Lou Lumenick

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.