Lou Lumenick

He’s great as a celebrity chef who’s forced to re-examine his priorities in this extremely funny and big-hearted comedy that Favreau also wrote.

Vanity, thy name is Kevin Spacey.

If you were wondering what “12 Years a Slave” might have been like as a two-part episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” you might want to check out this unsatisfying but not uninteresting oddity. It renders another historical story about race with exquisite taste but not much in the way of passion.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.

Walking with the Enemy may not be another “Schindler’s List” (Ben Kingsley has a small but important role as Hungary’s deposed regent) but it’s handsomely photographed (A-list vet Dean Cundey) in Romania and a compelling addition to the Shoah canon.

Lethargic direction, bland visuals, credulity-straining plotting and tin-eared dialogue turn even pros like Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman into sleepwalking bores.

A fine cast headed by the underrated Greg Kinnear lifts this year’s third major religious movie, the fact-inspired Heaven Is for Real, somewhat beyond its Hallmark Channel-caliber script and visuals.

Legendary hipster filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s wryly funny exercise in genre bending hits so many grace notes it ends up being his most satisfying film in years.

Like the similar, and slightly superior, "The Conjuring" last summer, Oculus eschews the buckets of gore common to R-rated horror movies and takes a relatively subtle, psychological approach — even if the somewhat disappointing ending leaves the door open for a sequel (or three).

Tedious and pretentious.

Deeply mediocre and ultra-predictable.

Holy ship! Crowe’s grumpy Noah and his dysfunctional clan help God reboot the too-wicked world in this imaginative (but hardly sacrilegious) and visually spectacular elaboration on Genesis.

Those with a high tolerance for violence and gore — at one point, Rama battles assassins labeled “Baseball Bat Man’’ and “Hammer Girl’’ simultaneously — will eat up The Raid 2.

Rob the Mob, which is more fun and more tightly constructed than “American Hustle,’’ romanticizes the clueless couple, whom the columnist dubs “Bonnie and Clyde,” and moves their inevitable Christmas Eve date with fate from Ozone Park to a far more attractive location.

As in genuine porn, most of the acting (except for Skarsgard, who deliberately tries to be funny and sometimes succeeds) is as flat and uninteresting as the script — even when the older Joe narrates a montage of flaccid penises.

Divergent is a clumsy, humorless and shamelessly derivative sci-fi thriller set in a generically dystopian future.

It doesn’t add up to much of anything exciting, even with an appearance by Isabella Rossellini (of Lynch’s “Blue Velvet’’) as the mother of one of the doubles.

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan are superb as the couple, who use the occasion to drop bombs on each other.

A thoroughly enjoyable caper that doesn’t outstay its welcome.

The best parts of this awkwardly paced film are Bell’s scenes with Enrico Colantoni, who returns as her private investigator dad, concerned she’s throwing away a bright future by getting sucked back into her old life.

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.’’