Lou Lumenick

A huge hit in China — where it was released in 3-D IMAX — the handsomely filmed Journey To the West deserves better than the token 2-D theatrical release it’s getting in the United States to support its simultaneous arrival on video-on-demand.

Loaded with improbable cultural references (Sherman totes a Stephen Hawking lunchbox and uses words like “eponymous”), I fear Mr. Peabody and Sherman may be a bit too brainy to fully connect with contemporary movie audiences.

It’s the wonderful performances by Bening and Harris that make this flawed, somewhat maudlin film worth seeing.

It largely consists of Franco musing about depictions of homosexual activity on film. As well as gay cast members speculating whether Franco will take off his clothes and perform in explicit footage. He doesn’t.

All the tedium of an endless trans-Atlantic flight gets packed into the 105 minutes of Non-Stop.

Unfortunately, as in Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,’’ much of the sometimes draggy 2 1/4 hours is given to clichéd inspirational drama.

A campy guilty pleasure that serves up a “Gladiator’’ knockoff as an appetizer to the impressively flame-filled main course.

Basically a much schmaltzier fantasy version of “Love Story.’’

Endlessly lame.

Adult World proceeds by fits and starts, but fans of Cusack won’t want to miss his performance as the petulant poet, whose resistance is inevitably worn down by his persistent fan.

Except possibly for a superlative supporting performance by Hugh Bonneville of “Downton Abbey,’’ Clooney’s low-key directorial effort is not quite an Oscar-caliber movie, though it’s got a great cast, a worthy theme and plenty of things to reward adult moviegoers.

Winslet and Brolin have wonderful chemistry together, and Reitman makes well-worn metaphors like steamy weather and pie making (the film has been embraced by the American Pie Council) seem newly invented.

G.B.F., which concludes with a clumsy parody of the prom climax from “Carrie,’’ offers an admirable message of tolerance for teen audiences — too bad it’s been absurdly saddled with an R rating, even though there’s far less innuendo than in “Easy A.’’

The Nut Job has an interesting anti-socialist subtext, with the seemingly benevolent raccoon revealing himself as a power-mad dictator. It’s the most political non-Pixar cartoon feature since the very left-leaning “The Ant Bully’’ eight years ago.

Imagine the French lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Color’’ as a raunchy American exploitation flick with loads of fake gore. That’s a rough idea of the latest from Lloyd Kaufman, the exuberant shockmeister whose Troma Team is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

Poor John Leguizamo, who hopefully got well-paid to voice a stereotypical Latino bird providing a stream of nonsensical narration.

There is still enough venom spilled in August: Osage County to make this drama relatable to anyone who’s suffered through a wildly dysfunctional family dinner — and who hasn’t, especially at this time of year?

Jonze seems to be heading for a far quirkier ending than the one he actually delivers, but he does tap into the zeitgeist with his unlikely romantic fable.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

There are probably enough moments to satisfy hard-core fans, but for the rest of us, this amounts to the Middle Earth equivalent of “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones,’’ a space-holding, empty-headed epic filled with characters and places (digital and otherwise) that are hard to keep straight, much less care about.

Except for a couple of isolated, mildly subversive moments, Hanks is basically playing the genial host of “The Wonderful World of Disney’’ rather than an actual person.

Highly entertaining documentary.

Out of the Furnace is much longer on style and belligerence than actual substance.

A family-friendly, Hallmark Channel-ready musical dramatic fable whose plot more closely resembles Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer.’’

The feel-bad movie of the holiday season, Spike Lee’s often-repellent Americanized reimagining of Korean director Chan-Wook Park’s twisty 2004 revenge thriller Oldboy is relentlessly gruesome, self-consciously shocking and pretty much pointless.

Tiresome cavalcade of bickering — which feels like it lasts even longer than your typical Thanksgiving dinner.

Delivery Man trades the abrasive comedian’s trademark snark for schmaltz — an experiment that actually works better than you’d guess.

Bob Nelson’s original script, a sort of unlikely cross between “The Last Picture Show’’ and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,’’ offers a biting satire of Midwestern life that Payne sometimes allows to border on condescension.

Miyazaki offers a vivid, at times fantastical view of Japan between the wars, wracked by the Great Depression, a fearsome earthquake that leveled Tokyo in 1923, a tuberculosis epidemic and the rise of fascism.

Overall, it’s engaging and serves its young audience well — a rare Holocaust movie that doesn’t strain to become Oscar bait.

The film at least achieves the level of mediocrity thanks to the professionalism of two slightly younger participants — Kline and Mary Steenburgen, who also have Oscars on their mantels but go well beyond phoning it in here.

It’s a remarkable story, vividly and urgently told by French-Canadian director Vallée (“The Young Victoria”) from a pointed, schmaltz-free script by Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack.

The schmaltzy Diana is directed at a dirge-like pace by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose film “Downfall’’ depicted the final days of Hitler and provided one of the Internet’s most enduring memes.

Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary is a fine, touching tribute to John Waters’ larger-than-life drag diva, Divine.

Like “Traffic’’ on a massive dose of downers, Ridley Scott’s The Counselor is a great-looking and star-filled but lethally pretentious, talky, lethargic drama.

Danny Huston looks and sounds like his celebrated father, John, more and more each year, so I enjoyed watching him play a flamboyant and womanizing legendary director not unlike his old man in Bernard Rose’s modest little comedy.

Well-meaning films like “Lincoln’’ and “Lee Daniels’ The Butler’’ merely scratch the surface compared to the deep and painful truths laid bare by 12 Years a Slave. It’s about time, Scarlett O’Hara.

Hollywood’s ongoing campaign to remake every horror movie of the 1970s and ’80s has finally caught up with the Stephen King-Brian De Palma classic “Carrie,’’ and the results are distressingly anemic, pig blood and all.

It’s much more lively than “On the Road,” last year’s snoozy adaptation of the Kerouac novel that presented fictionalized versions of some of the same characters.

Basically, the whole thing can be summed up as an epic midlife crisis.

Their misadventures in the Big Apple, including Giamatti’s involvement with a Russian house sitter (a bizarrely cast Sally Hawkins) are neither funny nor touching, just tedious.

Compared by some to “2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ Cuarón’s relatively intimate space epic is equally groundbreaking in the spectacular way it depicts space.

Is torture ever justifiable? A twisty, compelling, brilliantly acted (if sometimes difficult to watch) thriller, Prisoners, asks this question not in the usual contemporary context — anti-terrorism — but instead as a gruesome option deployed as a response to every parent’s worst nightmare.

The film also drags a bit toward the end, but neither of these is a major flaw in a movie with more funny lines than in most of Allen’s movies these days — not to mention a saner, clearer moral perspective.

Overall, the rambling Jayne Mansfield’s Car is almost as big a wreck as its namesake.

Gorgeous location filming on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and a voice-only performance by the great Claire Bloom as an elderly woman remembering World War II are the main attractions in Kat Coiro’s familiarly snoozy romantic drama.

Short, sweet, raunchy and often screamingly funny.

It falls to Hanks and his movie-star presence to anchor this ambitious enterprise, and he does some of his most impressive acting without saying a word.

A more nuanced picture of the only president to resign from office emerges in Penny Lane’s clever documentary.

A campy erotic thriller that’s seriously short of, well, passion.

A credulity-straining thriller featuring a few good paranoid moments — and, perhaps most important, Rebecca Hall running in high heels.

Cusack and Cage — who don’t have any scenes together until halfway through — do their best work in years, while erstwhile “High School Musical’’ star Hudgens shows off acting chops missing in “Spring Breakers.’’

Larson shines as an adult staffer assigned to keep these self-destructive kids safe while they work with therapists.

Jobs amounts to, at best, a Cliffs Notes version of the man’s early life. If you want the real story, you’ll have to read Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2011 biography, which would make a much better film than this one.

Although director Lee Daniels dials things down a bit here, subtlety is not what he does. That strategy worked for “Precious’’ but turned his more recent “The Paperboy’’ into a feature-length howler.

The Zipper is a carnival ride, a tumbling cage whose screaming customers are spun around like a Ferris wheel.

Often less really is more, and that’s why I can recommend Planes, a charmingly modest low-budget spin-off from Pixar’s “Cars’’ that provides more thrills and laughs for young children and their parents than many of its more elaborate brethren.

The superficial script doesn’t go nearly deep enough to begin explaining Lovelace.

I’m a sucker for films with great surfing footage, let alone wacky ’70s hairstyles. But this overlong, cliché-infested Aussie period drama tested my patience.

Superficial and hokey yet still oddly endearing.

Paul Schrader’s The Canyons is not the worst movie of 2013 — it's marginally better than "InAPPpropriate Comedy" and "Scary Movie 5," two even worse bombs that Lindsay Lohan also lent her rapidly diminishing talents to — but it is surely the most boring I’ve seen.

The pretentious and unrelievedly glum first feature from music-video and advertising director Nenad Cicin-Sain, The Time Being looks sharp, but it’s about as dramatically satisfying as watching paint dry.

Blue Jasmine may sound like a topical satire, but it isn’t really. It’s a character study of an obnoxious, selfish and supremely self-absorbed woman oblivious to the pain she inflicts on others.

Still Mine eschews schmaltz, and is tremendously moving.

A couple of heavyweight actors — Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy — get top billing, but this British drama belongs to young Eloise Laurence, memorable as Skunk, the diabetic daughter of Roth’s kindly solicitor.