Liam Lacey

Throbbing musical crescendos and flickery flashbacks abound but apart from some outlandish plot machinations, nothing here is good or bad enough to be memorable.

The trouble is that absolutely nothing about the movie feels like news.

Yes, at its best, Birdman soars, swoops and flutters with life and invention, but it parrots more than it speaks. You long for a writer as reliably, elegantly witty as Tom Stoppard, whose dramas are typically “backstage,” or if not Stoppard, at least a verbal speed-puncher like Armando Iannucci, or if not Iannucci, someone as relentlessly inventive and obsessive as Charlie Kaufman to make you feel like somebody is trying to say something, rather than a writing team filling in the intelligent-sounding words to support the boisterous performances and the virtuosic camera dance.

Barnaby puts a mythic frame around a grim history, shaping it in a way that feels always like a creative adventure, not a duty.

The title comes from prosecutor Ferencz, who compares his work to that of the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who said he watched the sky so future generations could use him as their foundation.

Here’s how good an actor Bill Murray is. He does such a bristly, entertaining turn as a boozy curmudgeon in St. Vincent, that he saves first-time director Theodore Melfi’s obvious dramedy from sliding into a burbling sinkhole of schmaltz.

The movie’s compromised tone, wavering between emo introspection and rom-com cuteness, is awkward in all the wrong ways.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Director David Dobkin, best known for comedies such as "Shanghai Nights" and "Wedding Crashers," demonstrates his serious intent mostly by paint-by-numbers psychology and a ponderous pace.

A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn’t nearly as urgent as it needs to be.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows.

Bring on the sequel please, because, as fine as Denzel is, director Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer is not so good – a self-consciously stylized, stop-and-start hodgepodge of Death Wish street vengeance, Bond-style Russian villainy, and moodily shot Boston locale.

Although overplotted and underexplained, the movie is rich in memorable lairs.

As with so many movies where the script constructs experiences that are contrived and off-putting, you hope the actors can capture the emotional truth of some scenes, even if the entire apparatus feels bogus.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

While Wojtowicz’s shape-shifting character is the major source of fascination here, the archival footage, including with is terrifically effective in evoking the tumultuous era and occasionally providing a reality check to the Dog’s boastful version of his life.

The confluence of poverty, dysfunctional parenting and poor educational prospects makes the oft-idealized small-town life look like an incubator for failure, no matter how high and spectacular the Fourth of July fireworks fly.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

Is The Trip to Italy the second Godfather of comedies, or a retread? Neither, exactly. The concept is no longer fresh, but the scenery on the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts is more transporting, and their convertible Mini Cooper is a more amusing vehicle. Finally, the fact that the only singalong CD for the drive is Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is an unexpected master stroke.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

Land Ho! is both loose (shot over 18 days, with an improv quality to the acting) and overcalculated in its series of encounters, small revelations and life-affirming beats. The movie is pleasant and mostly forgettable, except for the character of Mitch.

Calvary is an unsettling concoction, abstract and brutal, morally serious and too ghastly in its flippancy to be simply comedy. When you stop gasping at the shocks and jokes, there’s a profundity here, in the struggle to find the balance between outrage and forgiveness.

One distraction is that everything feels smothered in an extra helping of déjà vu sauce: another movie featuring a middle-aged misanthrope with a dewy younger woman; another film with stage magic as a theme.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

A Master Builder really doesn’t work, hampered by odd casting, theatrical performances and a reductive interpretation of Ibsen’s play.

Lucy, you may have twigged, is named after our 3.2-million-year-old hominid ancestor.

Although the film and the actors keep on looking good, this solemn, soppy, fantasy has nothing to say about science or faith.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

When it came to describing what was happening to him, Ebert was forthright, clear-eyed and admirably free of neurosis and self-pity.

All this is initially fascinating, and then progressively less so. The problem is the usual serial-killer issue – things, no matter how weird and kinky, get repetitive.

The combination of Hardy’s almost androgynous features and powerful physique evokes a young Marlon Brando, and while it’s premature to say he has a talent to match, he has emerged as one of the screen’s most versatile and compelling presences. Locke is what you might call his sedentary tour de force.

Rogen’s always a dominating presence, but the doll-like Australian actress, who showed her comic chops in "Bridesmaids," comes close to stealing the movie here, in an uncorked performance full of volatile, liberating mischief.

Less “amazing” than persistent.

Firth gives the performance his all as a man trapped in a vortex of grief, shame and hate, but as in Scott Hicks’s "Shine," which the film occasionally resembles, there’s an overtidy relationship between trauma and catharsis.

Only Lovers is so fluidly edited and thinly plotted that it feels almost off-hand; yet, it’s also made with great care, beautifully lit and set-designed to an eyelash.

Apparently intended as a blend of "Bridesmaids" and "The First Wives Club," it’s often oddly engrossing, almost despite itself, largely thanks to the performances and the free rein the director gives his stars.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.

After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?

Some of the most striking moments in Bears are during the film’s closing credits, when we see how alarmingly close the camera crew was to the animals. We’re reminded us that while the movie Bears is both sweet and humane, the real bears are neither.

Apart from Mychael Danna’s portentous orchestral and electronic score, Transcendence simply lacks oomph: Shots don’t overwhelm, scenes don’t pop and nothing on the screen gets under your skin.

The movie is no religious fringe event. It’s from a major studio (Sony), with an Oscar-nominated star (Greg Kinnear), adapted for the screen by "Braveheart" screenwriter Randall Wallace.

The superiority of the musical sequences, and laziness of the writing, creates a dynamic where you find yourself wishing the characters would shut up and dance.

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Volume 2 picks up the story with an older Joe, now played by Gainsbourg, with her watchful sad face showing the character’s unsatisfied hunger. It seems more von Trier’s script than any great social taboos that cause Joe to go into free fall in a world that becomes more kinky and sinister.

Easily the best scene of Nymphomaniac occurs in the first two hours, when Joe finds herself the other woman in a marriage breakup.

At almost 21/2 hours, Divergent is repetitiously brutal and drab, with sets that resemble warehouses and industrial junkyards; the action rarely emerges into the daylight before the climactic gun battle.

The crimes and Gervais and Fey’s performances get stale quickly, though the song-and-dance numbers are fairly clever.

A spring-autumn romance that comes with side helpings of local colour and melodramatic backstory.

Every stage of the race and chase is announced on a webcast conducted by the secret impresario of the illegal De Leon race, a billionaire car enthusiast known as the Monarch, who “nobody knows.” Actually, the Monarch is clearly visible in a corner of the computer screen and he’s played, with jive-spouting brio by Michael Keaton. Hey, the movie isn’t called Need for Logic.

Over all, A Field in England aims to confound. The filth-encrusted characters aren’t easy to keep apart, and the narrative is too fragmentary and freakish to grasp (the sun turns black, a character vomits rune stones).

From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.

Their excitement is infectious and the entire endeavour both mind-bending and tremendously human: Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recent Nobel Prize-winner and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in, while a tear trickles down his cheek.

Parents will get the historical jokes but are unlikely to be amused; kids won’t get them, but might laugh anyway.

Overall, Stalingrad is a bizarre concoction, part Putin-era patriotic chest-thumping and part creaky war melodrama, all set in a superbly recreated ruined city.

Whether Omar will ultimately serve to change or harden hearts remains ambiguous, though it’s a movie that’s entertaining enough to appeal to the kinds of ordinary kids we see in the movie.

Actor Liev Schreiber’s voice-over narration is filled with sonorous urgency, but as the film’s commentators acknowledge, some ideas are a hard sell: How do politicians and regulators convince the public on the benefits of a financial diet when a spending spree sounds much more fun?

The work is more muted than Miyazaki’s more fantastical films, but visually complex and gorgeous, from the rustic mountain scenes to the urban scenes and soaring aerial views.

No doubt the audiences in the Coliseum would offer a thumbs-up to the scale of the destruction, though even they might have had some quibbles about the special effects, which, too often, resemble a very large pile of melting crayons.

3 Days to Kill is a comic variation on the "Taken" movies, which Besson also co-wrote and produced, starring Liam Neeson as a daughter-rescuing spy.

Whether you appreciate Gloria as a portrait of a vital woman, muddling through life’s middle chapters, or as an allegory of Chilean resilience, the message is the same: Let’s face the music and dance.

It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.