Kyle Smith

Life, Animated oversimplifies the situation, contriving to use endless clips from Disney movies to make a case that movie magic really can better people’s lives. Unfortunately, by the end of the movie it’s clear that Disney can’t help Owen negotiate sex, breakups or many other challenges he faces as an adult.

Written and directed with compassion by Noah Buschel, the film is a low-key chamber piece better suited to television. But don’t let its restraint fool you: As unshowy as it is, The Phenom has an impressive collection of tools.

Free State of Jones is enticingly difficult to chart. It’s anti-war, anti-plutocracy and anti-racist, but it’s also pro-Bible, pro-gun, anti-tax and sympathetic to the poor whites who usually get tagged as racist. Its hero is an avowed Republican named Newt.

Quotable, controversial, anarchic, charismatic and handsome (in an ugly way), the zany avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa had everything one needs to be a star, except talent.

The girl kept talking and strategizing as heavy string music played on the soundtrack. This was doubly weird because: a) it made me feel like the bad guy; and b) life doesn’t normally have a soundtrack. Somehow the bitch got hold of a flare gun. Ever had a flare gun fired into your hide? Unpleasant.

If it’s possible to make a morally old-fashioned film about teen orgies, writer-director Eva Husson has done so with Bang Gang, a quietly chilling look at the sex lives of a group of bored high-school students.

Imagine “Moby-Dick” rewritten in crayon, and you’ll get the idea.

Sharp, funny and as mesmerizing as the master’s notoriously languorous suspense scenes.

No, Warcraft isn’t a ridiculous mess; it holds together on its own musclebound terms. It neither tries to be jokey nor undercuts itself by being unintentionally funny. And it offers a bit more complexity than some other nonstop action flicks adapted from video games. It’s a real movie, just not a good one.

The climate-change documentary Time To Choose makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint.

A movie that sets out to make boy bands look silly. The conceptual error is obvious. There’s low-hanging fruit and then there’s fruit that’s already on the ground, rotting underfoot.

You certainly get your 20 bucks worth of spectacle out of Alice Through the Looking Glass. So breathtaking are the landscapes, so whimsical are the creatures, so marvelous are the marvels that I wanted to give a standing ovation to whoever signed the check to pay for all this. Expensiver and expensiver!

It’s kind of cute but mostly just awkward, somewhere between watching bros who slept through French class trying to work their game in Nice and endless CBS sitcoms about nutty guys ruled by exasperated, boring women.

I tried squinting. Didn’t work. I turned my head slightly to the side. Uh-uh. No matter what I tried, I could not, cannot and never will be able to see Ewan McGregor as Jesus Christ.

Davies’ quiet, painterly film largely eschews musical cues that would heighten its emotional impact, but as it is, Sunset Song is captivating in its sincerity.

Loaded with dazzling ideas that don’t ultimately pull together.

Elstree 1976 is an amazing experience. I’m shocked that a documentary revisiting the making of “Star Wars” could be this boring.

After the first two “Captain America” entries, the finest comic-book movies of the last five years, this one is disappointing. The story doesn’t make sense.

Small fry will learn an important lesson taking in the recycled storylines of Ratchet & Clank: Like nearly all recycling, it’s garbage.

Yet merely “playing with concepts” doesn’t quite add up to a film, and The Family Fang, adapted from Kevin Wilson’s novel, feels like an extended therapy session.

To describe this as a movie about a mediocre businessman biding his time before an appointment probably makes it sound more exciting than it is.

An English-language film from Italy, Tale of Tales toys with the ogres, princesses and crones of classic fairy tales to almost no dramatic effect, albeit with lots of sex and gore. Imagine the Brothers Grimm’s cousins Tyler and Jake writing for a late-night slot on Cinemax and you’ll get the idea.

An Eye for Beauty star Éric Bruneau proves to be a haircut in search of a man, which makes him ideal for this vapid adultery drama that delivers the character depth of your average spread in Architectural Digest.

Probably no studio mulls its “brands” as obsessively as Disney does, and The Jungle Book is very much a careful, calculated brand extension, not a reinvention. But that’s just fine: What better lesson to teach kids than respect for what came before you?

Carney’s film (unlike his disappointing previous effort “Begin Again”) is mad, irrepressible youth incarnate, by turns as exuberant as “The Commitments” and (nearly) as heartfelt as “Once.”

It’s breathtaking. It’s dazzling. It’s world-altering, is what it is. For the first time ever, a movie has actually done it. Hardcore Henry has precisely replicated the experience of watching someone else play a video game.

Directed with great sensitivity by Norway’s Joachim Trier, the film is superbly, subtly acted.

Demolition, written by Bryan Sipe is, like director Jean-Marc Vallée’s previous films “Wild” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” a tale of interior repair sought through obsessive and near-penitential acts, but it’s stranger and at times more interesting than those other two.