

For all its professionalism, I found it as cold as the ice rink at Rockefeller Center.

It requires a mild suspension of disbelief to accept that slacker David would suddenly intervene in so many lives, pretending to be a good Samaritan.

The ingredients are in place for a potent finale, but “Catching Fire” is watered down.

I’m pretty sure it would still be one of the best films of the year if the explicit lesbian sex scenes were censored, but it wouldn’t earn a penny in Peoria.

This very male and methodical movie is like the anti-“Gravity,” as the un-moored hero is quietly in control of his options and at peace with his possible failure.

There’s a lot of comic and fantasy potential here, but much of it gets squandered.

Compared to other Marvel characters, Thor is a difficult sell.

Ender’s Game is a blandly sanitized spectacle.

In trying to lift this lame schtick, De Niro, Douglas, Freeman and Kline are stand-up guys, but Last Vegas is a case of erectile dysfunction.

Iowa-native Gurira has had roles in TV’s “Treme” and “The Walking Dead,” but Mother of George should be the birth of a brilliant film career.

After we hear the hit parade that poured from rural Alabama and meet the men who led it to the top of the charts, we realize that Muscle Shoals could call itself Hitsville, USA.

In its cross-cultural breadth, director Ridley Scott’s smart and violent film merits comparison to Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” but the dialogue delivered by the stellar cast is incomparably McCarthy’s.

This thriller about the game-changing website Wikileaks is as smart about cyberspace as “The Social Network,” but there’s a glitch when it shifts the focus from felonious leaders to the misdemeanors of the man who exposed them.

When a celebrity chef like Rodriguez is just going through the motions, we can smell that the grindhouse fad is way past its expiration date. It's time to put a fork in it.

Shakespeare’s play evokes the poetry of undying love, but this Romeo and Juliet is prosaic.