Lou Lumenick

Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration”) directs with restraint that makes the story all the more affecting.

De Niro mostly looks miserable and very tired (a document glimpsed on-screen hilariously claims his character was born in 1970) and prattles on endlessly about forgetting the past.

There’s no shortage of brains, brawn, eye candy, wit and even some poetry in this epic battle between massive lizard-like monsters and 25-story-high robots operated by humans.

This romantic dramedy tries to cram enough plot twists for a season’s worth of TV episodes into an hour and a half, but is still worthwhile for its fine performances, including the best work that Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Connelly have done in quite a while.

Coogan is often very funny as the libertine Raymond, whose real estate holdings made him one of the UK’s richest men at the time of his death in 2006. But tragedy simply is beyond his range at this point.

The sad truth is these durable 80-year-old characters, who peaked with a 1950s TV series, never even come to life in this bloated, misshapen mess, a stillborn franchise loaded with metaphors for its feeble attempts to amuse, excite and entertain.

Nothing in Redemption quite adds up, including the paranoid hero’s insistence that he’s being watched by drones.

A rare dud from great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, I’m So Excited! is a campy, sex-obsessed spoof of airborne-disaster movies that never really gets off the ground.

The Heat, which provides enough opportunity for wholesale mayhem as well as laughs, is pretty much a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

You couldn’t ask for a more fun summer popcorn movie than White House Down.

It’s not exactly giving away anything to reveal that Stamp also sings three numbers in Unfinished Song — the last one so stirring that you should bring at least one box of Kleenex.

Less an awful movie than a totally uninspired one. The under-5 set may find it funny, though I suspect their parents will be checking their watches a lot, as I did.

What makes Storm Surfers 3-D mesmerizing is jaw-dropping footage shot inside brute waves that’s unlike any I’ve ever seen before.

Deploying an impeccable American accent, Brit Henry Cavill may be as charming as the late great Christopher Reeve.

Silly enough for you? Did I mention that the immortal Ken Jeong of “The Hangover’’ plays God, who gets mighty pissed when hubby accidentally shoots Jesus out of the sky?

The first filmed Shakespeare comedy in decades that’s actually funny.

After a wickedly promising start, this pointed political satire quickly deteriorates into a fairly routine, if sporadically quite effective, home-invasion thriller.

Basically, this is Smith and his real-life son, Jaden (both affecting ridiculous mid-Atlantic accents) talking the audience to death for something like 90 minutes before the closing credits.

For my money, Furious 6 is more fun than “Skyfall" and a lot more fun than the deadly dull “Star Trek Into Darkness,’’ both of which ask you to take their silly plots way too seriously.

This is less a documentary than a wholly uncritical celebration.

The only darkness here — besides the dingy-looking images dimmed by 3-D glasses — is the murky plot, which is as silly as it is arbitrary.

The various witnesses tell contradictory tales that turn this into a real-life “Rashomon." The fact that two of the principals — Sarah and Michael, who delivers touching and eloquent on-camera narration that he wrote himself — are accomplished actors adds another level of confusion and interest that help make this compelling storytelling.

While Greenwood and Posey turn on enough charm to make this a fairly painless experience, Zack Bernbaum’s And Now a Word From Our Sponsor is a mild, toothless satire — a “Being There’’ where there’s barely any there there.

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is the first must-see film of Hollywood’s summer season, if for no other reason than its jaw-dropping evocation of Roaring ’20s New York — in 3-D, no less.

The overall effect tends to be as chilly and monotonous as Shannon’s demeanor as Kuklinski — a real disappointment.

Love Is All You Need is entirely predictable, and that’s OK in a film as lovingly made, well acted and enjoyable as this.

The agent in this interesting little thriller — well played by John Cusack — is up to the Company’s usual dirty tricks.

Mud runs over two hours, climaxing with a shootout that belongs in a different movie. It’s a rare misstep in an art-house movie that will pull mainstream audiences along as inexorably as the Mississippi River. Go see it.

One of the best films released so far this year, At Any Price signals the arrival of Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani in the ranks of major US directors.

“I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch The Big Wedding.

Whatever the unanswered mysteries of Jay’s personal life, just watching this magician’s hands at work with a deck of cards is positively mesmerizing.

As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.

42 may not be a home run, but it’s certainly a solid three-base hit as worthy family entertainment.

Gandolfini acquits himself well in a rare big-screen lead as the depressed operator of a rinky-dink amusement park in the waning days of winter.

The disappointing The Company You Keep consistently stretches credulity way past the breaking point in its depiction of journalism, police procedure and political activism.

Though it tries — with a much too heavy hand — the new Evil Dead is far less humorous than its predecessor.

The hippie heroine of this wacky Aussie comedy cheerfully theorizes that Australia was actually originally settled not by convicts but by mental patients — which may possibly explain the antics of Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, among others.

A long, tedious and often unintentionally hilarious adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi follow-up.

An inept, brutally unfunny collection of sketches.

Although the golden-hued cinematography (a filming cliché that really needs to be retired) and the sometimes slack direction by Marc Evans are minuses, Hunky Dory does deliver in the musical department.

Love and Honor may be politically clueless, but Hemsworth and the student journalist he hooks up with (fellow Aussie Teresa Palmer of “Warm Bodies’’) do make an undeniably attractive couple.

She’s (Fey) so good that — up to a point — you can ignore Paul Weitz’ erratic direction and a patchy script, both of which clumsily handle shifts between comedy and drama.

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle.

Admittedly, I’m far from a fan of Korine’s “Gummo,’’ “Julien Donkey-Boy’’ and the absymal “Trash Humpers.’’ But that he is proud of making intentionally sloppy and tedious movies doesn’t make them any easier to watch. Or all that much fun, for that matter.

“Let’s show ’em some good old-fashioned American swagger,’’ MacArthur says on his arrival in Tokyo. It’s too bad director Webber and the screenwriters, David Klass and Vera Blasi, didn’t take his advice to heart instead of largely wasting Jones and some very nice period details.

Save your money and wait for the new 3-D version of the 1939 classic that Warner Bros. has promised for later this year.

Todd Robinson’s Phantom gives us a couple of things we haven’t seen in a while: the great Ed Harris and a Cold War submarine thriller. It’s not something you want to plunk down $12 for, but just diverting enough to check out when it arrives on Netflix Instant.

A glorified TV movie.

Odd and not entirely uninteresting little docudrama.

Actually, Bruce, what stinks is the script — which is woefully lacking the kind of one-liners and memorable bad guys that helped make working-class hero McClane so iconic he’s still around after 25 years. Even the action sequences are pretty much by the numbers this time.

So feeble it fails even as train-wreck exploitation. I’d be unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to label Coppola’s sophomoric, er, sophomore effort as a director an offer you can refuse.

I walked out of Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects thinking to myself, “Finally, a mainstream 2013 movie I can whole-heartedly recommend’’ — then quickly added, “well, except that it will probably piss off a sizeable portion of the target audience.’’

An entertaining if nonsensical variation on Hill's greatest hit from that bygone era, "48 Hrs.''

Koch ends with the former mayor showing off a typically flamboyant gesture that embodies his contradictions - choosing to be buried in a Christian cemetery in his beloved Manhattan, complete with an already erected tombstone proclaiming his Jewish identity.

If you mashed-up the worst parts of the infamous "Howard the Duck,'' "Gigli,'' "Ishtar'' and every other awful movie I've seen since I started reviewing professionally in 1981, it wouldn't begin to approach the sheer soul-sucking badness of the cringe-inducing Movie 43.

An exceedingly dull and stillborn attempt to update the Brothers Grimm.

Dan Schechter's no-budget comedy about the romantic and professional travails of a pair of financially struggling film editors offers a few laughs, all served up on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

Parker is watchable chiefly for Statham, who exudes effortless cool and excels in hand-to-hand combat, as well as demonstrating his skill at wielding some very unlikely weapons.

Beautifully photographed over the four seasons - including Christmas, for the park's century-old bird census - Birders: The Central Park Effect is full of grace notes.

Perhaps the most fascinating vintage footage...depicts what happened in 1961 when the city sent police into Washington Square Park to stop the longtime Sunday practice of singing without a required permit.

To put it as positively as possible, there's never a dull moment in this flick - and that's not something you can take for granted at this time of the year. At the same time, though, there's rarely a believable moment in the script.

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

O'Brien also provided the lethargic direction and collaborated with Messina on the cliché-infested script, which is long on booze-filled confessions.

The tin-earned dialogue and haphazard plotting are more reminiscent of Tarantino's frequent collaborator Robert Rodriguez.

Anything following that spectacular sequence is bound to be something of a letdown - especially when it ends up playing like standard-issue Hollywood melodrama.

The acting is OK, but none of the leads has the kind of sizzle that might have turned this into something as special as another film set roughly in the same era, "Diner.''

It's worth seeing the movie for Hathaway alone.

Like the fictional Clarice Starling in "The Silence of the Lambs,'' Maya is a consummate professional who brilliantly performs her job in an often hostile work environment.

Piles on enough eye candy and action sequences to please fans, plus more humor than the three "Rings" films - even if it only occasionally achieves the trio's grandeur.

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

Half as long and twice as much fun as the self-important "Lincoln," Roger Michell's charming sex-and-politics comedy Hyde Park on Hudson is basically a frothy tabloid take on presidential history. And for my money, that's a good thing in a season filled with puffed-up prestige pictures.

There's nothing you haven't seen before - and better - in Deadfall, which would seem to appeal mostly to fans of snowmobile chases.

The extra money has bought a professional crew for scripted sequences, in which Jonathan and his mother too often mug for the camera.

Slicker than most attempts to document Monroe's successes and tragic trajectory, but even her own words don't provide much more of an insight into what made this troubled icon tick.

Even at his best, Sharma doesn't have sufficient acting chops - or enough Hanks-like charisma - to hold the screen alone for more than 70 minutes with the CGI Richard Parker (as well as a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a rat who quickly become food for the ravenous tiger).

Ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.

With much help from an exasperated off-screen prompter - the only other performer in this small gem - Plummer's Barrymore shows flashes of glory as he delivers bits and pieces of various Shakespearean roles.

As cleverly adapted by Tom Stoppard, this is an Anna Karenina that's pretty much guaranteed to polarize audiences.

Jennifer Lawrence's smart, funny and altogether masterful performance as a troubled widow in David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook simply blows away the competition in this year's race for the Best Actress Oscar.

It's a must-see for Daniel Day-Lewis' charismatic, subtly shaded performance as Lincoln - and an even richer one by Tommy Lee Jones.

Walken was largely typecast in quirky roles as a result of playing the title character's brother in "Annie Hall," so it's something of a delightful irony that 35 years later, Walken finds his most rewarding role leading a terrific ensemble in what amounts to one of the best Woody Allen movies that Allen wasn't involved in making.

The Oscar-winning director of "Rain Man" - whose last film, the abysmal documentary "PoliWood" never went much further than the Tribeca Film Festival - demonstrates he can make a shakycam found-footage horror movie every bit as fake-looking, clumsy and unscary as your average college student working on a $200 budget.

That 20-minute white-knuckle sequence - which includes Washington's character, Whip Whitaker, flipping the plane upside down to pull out of a tailspin - is by far the most effective part of director Robert Zemeckis' first live-action film since the underrated "Cast Away" 12 years ago.

Like with any great singer, it's often the telling pauses of the man born Anthony Benedetto that say the most in The Zen of Bennett.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

The posthumous campaign to polish Michael Jackson's tarnished reputation continues apace with this Spike Lee infomercial, commissioned by Sony and the money-grubbing Jackson estate to promote the 25th anniversary of his 1987 album "Bad.''

The sort of enigmatic movie that many critics embrace because it's open to endless interpretation.

The very sex-positive The Sessions treats intimacy with an explicitness and honesty that's very rare in movies. It may be the first film that doesn't turn premature ejaculation into a punch line.

Low on raunch but even lower on laughs. It also looks like half the lighting crew failed to show up.

Utterly delightful.

A raunchy, sporadically funny comedy.

A blue-chip Oscar contender that's also a rousing popcorn movie, Ben Affleck's Argo offers plenty of nail-biting thrills as well as funnier scenes than you'd ever imagine possible in the grim context of the Iran hostage crisis.

While there are laughs, the farcical elements of The Oranges are not presented with sufficient discipline to live up to the full potential of its cast. But as a seven-year veteran of the New Jersey suburban experience, I can testify that it nails the milieu's specifics.

When Neeson engages in bare-knuckle fisticuffs at the climax of the cartoonish Taken 2, I honestly couldn't figure out if the 60-year-old actor was actually present at all except for the close-ups.

Tim Burton's best film in years.

Michael J. Bassett's Solomon Kane is been there, done that.

An indie-inflected popcorn movie with major brains, brilliant acting and a highly satisfying payoff, Looper is the first must-see movie of the season.