Kyle Smith

Lovable misanthropes can be a lot of fun, but someone forgot to put in the lovable.

Any Christian movie dealing in miracles is likely to be too sweet for some but this one is gently moving rather than pushy about its religious elements.

As a comedy, The Brothers Grimsby is weak and scattershot, but it’s useful as an unintended self-indictment of the chattering classes’ disgust and disdain for white working folk.

There aren’t enough movies in which Tina Fey fires an AK-47 while grinning maniacally. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot turns out to make excellent use of her established skills while revealing new ones: It’s “30 Rock Me to the Casbah.”

Chop up the film’s segments, replay them in any order, and things would make no more or less sense.

The Wave, competent as it is, lacks the heart-rending power of the similar 2012 tsunami movie “The Impossible.”

Like the lobby of a Donald Trump building, it looks ever so expensive and amazingly cheap at the same time.

“I see dead people,” Adrien Brody all but exclaims in Backtrack, a movie that tries to make a choo-choo out of “The Sixth Sense” but immediately goes off the rails.

Hitler didn’t actually snub Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, but the story is too good not to tell, so Race tells it anyway — adding the (true) detail that Owens was snubbed back home. By someone called “the White House,” because this supposedly truth-telling movie can’t bear to spell out the words Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Risen veers so far off the Bible’s path that it might as well be a tale of this 13th apostle, called Marty, who was in charge of snacks and mini-golf reservations.

Stiller’s one good idea is turning things over to Will Ferrell, who does some amusingly demented things while haranguing Anna Wintour and Tommy Hilfiger and is probably funnier in his sleep than Stiller is at his best.

This one is a “different kind of superhero movie,” meaning even more fiercely attached to the mode of artistic expression known as “puberty.”

I was too bored to hate the movie. Besides, who hates a stuffed animal? If it actually said something intelligent or surprising, you’d be alarmed, not pleased.

The Club offers plenty of stifling, agonized atmosphere, but it’s all penitence and no redemption.

A self-serving remark on the part of the filmmakers, who place only the tiniest fig leaf of a story on a panoramic canvas of the gory, gross and repellent.

The undercaffeinated middle of the film consists of dopey twists, slow-burning gazes and dialogue that aims for “heartfelt” but comes out “unfortunate.”

Mojave is a movie-length standoff between two detestable villains. One is a serial killer. The other is a filmmaker.

Still, if 13 Hours lacks the gravitas of “American Sniper,” it’s powerful stuff. Bay’s goal is to put you right in these men’s boots, to feel the heat, the fear, the fatigue, the weight of the weapons and the web of camaraderie.

To call Ride Along 2 rubbish is unfair to rubbish, which at some point had a purpose.

Japan’s loony suicide culture seems like an adequately scary backdrop for a horror movie, but the routine horror flick The Forest mostly settles for cheap thrills.

Despite the underlying wretchedness, though, the characters exude a sense of having so little interior life that none of this, or anything else, fazes them. That’s disturbing, too.

There’s something strange and dreamlike and delicate and beautiful about Anomalisa, an animated film for grown-ups that takes a long while to make its point, but does so with a dark brilliance.

A film I admired, but didn’t especially like, The Revenant is a master class in craftsmanship, marrying the ethos of 1970s Hollywood, with its beaten-dog heroes forever roughed up by a brutal system, to the technological prowess of today’s digitally obsessed blockbusters.

The film is sober, honest and serious about an important subject.

Three talking critters sing, dance and tell jokes, and I really wish they wouldn’t. Their act isn’t just dull — it’s almost as bad as One Direction’s.

The shamelessness with which Star Wars: The Force Awakens replays the franchise’s greatest hits is startling. To put it another way, it’s a satisfying meal — but it’s $200 million worth of leftovers.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s Macbeth takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.

Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks.

By going exactly where you think it’s going, Victor Frankenstein doesn’t so much invent a fresh origins story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.

I was searching for a metaphor to capture the experience of watching The Night Before when a character fell backward into a dumpster full of garbage bags. Thanks, guys!

Somewhere on the axis where David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Joey Bishop intersect, a man in a Salvation Army tuxedo wanders the Mojave Desert supplying anti-comedy to every cocktail lounge and prison in his path. This is Entertainment.

An indie exercise in macho posturing disguised as a tale of grief, reminds us that losing one’s parents is psychically debilitating. But that’s about as useful as knowing that rain is wet.

Unfortunately, director Jessie Nelson (“I Am Sam”) gradually turns the script into marzipan.

Don’t expect too much of Heist — it’s a cheesy formula picture all the way — but it has solid character foundations, the occasional bright line of dialogue (“Cops, this is robbers,” Morgan says on a phone call) and a neat final twist. As throwbacks go, it’s more bearable than shoulder pads.

It’s the sweet sincerity of Brooklyn that stamps it as both refreshing and nostalgic. The film is as welcome as a photo you just discovered of your mother before you were born, in which she looks prettier than you ever imagined.

A horror-comedy that takes a weak premise (do high school boys even go scouting anymore?) and barely uses it, anyway.

Both Adam and the stakes are so low, it’s like watching 100 minutes of a slug trying to crawl over a twig.

The movie left me amazed — amazed that Nicolas Cage wasn’t in it.

Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

What everyone will remember about Goosebumps is . . . nothing. Except that it was kinda like “Gremlins.”

Long on heart if short on surprises, Big Stone Gap is an easygoing visit to small-town America.

Steve Jobs is a tale of two men, not one: A more accurate, not to say wittier, title would have been “Steve Jobs and Aaron Sorkin.”

In Pay the Ghost, Nicolas Cage investigates a supernatural abduction, but has no solution for the maggot-eaten zombie that is his undead career.

When Mel Brooks checks in to play Dracula’s dad, harrumphing and looking exactly like Grandpa Munster, you realize Sandler and Co. aren’t trying any harder than they did in “Jack and Jill” or “Pixels.”

Finish your popcorn early if you’re going to The Green Inferno, and save the bucket to barf in.

There might be a great movie to be made out of the financial crisis, but 99 Homes, which is like being shouted at by a man with bad breath while he grips your collar with both hands, isn’t it.

Sicario, which combines dizzying action scenes with a taut script, ravishing photography and an otherwordly musical score, is a knockout.

In Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, selfish oldsters scheme to rob young people of their vital essence, sacrificing them in the process. It’s basically “Social Security: The Movie.”

Only in the heartfelt closing minutes does the film cut any deeper than a tired episode of a sitcom about children of immigrants complaining about their hopelessly old-fashioned parents.

Rom-coms died because they weren’t very rom and didn’t have enough com. But Sleeping With Other People, which is both hilarious and emotionally alive, is as delightful as a first date that crackles with possibility.

The Transporter Refueled is a story of bodies: sleek, curvy, luscious bodies, purring for action and ready to let you do anything to them. They’re hotties, these Audis.

Plays like an unintentional mashup of “Being There” and “Elf.”

A study in intoxicants: drink, drugs, youth and Emily Ratajkowski. All four are potentially dangerous, yet nearly impossible to leave alone.

What keeps the movie nervy and kinetic is that, for a good hour, it never seems that Jack and family are anything but average people who somehow manage to survive one hellacious trial after another, even when it comes to having to kill another human being.

It’s all as pointless as the asthma inhaler with which one character treats his advanced lung cancer.

The movie putters along as softly as Wendy drives. Despite its lack of narrative horsepower, though, its character sketches are pleasing. And amusing.

It’s somehow both too drawn-out and abrupt — but it’s got creepiness galore.

Armie Hammer has given several of the worst performances in recent years — see, or rather don’t, “Mirror Mirror” and “J. Edgar.” The big surprise in The Man from U.N.C.L.E is that Henry Cavill is even worse.

Filled with arch wit, the film is sweet and sorrowful at the same time. Like many indies, it lacks much of a conclusion, though writer-director James C. Strouse shows that simple ideas, ably executed, can make an endearing film.

Cop Car is an instance of what happens when an airy indie filmmaker tries to “do genre” and winds up being as convincing as John Kerry putting down his demitasse and dressing up in hunting gear.

In The Runner, the latest Nicolas Cage film to roll off his one-man assembly line of shoddy cinema, the star looks almost as tired of acting as I am of watching his acting.

Neither bad enough to be a complete waste of time nor good enough to remember past next Tuesday, the film co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie staples together one routine action piece after another with cutesy dialogue and lots of merciless pounding away at iPad screens.

Best of Enemies illustrates how even literary swashbucklers can be reduced to schoolboy behavior.

The End of the Tour is a five-day bender of a talk — a film that illuminates like few others the singular pleasure of shared discovery of one another’s sensibility. In an unassuming way, it’s a glory.

A movie that won’t knock you out with originality but may charm you with its wit.

The finest 1947 boxing picture of 2015 is here: Southpaw, a film that’s gruntingly insistent on its clichés.

It stumbled onto an accomplishment truly awe-inspiring: It makes “Battleship” and “The Watch” look good.

Viola Davis lets her Charles Bronson flag fly in Lila and Eve, a ludicrous revenge thriller that should have been called, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”

The film never flags. To find a smarter bug-man saga, you’d have to go back to “The Metamorphosis.” I was far from sold on insect superheroes, but now I say: Bring on Cockroach Chick.

Robin Williams’ last live-action film, Boulevard, is a frustrating ending to a stellar career, a cramped and melancholy film about a cramped and melancholy man.

Self/less is a celluloid smoothie blended from dozens of familiar elements, but it’s neither tasty nor nutritious.

By far, the highlight of Minions is hearing The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life” over the closing credits — the first time I think I’ve ever heard it used in a movie. Otherwise, the prequel to “Despicable Me” is like trying to form a rock band out of three Ringos.

Looking at the Mexican drug wars from both sides of the border, Cartel Land is punchy and vital but not particularly informative.

Ted 2 has so many mo–ments of crazy brilliance that I laughed a lot, if infrequently. Is a ballplayer who whiffs four balls but knocks the fifth one 500 feet worth watching? I say yes.

Hutcherson isn’t particularly adept at playing moral anguish, but the film maintains an electrifying tension for its first half as we wonder just how far his character will go. In the second half, though, the film degenerates into a desultory action movie as everybody starts creeping around trying to shoot one another.

Director Marc Silver expertly interweaves the courtroom drama and its larger social and human connotations.

As a comedy, the film isn’t especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la “Go,” it’s raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere.

Don’t expect the real dirt on “Saturday Night Live” from the doc Live From New York! The movie is fun, but it’s a cinematic coffee-table book.

It’s a tiresome, preachy, repetitive, disorganized and dismally unfunny attempt to appeal to Michael Moore fans. The overall temperature of their efforts is strictly room: Call this “Fahrenheit 68.”

None of this is ever quite as great as it is in Spielberg’s work, but it’s reasonably close; the worst you can say about the movie is that it sticks to a highly potent formula.

The film is elegantly done, mainly because it wisely expends most of its energy on Alicia Vikander’s face.

Beginning as an adorable romcom, Hungry Hearts morphs into a disturbing but not particularly illuminating story of mental illness.

Alas, “sad case” is not how we want to see McCarthy; it’s frustrating to see her spend more than half the movie being the pathetic target of jokes rather than the dominating figure she was in “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat,” both of which are far funnier than this one.

The Entourage formula feels warmed-over, played-out, spent.

Laden with witty ironies, the film by Anne Fontaine suggests men may not play exactly the roles they think they do in women’s lives.

The movie can be mildly amusing. But I couldn’t figure out which of the three principals I least wanted to know.

Treading the same halls as “Kick-Ass” and “Kingsman,” Barely Lethal imagines an academy of teen assassins. Life there is deadly, but not as scary as high school.

The exhilarating documentary Sunshine Superman, which melds gorgeous aerial photography of Boenish’s jumps with sublime musical cues, finds in Boenish a kind of poet-adventurer, equal parts pixie and desperado.

This serviceable remake sticks fairly closely and smartly to the same plot, with the same scary objects and even the line, “They’re here.”

A sort of grown-up version of “Moonrise Kingdom,” France’s Love at First Fight has some youthful free-range charm but not nearly as much as its predecessor.

Not as aca-mazing as “Pitch Perfect” (which made my 10-best list for 2012), the follow-up should have been cut by 10 or 15 minutes. First-time director Elizabeth Banks (who returns as a snarky announcer) doesn’t have the zippy comic timing of the first film’s helmer, Jason Moore.

Slow West certainly lives up to its title: It’s one poky Western, plodding and perambulating and moseying across the 1870 frontier on a grim march to a pointless ending.

A passable French homage to the American crime epic, The Connection has plenty of visual style to go with stock characters.

Bidding to be the “Terms of Endearment” of zombie movies, Maggie sucks all the life out of an idea that just won’t die.

It’s that priceless dialogue, the bitter ironies, the magnificently skeevy cast of characters and even the overall structure that make The Seven Five “Goodfellas” in blue.

The Spandau Ballet documentary Soul Boys of the Western World has all the kooky clothes, zippy songs and ’80s optimism you could ask for in a film about a group that had only one big US hit (but several in the UK). Why do I find it hard to write the next line? The band wasn’t that great.

Whedon keeps approaching ideas, but every time he does so he leaves a flaming bag of dog poop on the doorstep, rings the bell and runs away tittering.

The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It’s a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past. It’s as if millennial hipsterism, with its feigned fascination for all things retro, took a surprising further step: actual respect for learning, for experience, for wisdom.

Though Wilkinson gives an atypically restrained performance that lends the movie its best moments, and Watson manages to breathe a little life into her underwritten character, the movie is hopelessly simple-minded, with corny fantasy sequences, slathered-on folksiness and a plot twist that it would take a miracle of self-delusion not to see coming.

Just Before I Go is a “Garden State” retread in which filthy jokes gradually cede ground to sentimental slush.

Tender, heartfelt and exquisitely dull, the drama Félix and Meira illustrates the perils of trying to tell an emotional love story with meaningful stares and long pauses.

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

Calling Child 44 a mash-up of “Dr. Zhivago” and “Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t do enough to capture how strange it is.

A circle of lowlifes gradually kill one another off to no great effect in the dull and woebegone comic noir Kill Me Three Times.

Ex Machina offers plenty of intriguing style but a spotty story line.

A backstage drama that has all the sizzle of a glass of water resting on the windowsill, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria mistakes lack of dramatic imagination for smoldering subtlety.

Proving it’s still possible to stick to the broad contours of “The Graduate” story and come up with something brightly endearing, 5 to 7 is a memorable directorial debut for “Mad Men” writer Victor Levin.

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.

Dryly comic, arch, sleek, and suffused with mood-setting tracks by the likes of X and Depeche Mode, Electric Slide has some of the mordant absurdity of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. Like its dim hero, it’s going nowhere, but traveling in style.

If the jokes in Get Hard were a set of Jeopardy categories, they’d read as follows: Things Will Ferrell Puts Up His Butt, Butt Rape, Shots of Will Ferrell’s Bare Butt and Satirical Comparisons of Violent and Nonviolent Crime Not Excluding Mentions of Balzac.

Grunting and boarlike, Gérard Depardieu supplies a one-note rendition of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Abel Ferrara’s peculiarly unilluminating Welcome to New York.

Despising the British upper class is so utterly common, as we see in The Riot Club, a farcically heavy-handed attempted satiric takedown of an elite group of Oxford students.

Watching Penn pump iron and denounce capitalism for two hours would be roughly as illuminating as this monotonous Euro-thriller.

Struggling for the same vibe as male-bonding comedies like “Diner,” Growing Up & Other Lies instead feels like a really long beer commercial, except beer commercials usually contain at least one witty idea.

Run All Night is routine in its contours, occasionally sloppy in its editing and filled with the usual implausibilities.

Yet the film is marred by Hawke’s blundering intrusions as he keeps changing the subject to Hawke: He tells us he often wonders “why it is I do what I do,” as if anyone but he is interested in the answer.

Mostly Unfinished Business is a tale of unfinished jokes.

A dull, trite thriller.

There should be a word for the friendly rudeness of deli waiters: In the documentary Deli Man, they’re described as being as brusque and familiar with you as if you’re there three times a day — even if they’ve never seen you before.

Preposterous, slipshod, unfunny and emotionally null.

It’s a rare film that locates viciousness and kindness on both sides of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

Within five minutes you’ll guess why John Cusack, not overly encumbered with big film roles these days, didn’t return for the sequel: The script is monotonous, meandering and witless.

Slightly radical in portraying high schoolers as human beings of normal niceness and intelligence. That means this winsome comedy is a little low in the stakes department, not to mention predictable, but it gets an “A” for charm.

Most of the best gags are in the early going and the film seems ever more stretched and thin as it goes on. It would have made a brilliant eight-minute sketch, though.

Kingsman: The Secret Service borrows the tone, story, characters and humor of “Kick-Ass,” only this time in a 007 world instead of Batman’s. Nearly everything it does, it does poorly: This one is “Weak-Ass.”

Seventh Son is not a good movie, but it’s also not a pretentious one, and I call that a fair trade.

A searing, penetrating look inside schizophrenia is exactly what Enter the Dangerous Mind isn’t.

It’s mainly instructive in that it shows how liberals believe the end always justifies the means.

A sci-fi actioner with the production values of your average porno, Alien Outpost spews clichés like a machine gun set on maximum triteness.

Though somewhat marred by cheesy docudrama re-enactments, the film (produced by Steven Spielberg’s sister Nancy) is nutty, dramatic, surprising and above all inspiring.

Mortdecai is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.

Not that a film as taut and exciting as this one needs punchy dialogue, but Black Sea has that, too.

Gunning for the near-annual Ugly Makeup Oscar, Aniston proves, as always, a modestly gifted actress, only this time with scars and weedy hair.

An intriguing sci-fi thriller, but in the end it doesn’t do enough with its ideas.

How English is this movie? As English as a cold, rainy day at the beach. As English as the politeness that masks hostility, as English as a pie that contains meat, as English as secretly wishing you lived in some other country.

This Michael Mann-directed film is full of Michael Mann-isms, many of them familiar from, and done better in, “Heat.”

Melding a morality play with a glossy soap, Italy’s Human Capital is a fairly successful balance of entertainment and ideas.

Though the film, based on a Ron Rash novel, doesn’t quite deliver on all its grim portents, debut director David Burris creates a neo-Faulknerian atmosphere of indelible sin in a story that rises above cliché. As Wyle’s character puts it, “The South was never one thing.”

A Most Violent Year is a small picture, but each brushstroke is laden with detail and craftsmanship.

The moral alertness of the film is of the level normally confined, in military pictures, to talky courtroom scenes, yet Eastwood skillfully works dilemmas into propulsive and suspenseful action.

Dialogue, we seem to have forgotten, matters, and the words — by the brutally funny screenwriter of “The Departed,” William Monahan — are electric eels, slithering and sinister and nasty. They sneak up and sting you, or sometimes tickle your toes. Lowlifes don’t actually talk this way? Yeah. But if only they did.

Who gets to say what art is? Does honest emotion count for more than cold abstraction? If Andy Warhol likes it, does that make it OK? Big Eyes toys with some amusing ideas, and that’s enough.

Unbroken, is a cinematic scrapbook, a collection of well-composed scenes practically cut and pasted from “Memphis Belle,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Life of Pi” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Unlike those other films, though, Angelina Jolie’s second effort as a director is more a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

It’s adequately visionary, it’s routinely spectacular, it breathes fire and yet somehow feels room-temperature.

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

If Top Five doesn’t go deep, though, it is intermittently very funny.

Thin yet excruciating, the film is a quintessential vanity production. The script feels like a first draft that aspired merely to mediocrity and fell well short.

The writer-director of Dying of the Light is Paul Schrader, screenwriter of “Raging Bull.” The star is Nicolas Cage — Raging Tool.

Turing’s tale needs to be more widely known, and while The Imitation Game may not be a great film, it is an important one.

The three friends do things that venture beyond entertainingly dumb and into exasperatingly unbelievable.

Imagine “The Graduate” as rewritten by a golden retriever, and you’ll have some inkling of the intelligence level in the rom-com All Relative.

Mesmerizing, eerie and unpredictably weird.

The film’s mix of elements of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Bad Santa” is amusing.

The teary-eyed sincerity of the music-industry drama Beyond the Lights is at times too much, but despite its cliche elements, the film at least has the feel of a passion project.

Jon Stewart’s filmmaking debut Rosewater has much in common with “The Daily Show” — it’s blaringly obvious, it’s naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it’s enamored with cheap jokes.

A Quentin Tarantino knockoff from Japan, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? has some of the master’s nutty energy but little of his cleverness.

Big Hero 6 even has a title that sounds like a product ordered off the takeout menu of the type of restaurant that recombines a few elements in many ways. That could work fine, if any of the ingredients were particularly flavorful.

Rendering the life of young Abraham Lincoln as a tone poem, The Better Angels sags under the weight of its own resolute earnestness.

Unfortunately, the film turns out to be not quite as twisty as promised: it’s less a pretzel than it is a Cheez Curl. And I do mean cheez: The resolution, when it comes, is wholly lacking in nutritional value.

Though far too long for its wisp of a plot, this stylish film has a nerve-cinching grip that makes it more alarming than most horror flicks, let alone most movies about a couple having a tiff.

The movie is about a situation, not a story — there’s little narrative momentum — and as is often the case with movies about journalists, the mood of smug sanctimony becomes unbearable.

But for all its 21st-century special effects, the characters, dialogue and values of Fury are straight out of the ’50s. The 1650s, maybe.

Stewart’s restrained performance is affecting, the film seems well-researched about what it’s like to try to deal with Gitmo detainees who throw their own feces, and it isn’t as tendentious as the average Hollywood take on the subject.

In Listen Up Philip, the tiny fury of Jason Schwartzman suggests his “Rushmore” character is now 15 years older and a middling Brooklyn novelist. His deadpan misanthropy is good for some acerbic laughs in a movie that starts appealingly but gradually comes to seem closed and stuck.

A kill-a-minute gore-a-thon whose twist is so obvious your grandma Edna will see it coming, Kite never gets off the ground.

The origins story Dracula Untold is Dracula unbold — unoriginal, unimaginative and utterly non-unprecedented. This Vlad the Impaler has all the edge of Vlasic the pickle.

A thrilling and propulsive drama.

Can a series of irritating events make a movie? Yes, but an irritating one: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Kill the Messenger tries to be the “JFK” of crack, but offers only shrill self-righteousness to answer the crazed energy of Oliver Stone’s masterpiece of deceit.

Annabelle is mostly a grab into the Great Big Bag O’ Horror Clichés: sound-bombs of shrieking violins explode randomly, doors slam unbidden, rocking chairs creak by themselves, machines suddenly whir to life.

A sun-splashed noir that loses its appeal in the last act.

Engaging as it is to look at, this stop-motion animation film from the young Oregon studio Laika seems to have been masterminded by people thinking, “Everyone loves Pixar. So let’s do everything the opposite!” Admirably contrarian. Like being cast overboard and calling out for an anvil.

Another project whose narrative gets swallowed by its design.

They don’t make ’em like A Walk Among the Tombstones any more. Mainly because everyone got bored with ’em and stopped watching ’em.

There’s a fine horror film inside Tusk, but it’s only 20 minutes long. The rest is just blubber.

The gimmicky title is doubly misleading: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is neither a mystery nor Beatles-themed, but it is an elegantly wrought tale of anguish.

Even for a movie about complying with USDA regulations, Dolphin Tale 2 is a little lacking in excitement.

Yousef’s story, which he retells in the documentary The Green Prince, is one of unimaginable courage and moral awakening.

Only intermittently does the film treat us to more than snippets of Beal’s woozy, misshapen folk-blues, but perhaps these are best taken in small doses anyway.

The gorgeous heartache of songs by the group Belle and Sebastian gives God Help the Girl its dreamy appeal, but thanks to a poky story line it essentially amounts to a series of music videos.

When the legend of Elvis is reimagined as a mushy Christian heartwarmer in The Identical, it’s as if “Boogie Nights” is playing in the background while we hear about the life story of Edna, Dirk Diggler’s nice librarian cousin from Idaho.

That the story has largely gone untold is a shame, and Kennedy (daughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy) has done a service to the country in reminding us.

The film by Yasuhiro Yoshiura suffers from many of the same flaws as other anime features — a plodding pace, broad humor, a bland heroine and snarly, one-dimensional villains.

This one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.

Like many movies that premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, The One I Love has plenty of story — for a 30-minute TV episode, in this case of “The Twilight Zone.”

Nearly as good as the average episode of TV’s “Friday Nights Lights,” which makes it better than most movies and one of the better sports films of recent years.

It’s photographically yummy, heaving with sun-dappled vistas and four-star dining. The boys float around a bit in the sea and enjoy homemade pasta while trundling out their impressions of, say, Marlon Brando.

They’ve been around so long that they’re now the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their ’80s vibe — cowabunga, dude! — is so strong that I kept expecting a cameo by Huey Lewis or Max Headroom.

What If is a case of the cutes the way the Black Death was a case of infectious disease. The movie is saturated with cute, teeming with cute, rancid with cute. I’d endured all a man could fairly be expected to take when I glanced at my watch and realized there were still 95 minutes to go.

Frustrating, at times agonizing, the film is nonetheless dappled with a sad beauty. It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

Guardians of the Galaxy brings to mind some of the most unforgettable sci-fi event movies of the last 30 years. Alas, those films are “Howard the Duck” and “Green Lantern.”

Twice I have left a Calvary screening feeling dazed and moved.

In a captivating climax, the movie turns attractively freaky, though somewhat marred by cheesy special effects, and there’s a huge debt to the immense leaps of “2001.” An abrupt ending feels frustrating and leaves questions floating in space. Then again, I’m using only 3 to 5 percent of my capacity, so what do I know?

This atmospheric, cool-looking but gimpy thriller based on a John le Carré novel makes “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” look like “22 Jump Street.”

A comic adventure that suffers from a dearth of both laughs and thrills.

The attraction between the resolutely empirical scientist and his “spiritual,” hippy-dippy girlfriend gives the film an unpredictable quality.

I’ve read ingredients labels that were scarier than The Purge: Anarchy, a plodding horror flick that mistakenly thinks it has big ideas.

The Lord works in mysterious ways but Persecuted works in blundering, obvious ways, straining a Christianity-under-attack theme through a dopey thriller.

There are enough sharp one-liners and funny situations to keep things entertaining even as Braff delves (lightly) into genuine dilemmas confronting many a married couple.

For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

Among group-suicide movies, A Long Way Down may prove uniquely inspirational: It’s bound to make audience members want to kill themselves. It might be the only summer movie during which the snack bars will be selling cyanide Kool-Aid.

There’s nothing wrong with being a brainless B-movie, but this one is funless and lackluster, a grinding mess of pulp clichés with dull characters, perfunctory violence and dim plotting.

Roger Ebert makes an unusual candidate for a documentary: He was a writer, which isn’t cinematic, and not the swashbuckling kind. He didn’t go to war zones, just movies.

Even at a cramped and frenetic 82 minutes, the movie feels long. That’s what happens when the audience can guess everything that’s going to happen in advance.

You get the feeling the guy who wrote Transformers: Age of Extinction used the entire script as a passive-aggressive running joke on his boss, director Michael Bay.

If “Once” was a bracing blast of cool spring water, Begin Again is a can of Fanta. If “Once” was a piano, Begin Again is a keytar. If “Once” was Otis Redding, Begin Again is Bruno Mars.

This one-sided documentary, told entirely by supporters, paints Swartz as a hero pursued by malign forces.

Paul Haggis’ Third Person has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/₂ hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”

It isn’t quite as clever as it thinks. This is one of those man-written feminist parables that looks an awful lot like a Penthouse art director’s idea of a feminist parable.

Lawless outback, shotgun-toting banditos and even roadside crucifixions somehow add up to an experience that’s about as thrilling as your average trip to the post office.

Its young director, however, has a considerable flair for surprise and visual gusto, and he even, on a shoestring, delivers sharp-looking special effects.

What’s the difference between “21 Jump Street” and 22 Jump Street? Same as the difference between getting a 21 and a 22 at blackjack.

No, this film by director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre just isn’t funny, and the mismatched leads aren’t even interesting together.

A sickening horror parable disguised as a comedy of mores, the Netherlands’ Borgman is a rarity: a genuinely shocking, upsetting movie.

Shailene Woodley, already a subtle and rangy actress, easily carries the film as Hazel.

The second half, though, is chilling, as the trio’s actions come into sharp, painful focus. Too bad Reichardt has no ending.

Writer-director Jon S. Baird has devilish fun with the hilarious black-comic elements of Irvine Welsh’s novel, but the incessant bad behavior does get a wee bit monotonous, and the twist ending is disappointingly pat.

I laughed more at Seth MacFarlane’s sendup of ’60s Westerns than I did at all the other comedies I’ve seen this year, combined.

Clive Owen stumbles around the scenery doing unfortunate drunken-writer shtick in Words and Pictures, a formula movie whose script is yet more unfortunate.

Barrymore is still cute, and she and Sandler at least seem to like each other as they get on with the grim business of rom-com contrivance.

The film, like the man, is never boring.

Cédric Klapisch’s film is meandering and cutesy, but his characters are endearing and every so often he comes up with a deft insight, such as how this city’s streets are like a flayed zombie.

Rookie filmmaker Michael Maren’s script isn’t deep, but it’s heartfelt without being sticky, suggesting that the best way to deal with aging parents is to savor every tender frustration while you can.

Phoenix, who was so subtle in “Her” and brilliantly tortured in “The Master,” has lapsed back into the shouty bombast style of his “Gladiator” days, but his efforts to make the character seem layered are to little avail, especially given that Gray waits until the end to try to make him a tragic figure instead of merely a sleazy one.

Fatally mild, slow and factory-made, Million Dollar Arm belongs somewhere less competitive than the multiplex. Like the ABC Family Channel — the entertainment industry minor leagues.

Based on a lesser-known Dostoyevsky work, Brit director Richard Ayoade’s breathtakingly realized oddity will appeal to fans of David Lynch and the comic surrealism of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

A central problem: Efron isn’t funny.

Stage Fright starts out as a funny musical mashup — “Glee” meets“Friday the 13th” — but winds up indulging slasher-flick clichés instead of spoofing them.

As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives God’s Pocket an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.

Director Marvin Kren delivers a lot of cheap scares, but the film doesn’t approach the dread-soaked suspense of the 1982 version of “The Thing.”

A buddy comedy that reeks like stale underpants.

The Amazing Spider-Man is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.

A captivating Tom Hardy is in the driver’s seat for the one-man show Locke, but like many experimental films, this one suffers from its self-imposed constraints.

Not many surprises are in store, but the film’s affection for the dramatist is pleasing.

Dystopia’s supposed to be worse than what’s in the papers, fellas. Try to keep up.

The horror flick 13 Sins is passable enough when it comes to dialing up the suspense, but the “Saw” formula of a mysterious voice guiding our hero through a series of depravities has gone a bit stale.

This is one of those nature documentaries that’s pretty much solely interested in being entertaining, and so is cleverly edited to look like the linear story of a mother (dubbed Sky) and her newborns (Scout and Amber).

With Fading Gigolo, writer-director-star John Turturro does a passable imitation of a mediocre Woody Allen sex comedy, and guess who tags along for this would-be romp?

Draft Day is lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so dumb it should have been called “Dummyball.”

I think I’d rather have the waterboarding than the movie’s bromides about how we’re all victims and hate must end.

Rio 2 is not what I would call Amazon prime, but it’s got enough silly songs and daffy critters to keep the little ones happy.

David Gordon Green’s Joe largely succeeds in immersing us in a rural world of cruelty, ugliness, decay, neglect and aggression, but if there is a point to it all, I couldn’t find it.

This Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary doesn’t stray much from the nature-doc formula of making its stars look frisky and winsome while sprinkling in a few info-nuggets about the critters (they’re older than dinosaurs!). And that’s just fine.

Morris is likely to disappoint liberals in The Unknown Known by failing to take down an apparently weak target.

Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character — a craven, narcissistic, provincial TV and radio host who has been amusing the Brits for more than 20 years — proves too much of a sketch-comedy creation to sustain a film.

This pointless study of a witless character is a sad waste of Law’s talents. The more zestily he delivers Dom’s profane tirades, the more you wish Shepard gave us a reason to care about this lout.

So Arnold Schwarzenegger has reached the shaky-cam-and-hoodies stage of his career. But it’s a bit late in the day for Arnold to try to get all indie and complicated.

Top performances by Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, though, make the film emotionally rich.

It’s too busy with feel-good slogans like “Si Se Puede.” The slogan may be nice, but it’s meaningless. So is the movie.

Although Hill failed to derail Thomas’ career, she seems to consider her testimony a success: She remains a highly sought public speaker about workplace sexual harassment, which in large part thanks to her is much less tolerated than it once was.

The doc consists of interviews with the absurdly grandiose Jodorowsky (whose fans include Kanye West) plus acolytes like current director Nicolas Winding Refn and film nerds, all of whom walk us through storyboards and tell us how awesome this “greatest film never made” would have been.

Tina Fey is adorable as a gulag guard who yearns to sing, but even better is Ty Burrell as a Clouseau-like Interpol inspector.

A young Jack Nicholson might have pulled this off, but Jason Bateman is not Jack Nicholson. Pity the actor who thinks he’s edgier than he actually is.

Young men and fast cars are automatically stupid together, but even if you set your intelligence level at “off” — and you should — you’ll get a hangover from this cocktail of 200-proof stupid, clinking with moron ice cubes and with an idiot cherry on top.

A wicked little horror film in which nearly all of the violence takes place in your head, In Fear expertly builds terror out of not much more than two people driving around in a car.

Green rules the picture with her nutty stare and her willingness to get nasty in a hot sex scene, but the movie’s main weak point is the Greek general Themistokles.

“GBH” is a featherweight screwball comedy that, trying mightily to be cosmopolitan, feels awfully provincial, desperately touristy.