Mick LaSalle

It has the curse of earnestness. It is so sincere ... it is so sincere it could put you into a coma.

Almost too much to bear. But brace yourself and see it anyway. It’s worth it.

It’s a formula movie, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that it’s a sort of bad version of itself.

It’s long, downright dispiriting, enjoyable only sometimes, and yet there’s a feeling of authenticity. It’s neither bad nor good, but interesting. It might improve with age.

The only thing good to say for The Forest is that Dormer is interesting, that she creates a different vibe and essence for each sister, and that it would be nice to see her in a better movie.

Anomalisa may simply be a brilliant one-off, but it’s pointing a new direction for animation, if anyone cares to follow it.

I might be tempted to vote DiCaprio best actor — or at least to propose a new category be inaugurated, the acting equivalent of the Purple Heart.

Needless to say, if “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained” were too much for you, The Hateful Eight won’t be any easier. This is a big step beyond.

Writer-director Peter Landesman has a fascinating and appalling story to tell here, and that cuts through the layers of corniness.

Joy never completely loses its way. But it almost does, and it never quite arrives.

Going into Sisters, the thought is, “It’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. How bad can it be?” Going out, the thought is, “Now we know.” It can be downright awful.

The storytelling in The Force Awakens is masterful, in that it seems to be taking its time but is always moving relentlessly forward and coming up with surprises.

With In the Heart of the Sea, director Ron Howard has given us a painstakingly crafted bore, a lovingly rendered snooze, and a very expensive means by which audiences can experience restless leg syndrome before being carted off to the land of happy slumber.

Haynes elicits two great performances and provides the perfect frame for them, not just in terms of setting, but through smart casting and attention to the smallest of performances.

Simply the most relentlessly entertaining film of the last few months.

As for the movie’s ultimate resolution, nothing specific can be said here, except that it borders on inexcusable.

Kurzel and three screenwriters have figured out a way to make Macbeth boring. Now that they proved it can be done, no one need ever do it again.

To take such a subject and render it without focus, interest, or joy—to make a long, dull movie from it — qualified as some perverse sort of achievement.

Rocky might not be the brightest guy, but he knows things. He has his limitations, but he is, in his own way, extraordinary, and when we look at his/Stallone’s face, we can have no doubt that Rocky has gone through life and learned things. He has been awake all these years, and growing. With no exaggeration, this is a beautiful and moving thing to see.

A bleak, tedious enterprise, shot in earth tones and Gothic gray and blue.

The result is a reminder that, with weak material, it’s often worse to have a really good actor. The weaknesses just stands out in sharper relief.

The magic of Brooklyn can’t be analyzed, but something in the richness of its relationships puts an essential truth before us — the brevity and immensity of life. We know all about that, of course, but that’s the beauty of great art: It takes what you already know and makes you feel it.

Trumbo is breezy and pithy without ever undercutting the seriousness of the subject. A certain degree of wit is appropriate in a writer’s story, just as any Hollywood tale must at least have a whiff of absurdity, or else it can’t be true.

Spotlight one of the best movies about journalism ever made, at once gripping and accurate. It doesn’t just get the big things right, such as how news stories evolve, but the small things, such as what offices look like and how staff tends to react to a new boss.

In this her third feature as a director, Jolie once again shows a marked talent for the visual aspects of storytelling. Her shot selection is impeccable and her compositions are artful without being self-consciousness.

The movie’s intelligent respect for that which is unknowable allows it to cover an enormous swath of ground in just 85 minutes. Sarah Silverman is very good in I Smile Back, and the movie is even better.

One of the great satisfactions of Spectre is that, in addition to all the stirring action, and all the timely references to a secret organization out to steal everyone’s personal information, we get to believe in Bond as a person.

The attempt is to create a reality wide enough to accommodate the extremes of absurdity and hard political truth, but the pieces never cohere, and so we end up with a rattling bag of disparate elements.

The real issue is that everything about Adam’s journey feels half digested and tossed back up. We’ve seen it before. It was better the first time.

By avoiding the usual cliches of the freedom saga, Suffragette finds its way to its own, specific integrity. It’s a movie that’s easier to respect than love, but it is something to respect.

In the end, the film shakes down as a kind of eat-your-spinach exercise, a movie that’s worthy and perhaps good for you, but is labored and only enjoyable intermittently.

Truth is a journalism horror story, something like “All the President’s Men” but with the wrong ending and plenty of blame on all sides. It is one of the most frustrating speak-truth-to-power tales ever put onscreen, because it dares to show how that usually works out: Power wins. Big.

Seemingly loose and free-associative in style, Experimenter builds to an effect and, for all its humor — or rather, through its humor — makes a sober and chilling point.

Obviously, no one should wish all films were shot like this. But the approach suits this story and these characters, and that’s all it had to do.

The world here is so ugly that only beautiful tracking shots, rich close-ups and adroit handheld work could make it bearable.

Bridge of Spies tells us that the Constitution is not some quaint national luxury but the road map out of the darkness.

To be sure, Steve Jobs has its own integrity as the story of the young innovator, but it’s a little like making a movie about Thomas Edison and stopping somewhere between the phonograph and the lightbulb.

Frehling is excellent as a rigid do-gooder who thinks he understands everything and then comes up against crimes that shake his sense of the universe. His fresh fierceness is nicely balanced by Voss, who says little but radiates wisdom.

Freeheld is formulaic, but some formulas are good if you do them right, and it helps knowing that it all really happened, or most of it.

A complete washout, a joyless, pointless and fundamentally idiotic enterprise.

After two hours of The Walk, I felt as if I’d walked the wire myself. I was agitated and exhausted. During the movie, I was squirming and wincing, and a few times even had to close my eyes, just to find some relief.

The new Ridley Scott movie is fascinating and charming and crammed and overstuffed, and it’s a curious case, too. It gets all the seemingly hard things wonderfully right, but then caves in at points that should have been easy.

If at any point in Sicario, you feel lost, don’t worry about it. The movie is all about being lost and, in any case, all becomes clear, eventually.

The success of this film may ride entirely on the alchemy of these particular actors, but whatever is carrying it, The Intern gets there.

It’s an elaborate and artificial concoction, without any discernible ambition behind it.

Hitman: Agent 47 takes an austere European aesthetic and combines it with Hollywood mindlessness, and the result is like a guilty pleasure, minus the pleasure.

It is not a pleasure to sit through, not even remotely, not even by some stretched definition of the word “pleasure.” It’s work, but it’s ultimately rewarding work. It tackles some truths that other movies wouldn’t touch, not even with a stick and thick gloves.

Ritchie is a director with no instinct for the audience, and he can’t hold things together for an entire film. He seems at a loss, from moment to moment, as to what he should emphasize.

Wallace’s 2008 suicide informs the film and Jason Segel’s performance. What Wallace wants to say, tries to say but can’t quite say is that, having reached the summit of success, he sees an even bigger mountain in front of him. His anxiety about holding it together in the face of newfound celebrity is no affectation. He’s frightened of it and probably has good reason to be.

The Gift stretches things a little too much for it to be a first-rate thriller. Still, among second-rate thrillers, it’s one of the best.

If only Streep would have put down the microphone and let Springfield sing “Jessie’s Girl,” Ricki and the Flash might have had half a chance.

Even the interesting parts of A Lego Brickumentary aren’t that interesting, but are rather more like the best thing you might hear while being cornered by the most boring person at a party.

Gainsbourg is always going through a little more than she cares to tell the audience about, but the connection her character makes with Samba — real, complicated and not typical — is one of the movie’s highlights.

McQuarrie devises a film that’s a succession of riveting sequences, filmed in a way that’s active and yet elegant. The camera keeps moving within shots, but not in a subjective, jittery way, but rather like a third person narrator calmly emphasizing the essential points.

Vacation is consistently funny from beginning to end, a piling on of dumb but inventive jokes and excruciating, awkward situations.

As Zimbardo, Billy Crudup adopts an implacable facade, and for a while we don’t know what we’re seeing — a humanitarian on the brink of discovery, an ambitious monster who has found the winning ticket, or a young professor in way over his head.

Every so often he inflicts something like Irrational Man on the world, which is so awful you have to wonder if Allen wrote it himself or farmed it out to some look-alike cousin out to destroy him.

The experience of Southpaw is rather like seeing the truth behind the cliches, revived in all their pain and power to surprise.

With a novel idea at its center and some good jokes scattered throughout, Pixels is a relief from the self-serious action films that invade movie theaters at this time of year. For most of the way, it’s good enough to enjoy, and for the rest of the way, it’s good enough to root for. But ultimately, it’s not quite good enough ... to be good enough.

To watch Boulevard is to keep circling back, over and over, to the question: Was it merely an actor’s misguided inspiration, to take a repressed character and turn him into a grievously depressed one? Or was Williams simply unable to do it any other way?

Smart, sedate and well acted.

Romantic comedies can go in all sorts of directions, but they depend on the audience’s believing that a couple should get together and stay together. But in Trainwreck, that belief is hard to come by.

By being more than a superhero movie, it reminds us of what it’s worse than. Its greatest virtue isn’t that it’s a superior comic book movie, but rather that it comes close to not being that at all. Close, and yet not close enough.

It’s hard to know what to make of this, but it’s quite enough that it happens at all. The film has some longueurs — it isn’t scintillating for every second of screen time. But Marques-Mercet and his actors establish an intimacy with the audience that’s practically unique. Even if you love it only a little, not completely, you will probably remember 10,000 Km for the rest of your life.

The bottom line is that the filmmakers are working with nothing here — no characters to speak of, no interpersonal relationships, no story with any suspense or capacity to engage, and no script with any humor or wit. What can they do?

In essence, everything good in Self/less was derived from “Seconds,” and everything bad the writers and the director came up with on their own.

A movie that has two good ideas. It needed three.

The movie makes something of a case for him, in that he is quite a good piano player, with absolute command of the blues, country and rock idioms, but there isn’t enough here to make someone a fan who isn’t already interested.

This sequel goes beyond disappointment into a sublime realm of embarrassment that's beyond and yet better than merely bad, because it fascinates: What on Earth were they thinking?

For all its weaknesses, Terminator Genisys is a "Terminator" movie that feels like a "Terminator" movie, more than did "Terminator 3," not to mention the ghastly "Terminator Salvation."

The film is a fascinating look at how a true event can become a media event — and how courting the media can have good and bad results so mixed up that it’s hard to know where the good influence stops and the corrupting influence starts.

More emphasis on these darker, subterranean elements might have made for a fuller experience, but Infinitely Polar Bear is really all about a father as seen from a child’s perspective. It’s better than a scrapbook item, as in a film made to be appreciated by one family. But it’s not quite a successful movie.

Again like Chabrol, Fontaine has a way of making you laugh, on and off, for 90 minutes, before leaving you feeling a little queasy from too much truth.

Writer-director Seth MacFarlane is like some weird combination of a stupid, dirty-minded teenager and a brilliant comic master. His impulses are sophomoric, but he knows where to find the punch line, and he hits it, again and again.

It’s a movie about a geeky teenager living in the Los Angeles hood, and something about it, or rather everything about it, feels real.

The not-as-good news is that, like “Wall-E” and “Up,” Inside Out has a great opening, a satisfying finish, and something of a sag in the middle. But this time it’s only a sag.

Alas, the main thing that comes through in Heaven Knows What is that a junkie’s life is really, really monotonous.

To see this film is to understand — not in an intellectual way, but in a direct, visceral way — why the British ignored the threat of Adolf Hitler for so long.

So this is a very worthy movie, not that this will hold any sway with illness-phobes, who’d rather stare at the wall for 105 minutes than see a good movie about sickness.

Jurassic World is an intelligent action movie that’s saying something simple but true: Yes, people are that stupid.

What makes Aloft better than dismissible is that it’s a sincere failure, not a cynical one, and the cinematography is arresting. In fact, for scattered seconds throughout the movie, Aloft is beautiful to look at.

Riveting from its first moments.

Love & Mercy captures with striking immediacy the unbound power of the artist in his element.

There’s an absurdist edge, but with nothing of the smart-aleck about it. Rather than use wit as a way of bypassing thought and emotion, Bujalski’s concerns are serious, and his attitude toward his characters is warm without being indulgent.

Nobody is better than McCarthy at over-the-top comic hostility.

The party scenes are entertaining fantasy, but the insider-business end of the picture is occasionally interesting in its own right.

By turns frightening, exciting and ridiculous, San Andreas is, in the end, more impressive than anything else.

Aloha shows how far a movie can go on charm alone.

If ultimately Slow West seems more like a filmmaking exercise than an engaging piece of work — despite Fassbender’s star presence — that’s all right. Filmmakers need to get their exercise. Let’s see what Maclean does next.

Now after 43 years in feature films, Danner has gotten the opportunity to show what she can do, and in I’ll See You in My Dreams, she is simply jaw-dropping, just wonderful.

This is a deluxe French film, longer than usual, with strong performances by French cinema mainstays Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet and a movie-stealing turn from relative newcomer Adele Haenel, who has become a major French actress in just the past couple of years.

The movie is saying something worth hearing about the place the future holds, the concept and promise of it, in human existence. It’s an attempt to wrest that vision from the narrow fantasies of doom-peddling action filmmakers. That’s an attempt worth making.

Saint Laurent’s designs and working life take a backseat to scenes of him stuffing his face with pills, accidentally poisoning his dog and sleepwalking through sex with a variety of lovers. Two and a half hours of this. Bonello might as well have shown him sleeping eight hours or using the toilet for all that says about the man and his work.

As of today, this is the most delightful movie out there.

Yet all this wit and effort and occasional beauty is in the service of a movie that is little more than a two-hour chase scene, one that seems founded on the assumption that if you show one set of people chasing another, that’s enough to get an audience excited: Oh, no, let’s hope they don’t get caught!

If there’s a weakness to The D Train, it’s only in the filmmakers’ ultimate choice to stop the pain right before the finish, as if any good might really come to the characters they’ve created. Perhaps the assumption was that, by then, audiences will have suffered enough. But some misery you really can’t get enough of, especially when it’s happening to other people.

So there’s nothing here to see, except maybe the white dress that Vergara wears in her first scene.

An adaptation not firing on all cylinders.

Supercharged and lifeless, frenetic and stone-cold dead, a barrage of action scenes that look fake, yet make you wonder if fake is the new real.

The Road Within is never good. The presentation of Tourette’s syndrome may be authentic, but everything else about the movie — the emotions, the characters, the situations — rings false.

Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.

For people already interested in fashion, the film’s appeal will be obvious, but Dior and I deserves to go beyond a small target audience.

Crowe is not messing around here, not trying to dream up opportunities to throw himself another close-up. He’s a genuine director.

The real problem with True Story is contained in its title. The story isn’t too good to be true, but rather too true to be good.

A sci-fi movie that actually has intelligent things to say about science — that’s all too rare. It’s what we get in Ex Machina.

It’s not a combination most of us would’ve thought of, but Stewart and Binoche bring out the best in each other.

The role of Arielle was originally supposed to go to Diane Kruger, whose tough-minded realism would have been interesting here. But Marlohe, earthier yet more ethereal, is ideal.

In the end, it’s hard to know whether to see the Iran of Desert Dancer in optimistic or pessimistic terms. Young people, especially, want to be free, but the other side has all the power. Having YouTube on your side certainly helps, but an army and some tanks can come in handy, too.

The film is fun and extreme, and though in the end rather pointless, there’s a certain audacity here — a delight in extremity — that’s appealing.

Long before the finish, Man From Reno has flat-lined.

Everything in the movie is suffused by a vision of life that is resoundingly and evidently false, but as this vision is not repulsive, but is intended to reassure, the lies don’t produce anger or frustration. No, they bring on the laughs.

While We’re Young is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements.

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

By the way, Danny Collins is inspired by the true story of Steve Tilston, a British musician who received a 1971 letter from John Lennon some 30 years after it was written. The gist of the letter was about the same, but all the characters and circumstances are creations of the filmmaker.

It matches up two comic actors and instead of clashing or canceling each other out, they bring in the best possible result: A comedy with twice the laughs.

Most of life is melodramatic — emotional, involving and lacking the dignity of straight drama. 3 Hearts is life as felt from the inside.

Funny how there are fans of Jennifer Lawrence who will never see her in Serena. It’s not her best film, but it contains one of her best performances, in a role that challenges her more than any other.

Basically, The Gunman is a movie that asks audiences to sympathize with the equivalent of Lee Harvey Oswald — that is, an Oswald who definitely did it. Oddly enough, it succeeds, partly because the moral climate it presents seems so confused, but mainly because of Penn’s particular aura of irascible integrity. He’s the most irritated action hero since Harrison Ford.

Insurgent would be a much worse movie if the good parts were all at the beginning. But they are saved for the end, and they leave the viewer with a feeling of, “Well, that was OK,” even though most of it wasn’t.

Magician is worth seeing as a kind of curated tour through the movies and through Welles’ interviews. However, if you have more time and want to get into Welles on your own, an afternoon watching YouTube videos followed by a few evenings of watching his best movies might be even better.

The curious thing about this new Cinderella is that every old and familiar element is done beautifully.

After devising a sturdy frame for Neeson’s special brand of sorrowful mayhem, the filmmakers expertly fill in Run All Night with a series of charged action scenes, including a rare one in which Neeson chases after a cop car, instead of the other way around.

The movie rarely, if ever, feels mechanical. Instead, you may find yourself marveling at the fertility of an imagination that could allow itself to toss so many vivid characters and stories—enough to supply four or five movies — into one generous package.

Though Carolla and co-filmmaker Kevin Hench devise some funny situations — particularly, the one in which a newly divorced woman insists on coming back to his room — the overall feeling that comes across is one of sadness, and that seems intentional.

This is just a slightly better than mediocre film with a disconcerting grasp of the truth.

It’s a good sci-fi action movie, too. Far be it from me to give this movie the kiss of death by making it seem too serious for its core audience. Chappie is everything it has to be — but it’s everything it should be, too.

The story is minimal, just a series of events in the life of a young man and his circle, but every scene is rendered with such authenticity that it’s riveting, almost like it’s a privilege to be stepping back in time.

The Lazarus Effect is not the usual mindless thriller, but it’s as flat as an open soda from last week, with dull characters and virtually every scene taking place in a single location. It looks as if it cost about 12 bucks to make — and somebody got robbed.

The emotional core of the movie, the relationship between Nicky and Jess, lacks impact, mostly because you can’t believe a word that they say, but also because Smith is not a strong leading man.

An inspired and funny vampire comedy, one that’s more than just a smart premise but that remains fun and inventive from beginning to end.

Even good stories are never quite like a movie, and to its credit McFarland, USA doesn’t try hard to be like a movie. It tries to be something like life.

It’s just bad. It’s boring, folks.

It tries to get by on charm, and like a lot of movies, and people who make that attempt, “Kingsman” does have charm — just not enough.

The enormous, make-or-break things are perfectly in place, and just that is enough for a reasonably enjoyable movie. But plot problems, some comically weak dialogue, repetitious scenes and a non-ending ending keep the experience a little more earthbound than it had to be.

To think of how people thought and acted just 45 years ago is to realize that the women in this film were the advance guard of the modern era. That makes them important, and they make this documentary important.

A film very much of its moment, in ways both good and bad. But the important thing is that its virtues are extraordinary, while its flaws are easy to forget because they’re so common.

Law often looks angry and frazzled onscreen. This time he looks angry and sure of himself.

It feels like living inside a pressure cooker with one particular family — experiencing their turbulence as if from the inside, while always a little glad to be watching from a safe distance.

To put it simply, people may be right and people may be wrong, but there are no right races or wrong races. A writer-director who chooses to have characters representing race and not themselves alone paints himself into a corner in which everyone in the movie absolutely must come out all right.

A so-so movie you just might want to see more than once. It belongs in a strange category: a film that can’t quite be called a success, that has too many dead spots, that doesn’t quite hang together or satisfy, and that yet is more interesting and occupies more space in the mind than other movies that are ostensibly and even unquestionably better.

What makes Aniston, of all actresses, especially right for Cake is that her comedy has always had a certain ruefulness underlying it, an understanding of life’s limits, a kind of glum acceptance. So the transition into sadness and desolation is a natural step for her.

It’s sincere and intelligent — but it’s weak as a social statement and even weaker as drama.

Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall have made as good a film as could be made from the substance of Kyle’s life and career. But greatness was never a possibility, not with a protagonist not all that interesting and with the surrounding circumstances making it impossible to go deeper and risk the movie’s critique of Kyle’s becoming overt.

Blackhat is pretty much nonsense, which Mann directs with such misplaced energy and with such little natural instinct for the material that, for most of the running time, the movie’s problems seem entirely his fault.

For all the movie’s honesty, the reality of Alzheimer’s disease is a lot worse than what you see in Still Alice. Perhaps directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland made a calculation as to how much an audience can take. They were right.

As a great New York story, it’s also a great American story about ambition and failure, about the kind of people who make it, the kinds who don’t, and all the things that can go wrong.

This is a pretty good action movie with the added kick of Liam Neeson in the lead role.

Jeremy Irvine is the sympathetic focus, but it’s Noah Wyle who holds the movie together, as a former teacher who lost his job through a malicious student’s prank. Smart, self-possessed and capable, this fellow nonetheless carries himself with an awareness of some underlying guilt.

This is a remarkable performance, remarkable not only in its force, but in its strength and precision. Oyelowo is reason alone to see Selma, and if you need another reason, there’s Carmen Ejogo, as a lovely, strong and haunted Coretta Scott King.

Actually, Mom is the essential difference between Wahlberg and Caan. Caan has the glow of mother love on him. Wahlberg plays Jim as having made the adjustment to a lack of love, but in a twisted way. He's gambling now to see if the universe loves him.

Faithful but not slavishly faithful to the source, the movie retains most of the songs but streamlines the story, particularly in the second half.

One of these days, Angelina Jolie might very well direct a great movie. She has a rare talent and intense concerns and interests. But first she is going to have to suppress some self-defeating impulses that have now twice taken potentially effective films and rendered them ridiculous.

Shot for shot, Big Eyes is one of the most beautiful-looking movies of 2014, but to say that isn’t enough, because it’s not just pretty, not just pleasing to the eye. It’s visually astute. It is made by people aware of what these screen images mean, what they refer to, and the psychological effect that they will have on an audience.

As Bilbo, Freeman is a pleasure to watch to the extent we get to watch him. His timing is brilliant — he gets the movie’s only laughs. He has tremendous sensitivity and an ability to seem like he’s about to say something — and then convey it without saying it. He could have made a great Bilbo. Instead he’s the one thing that has made this trilogy bearable.

If the movie has a weakness, it’s that Zohar gets the most screen time, though she’s the least engaging character.

If there’s a surprise to Top Five, it’s the emotional undercurrent that Rock writes and Dawson brings out. What lingers hours later aren’t just the laughs but the people.

The Imitation Game is the one film that might have been better off longer. Starting the story in 1938 and just going through Turing’s life chronologically might have taken an extra 20 or 30 minutes, but it would have been worth it.

It’s not a question of believing it, exactly. Director Ridley Scott has simply made us want to be there, to wish we really were there, and to accept his illusion as the most ready answer to that desire.

Miss Julie has almost everything — good actors, impeccable sets and direction rich in emotional detail — but it lacks madness and passion, and without those elements, it becomes a mere intellectual exercise.

Wild has so many things in its favor that it’s tempting to leave out the fact that it’s a movie about a hike that sometimes feels like being on a hike, a long one, without many changes of scenery. But the movie’s achievement is that it overcomes this.

Horrible Bosses 2 is harsh and tasteless, not to mention broad and shameless, but that’s not a bad thing in this case. Softness and good taste, as well as restraint and carefulness, are the enemies of comedy, and “Horrible Bosses 2” is a very funny movie.

The only problem with The Better Angels is that it’s not nimble enough to vary its strategy or to find ways for the character of young Abe (Braydon Denney) to grow over the course of the movie.

The film occupies that peculiar space that many of us would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, a movie that’s worthy but often inert, by turns enriching and enervating: a good boring movie.

The experience of watching Foxcatcher is of constantly waiting for something to happen — and of giving up, long before something actually does.

Only in the movie business could someone sell such shoddy merchandise and expect people to buy it. If The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 were an appliance, it would be a broken toaster that people would toss in the garbage. Except that analogy is too kind, in that “Mockingjay” would be half a toaster.

The material is ripe for black comedy, but Stewart’s screenplay, staying true to Bahari’s real-life experience, steers a middle course. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and sometimes absurd, but never any of those things fully, or effectively.

Just in physical terms, Eddie Redmayne transformation’s into Stephen Hawking is something remarkable.

As a work of art, the movie is merely on the bright side of OK. But as a vehicle for an emerging star, as a platform to show one actress in a variety of modes and moods, within a sympathetic and glamorous context, it couldn’t be better.

This is anti-funny, where every attempt at a joke is like a little rock thrown at your face.

The visuals are splendid. Even close-ups of face and hair are something to marvel at.

Before I Go to Sleep emerges as a mystery — one with a slow burn leading to a big payoff. But what keeps the movie going, beyond questions of what is true and what is false, are the issues raised by the illness itself.

The result is that a story with a couple of good ideas founders for lack of a third or fourth good idea. Still, any picture that features Radcliffe having a nervous breakdown for two hours has something to recommend it.

So here’s the case of a movie that is, in every way, nothing special — except for the way it’s made and how it’s done.

An odd little concoction, a coming-of-age story that, only in passing, is also a mystery.

There are moments that are too macabre and outlandish, but Gilroy steers the movie just this side of farce, just this side of Chayefsky, and keeps it all within a realistic framework. At times watching, you might wonder how he’ll keep the story going, how he’ll top himself. But he does.

This is an important movie, but it’s not a perfect one. It has one enormous flaw, and it’s a testament to the smartness of the writing and the inherent fascination of its viewpoint that it doesn’t wreck the experience: Director Justin Simien doesn’t know how to shape scenes or pull performances from his actors.

Ouija has something wrong with it from the first five minutes.

There’s the sense here that living in a tiny community can either make you bigger or smaller, and in 23 Blast we see both types, from the petty to the stoic and self-reliant.

This is a remarkable feat, not only of cinematography, but of choreography. Just to film Michael Keaton and Edward Norton walking down a Manhattan street, everything had to be timed as in a dance — when the camera swirls ahead, when it goes behind, when it swoops back around. It’s all accomplished so smoothly that it would be worth doing merely as a stunt, except this is no stunt. This method carries the mood and soul of one of the best movies of 2014.

The problem on which the movie turns is this: Bill Murray’s natural quality as an actor exudes self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. If he looks depressed, the aura suggests, it’s not because he knows less than we do. He knows more. Murray brings that quality to bear in St. Vincent, but it doesn’t fit.

The soundtrack, full of jazz standards, is an enjoyable feature, though in the context of the movie, audiences will mostly feel anxiety hearing them. The amount of work required to sound breezy and effortless is daunting.

At its best, Fury examines the psychological experience of warfare.

Until it becomes completely demented, The Guest is a perfectly respectable thriller, and even when it stops being respectable — even when it goes off the rails and becomes ridiculous — it’s still entertaining.

No campy vampire movie, and the early part of the film is well-made enough that the sadness of Vlad’s dilemma is truly felt.

That Hossein Amini, in his first outing as a director, kept all three of these well-known actors in perfect balance suggests a filmmaker who knows how to steer a performance.

In his performance, Jeremy Renner hints at something dark stirring beneath Webb’s surface, but it never quite comes out, and we’re left with something more on the order of a rough-hewn saint. Kill the Messenger tells an interesting tale, but it’s caught in an odd zone between too-Hollywood and not Hollywood enough.

Beethoven once went five years without composing. Until now, Downey has gone five years without making anything close to a serious movie. The bigger waste of time was Beethoven’s, but talent wasted is talent wasted. This is the type of film Downey should be making.

Abuse of Weakness is 20 minutes of a great movie and another 85 minutes of nothing much.

North American viewers will have one advantage over their South American brethren — the capacity to be surprised. We knew how “Lincoln” was going to end, but The Liberator is a question mark all the way to the finish.

Gone Girl is a great thriller until it stops being one, about 20 minutes before the finish. Until then it’s brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy, a movie that keeps the audience grasping and reaching in all the wrong directions, while consistently delivering something a little better, a little crazier and a little more disturbing than expected.

In making the movie, writer-director John Ridley had to negotiate with the Hendrix legend — that is, reality had to accommodate audience expectation. In that sense, Jimi: All Is by My Side does a reasonable job.

Two Night Stand has its moments. But moments are all this movie has — and all its characters are likely to get.

The Equalizer is silly but irresistible, taking situations of inherent gut-level impact and exploiting them for every bit of emotion and tension. It could never have been a great movie.

In many ways a beautiful movie, and yet in other ways it’s not very good at all. As an achievement in stop-motion animation, it’s stunning — seamless and detailed, so perfectly done that it’s easy to forget that you’re witnessing skill and not magic.

Aside from Patricia Clarkson, who is practically this movie's reason for being, the great virtue of Last Weekend is that it's exactly as it presents itself.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

It's probably the only love story you'll see this decade that will make you half-expect the camera to swerve and pick up the sight of Rod Serling, standing there in a black suit.

Just in the last few months, we've seen "Snowpiercer" and "Divergent," which also deal with what happens after a civil collapse. The Giver, the latest in this weird trend, approaches a now-familiar topic from a new angle, and, of the three, it's the most visually arresting.

Really, The Expendables 3 has only one thing going for it, beyond the unremarkable novelty of seeing lots of celebrities in a lousy movie. It has Mel Gibson, who is at his grim, tormented and quirky best here, playing someone who has crossed a moral line and has no regrets.

The result is that this is one of those rare movies that gets better as it goes along.

It's hard to imagine any movie ever topping this one's depiction of killer tornadoes laying waste to the Midwest.

One of the smartest and most impassioned films about Christianity in recent memory, though to say that might give the wrong impression. In tone and strategy, the film is low-key and subtle; and the story can be appreciated both for its surface qualities and its deeper intentions.

Fortunately, What If rights itself well before the finish and finds its way back to the truth and the light.

It exemplifies the same appealing style, which strives to show life as it's lived and people as they really talk and act.

This is all good movie material, so far as it goes ... but Get on Up can't go any further. Sometimes damaged people stay damaged, and sometimes popular artists make their contribution and then stay in one place forever. It's a big letdown for everybody, but in a biopic, it's poison.

Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much where action movies are these days - a combination of comedy without wit, action without drama and elaborate visuals that are nothing much to look at.

I'm as reluctant to stop writing about this movie as I was to stop watching it: At 166 minutes, it flies by, and you don't want to leave that world. But one thing is certain: This isn't the last word. People will be writing about this film for years - and looking at it to discover the lost history of our time.

I Origins is at its best when it's a personal story about relationships, and it has a strong first hour.

Now, thanks to A Most Wanted Man, we discover that it's really boring - practically sleep-inducing - to be an international spy.

Perhaps the movie's use of the past is more than cosmetic in this one regard: Watching Woody Allen revisit his old themes and obsessions already feels like a nostalgic experience. Actually setting the movie back in time deflects this and makes a virtue of a shortcoming.

A full-out action movie - and a sober rumination on the nature of existence. It is both things, effectively and sincerely.

A little too corny to endorse fully, but no one should be discouraged from seeing it.

As British comedy sometimes will, A Long Way Down has an occasional attack of the cutes, but the actors' commitment keeps the movie on the plus side.

About a third of it is a brilliant setup - but it's for a joke that never happens, at least not completely. A comedy, especially a broad sex comedy, needs to go to extremes. But Sex Tape is a little careful and contained.

Pay attention to the camera, and you will see that Polanski is a clinician. He is in the thrall of no one.

Segerstedt's anti-Nazi stand is the only reason to be interested in him, and yet half the movie is about his domestic life.

If you see the movie, notice how the ending is no ending, and the fact that it even feels like one is entirely a function of Michael Giacchino's musical score.

Hellion is so sincere and so dull that some might mistake it for a true work of art.

The music is hit-and-miss, and the movie sinks into as many cliches as it avoids. But the characters are appealing, and the storytelling is just unconventional enough to keep an audience guessing.

It's as if there's a barrier between the viewer and the story that never comes down.

As a first-time director, Falcone has trouble maintaining a specific tone - the movie wobbles back and forth between sentimentality and silliness, sometimes even within the same scene.

As presented here, the novelist Violette Leduc is fascinating and strangely lovable, at least as seen from the audience. But actually knowing her? That would have been work.

It's a film that, in its own peculiar way, forces viewers to question their values and ask themselves how much they're willing to sacrifice for a functioning society, and how much is too much.

Third Person is Paul Haggis' best movie, and the one he has been building toward for years.

Best of all is the work of Gillian Jones, who shows up in one scene as "Grandma."

The Dutch thriller Borgman gets credit for being original, but not for being original in a compelling way.

You're in that world, sucked in by the music and the performances. Appreciate the big things, but while watching, also pay attention to the little grace notes that make up a quality production.

We encounter a man of great talent and usefulness, and yet someone most of us can be glad never to have met.

The pregnancy monologue isn't funny at all, despite cuts to audience members laughing it up. It's a small false note in a movie that's otherwise as honest as they come.

The Signal starts off as an alien version of "Blair Witch Project" and then drifts off into cold plotlessness. But for a while, a little while, it seems like it just might be interesting.

22 Jump Street is exactly what comedy is today. It's coarse, free-flowing and playful.

Night Moves, which shows her at her best and worst, also shows two roads, right and wrong, that Reichardt can choose to pursue. As someone who likes this filmmaker even when I don't like her movies, I hope she takes the harder road.

Edge of Tomorrow covers familiar ground with unexpected wit and economy, and the result is a thoroughly entertaining sci-fi fantasy.

It's nothing you'd ever want to put yourself through twice, and yet it's effective in the moment. Shrewdly prefabricated and yet lovingly assembled, it is, in short, the most beautifully made cynical thing I've ever seen.

Then there's the acting, particularly that of Sam Shepard, as an old ex-con without much in the way of limits.

The Grand Seduction slowly brings its story into focus and then sneaks up and becomes quite funny.

Maleficent imparts a feeling of enchantment. Here is a world that's strange and beautiful.

An inventive and caustic comedy that really does look like the thing it's mocking.

Klapisch still gets these characters to sneak up and make us care about them - though it might help if you remember them from when they were young.

Audiences will walk away thinking, "What was that?" But they will walk away thinking.

Badly made and poorly written, Blended is a rehash of Adam Sandler's 2011 comedy "Just Go With It," only without Jennifer Aniston and without laughs. It not only gets the big things wrong. It gets the small, easy things wrong.

Most important, there is an emotional undercurrent in this installment that the earlier films only aspired to. When for a brief moment, the younger Charles Xavier meets the older, there is the sense of time's mystery - and also of the long, magnificent slog of a purpose-driven life.

Chef is the best thing he (Favreau) has ever done, as writer or director or actor. It's the sort of thing of beauty that filmmakers are ultimately remembered for.

Nothing in the story feels specific to that California city, or emblematic of it.

How could a little story like this get stretched to 124 minutes? It's at least 30 minutes too long.

What's particularly weird about Godzilla is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction.

As a documentary, it is very much what it set out to be - a celebration bordering on propaganda. Yet enough slips through to keep it interesting.

Taken as a whole, the movie is far-fetched and even faintly ridiculous; and yet, in the moment to moment, it's compelling and truthful.

Belle isn't a perfect movie; in some ways it's obvious. But even if it's not true to history, it's true to that painting and worthy of its inspiration.

Neighbors is funny for all 96 of its minutes, not counting the credits, and it contains the single best sight gag of the year so far. (We're talking laugh-out-loud funny and then laugh again later, just thinking about it.)

The movie is a fantasy, and the choice is either share the fantasy or don't participate.

Cinema is not about special effects, but about human emotion and a face in close-up. For those in doubt, Locke is the proof.

It has action sequences that will appeal to people looking for the usual pyrotechnics, but the core of the movie - and the source of the audience's interest - is emotion.

A particular strength of Alan Partridge is that the writers (Coogan among them) don't trade entirely on the audience's familiarity with the character, but rather come up with a flashy, eventful story in which Alan can be showcased in a variety of contexts.

A smart and unsettling atmospheric thriller.

Some of that emotion inevitably makes its way into our perception of the film, which elevates it somewhat, but only to the level of mediocrity.

Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

Audiences looking for a nonstop laugh riot may be disappointed, but the big laughs are there, and they benefit from the movie's underlying sincerity.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

As Wade, Gary Poulter is the most authentic-looking old drunk you'll ever see onscreen - something I thought before I knew the story of his casting: Poulter was a homeless man who was recruited by a casting director. He'd never acted before, and yet he's remarkable in this.

Entertaining and suspenseful, the movie shows the politicking and strategies that go into this annual ritual, and Costner is at his beleaguered best.

There's nothing like a good story, and The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden has a great one that grabs viewers from the first minute and holds on for two solid hours.

Under the Skin can be confused for a movie that hides its meanings, when it's really a movie that hides its meaninglessness.

To extend the boxing analogy, it's as if Morris, after getting pummeled for 12 rounds, just taps Rumsfeld with his finger - and scores a knockout.

Some sections are better than others, but all of them benefit from the various ways the character and the actress illuminate each other.

The film is partly a comedy, because no movie with protagonists this stupid could be a straight drama. And yet the film contains a lot of truth about its place and time.

There are phony movies made every week, but this is in a different category - a phony movie that seems a distortion of something real, a phony movie offered in place of the real movie von Trier could have made, but it would have cost him something. Some blood, some truth, some soul. What we're left with instead is an empty gesture.

Has the usual overlong running time, the half-hearted feints in the direction of human feeling and the obligatory action sequences that are big without being either exciting or particularly legible.