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.