Peter Keough

What emerges from this pretentious if diverting mishmash is a story that is equally predictable and contrived, but nonetheless offers some worthwhile insights into the notion of the male gaze and the subjugation of women.

These successes are inspiring, but deeper and more complex emotions are unexplored. It’s no fault of Foy’s performance; she brings depth, humor, and conviction to her role as the devoted wife. Garfield, on the other hand, labors mightily but can’t overcome the superficiality of the character as scripted by William Nicholson (“Shadowlands”).

After Love is like being stuck at a dinner with an unpleasant couple who won’t stop squabbling.

A climactic contest takes place in arctic weather that would rival any New England Patriots playoff game. Had the filmmakers drawn more on this rowdy, hardy spirit, not to mention the hirsute gravitas of Peter Mullan, it might have done justice to its legendary subjects.

Or maybe Major, like Oedipus, is really searching for herself? Do people even have selves? Are identities and souls just a bunch of clichés spun out by teams of screenwriters? If these questions interest you, do yourself a favor and watch the 1995 original movie.

If “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) had mean Mr. Potter standing on the bridge ready to jump, rather than James Stewart’s beaten down hero George Bailey, it still would not have been as namby-pamby as Mark Pellington’s treacly and bromidic The Last Word.

There is no continuity in narrative or character and it’s all shot in an elliptical, heavily stylized, gaudily lit (much of it looks like it’s shot through an algae-filmed aquarium) collage.

As the film darkens, it intensifies its focus on tragedy and atrocity and begins to do some justice to one of the largest and least known genocides in history.

An opportunity to capture on film a unique cultural enclave is reduced to a Hollywood pastiche.

Ironically, the phoniness that iconic teen romantic Holden Caulfield despised pervades Jim Sadwith’s Coming through the Rye, a semi-autobiographical tale of hero worship and literary integrity.

Contrived, inane, absurd, and occasionally brilliant, it’s all a blur.

Whatever the turning point, his transformation from feckless academic to stalwart knight occurs too easily. It should be the heart of the story, but instead is just a troublesome detail in a hollow movie.

The Meddler is a disappointment after the talent Scafaria demonstrated in her 2012 feature debut “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.”

Riggen has no shame when it comes to jerking the tears — surging music, cute children, suffering children — and sometimes her manipulations work even on the hardest of hearts.

It follows the lead of more recent Hollywood disaster movies like “2012” and “The Impossible.” It features just one family; everyone else is part of the scenery.

Exhausting and seemingly endless.

Zada gets credible performances from Dormer and Kinney, but their characters undergo such unlikely psychological contortions that these efforts are to no avail.

The fundamental problem with this Macbeth is that it insists on reducing the mystery of motivation to the pop psychology of a magazine article.

The pre-Thanksgiving release of Jonathan Levine’s The Night Before celebrates those Christmas blessings that are beloved by all: scatological humor, smarmy sentimentality, and gross product placement.

Only in the epilogue does the film mention that none of the miners was compensated and no one was held responsible.

Underneath its mea culpas lies a subtext that exonerates the post-Third Reich generations of its past.

Greer and Lyonne play off each other well; the combination of readily corruptible innocence and reluctantly innocent corruption elevate the material. Their badinage and interactions suggest a genuine sisterly relationship, with a long history of resentments, betrayals, and co-dependence. Too bad the filmmakers try too hard at making you laugh, and not hard enough at making you feel.

Barber, who directed the neglected, unabashedly satisfying vigilante thriller “Harry Brown” knows how to get the blood pumping and stoke an audience’s craving for righteousness, vengeance, and vicarious sadism. What he lacks is the woman’s touch, if by that one means nuance, ambiguity, and empathy.

The movie, though, is not so good. If it came down to acting instead of chess, we might have lost the Cold War.

No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

In the end, this feeble effort remains tainted, however unfairly, by the creator’s personal life. Maybe Allen should have titled it “Rationalizing Man.”

Will miracles never cease? Alas, they do. Pausing pregnantly between clauses to add to their trite profundity, Quentin recites the moral of the story, and it’s as phony as the towns of the title.

In Dito Montiel’s treacly, programmatic film, Williams succumbs to a recurring neediness, earnestness, and sentimentality.

Unfortunately, director Bill Condon and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher are clueless, and come up with an incoherent, implausible, contrived mishmash.

The film is engrossing and entertaining if sometimes trite and manipulative and totally bogus.

The duo provide a bit of wit and warmth amid the contrived subplots and the self-satisfied moralism.

A sometimes clever but ultimately clichéd comedy.

Has there been a more tormented or intense study of the ambivalence of revenge than Penn’s performance in Eastwood’s “Mystic River” (2003)? Penn might not agree with Eastwood’s politics, but when it comes to probing a killer’s soul he couldn’t find a better model.

In balancing the more objective cultural history of delis with a personal profile, Anjou serves neither well. Perhaps he should have chosen one course or the other.

Though it initially shows signs of overcoming its creakiness, “Capital” loses value when its screenwriters try too hard to be clever.

To its credit, despite a rough start (witch burning and all that), Seventh Son does not succumb to misogyny.

It will also make them laugh. Intentionally or not, director Rob Cohen (“Alex Cross”) has put together the most hilarious camp classic since “White House Down” (2013).

It’s a self-reflexive tour de force, laugh-out-loud in its outrageousness, a true gift from the Movie God, who, if not Tarantino, is in this case probably Sam Peckinpah. You just have to endure 90 minutes of inanity to get to enjoy it.

As for the performances, only homely Giovana has heart and depth. The two boys lack chemistry, even in chemistry class, due in part to the trite dialogue, or at least as it is translated in subtitles.

Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation has more substance than a sitcom, even though it’s broken down into three TV series-like episodes. But it’s no “M*A*S*H” — a film to which some have compared it — either.

Humorless, pretentious black-and-white tone poem about a very young Abe Lincoln.

Those looking for further enlightenment might want to pass on the feel-good cinematic hagiography known as Awake: The Life of Yogananda.

Directed by splat-pack director Alexandre Aja (“Piranha 3D”) with uncharacteristic but still gruesome restraint, adapted from what seems a very busy novel by Joe Hill, Horns resembles an awkward collaboration between Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen King, and Rob Zombie.

Unlike other films that successfully explore abstractions, such as Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” or the memoiristic collages of Terence Davies, it doesn’t seem to have much going on beneath the drab surface.

Things bottom out when Zoe not only hooks up with another lover (there is not an ounce of body fat in this movie), but also misses her son’s soccer game. And up until then we were all having a good time.

David Frankel’s film reduces an extraordinary life to a predictable template of bullying, resolve, success, disappointment, and platitudes — a pattern repeated two or three times until the genuinely moving finale.

Though it features a plucky female protagonist, Annabelle still possesses the same medieval attitude toward women as “The Conjuring,” reducing the gender to the extremes of self-sacrificing mother and malevolent toy.

When it comes to writing and directing movies, though, Murdoch has some work to do. “Girl” meanders narratively and with random chronology, some scenes playing like tepid music videos, others as unhelpful efforts at exposition, some as strained drama, and some as the genuine, funny, spontaneous interactions of gifted young people.

Despite the artful, passionate performances by the cast, his experiment comes across more as contrivance than a work of thoughtful, aesthetic detachment.

Sadly, the film rapidly devolves into an AARP version of a Jason Bourne-like vendetta, only bloodier and less meaningful.

Violette demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn’t the only one who suffers for it.

Unfortunately, this is one movie about food that I’m forgetting already.

Usually a French comedy such as this requires some crude modifications before a studio like Touchstone can remake it for American audiences. In this case, though, they just need to lose the subtitles and dub in the voices of actors like Rob Schneider or Adam Sandler. Until then, bon appetit!

Based on her short film, Candler’s Hellion pads its slender, commonplace, but potentially rewarding premise with contrivances, clichés, repetitiousness, and, when all else fails, implausible, arbitrary melodrama.

What follows is no “Citizen Kane,” or even “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), Todd Haynes’s arty tale of a reporter trying to track down a missing glam rock star, in which Collette also starred, playing the missing man’s alcoholic wife.

So where does that leave this coming-of-age comedy written and directed by Jan Ole Gerster? Somewhere in the middle, lukewarm and inoffensive, trying hard not to be plebeian or pretentious.

Despite the climactic hugs all around and spiritual healing celebrated by a tearful service in the cathedral, some moments en route make an impression.

Charming, but not seductive.

Belle has the pace and sumptuous cinematography of a Merchant and Ivory production, but none of their memorable characters, subtle performances, or literate dialogue.

Does not sink to the bathos of Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film (“Life Is Beautiful”), but it does reduce a period of irredeemable horror to the heroics of a single person.

Strauch’s orotund prose sounds much like that of Werner Herzog, but without the irony. Herzog’s sensibility is missed here; he could have made a masterpiece about the absurdity of these deluded seekers of Eden.

At its best, it delves into the murky areas of memory, childhood trauma, and family conflict. But it forgoes such troubling issues for mumbo jumbo and glowing-eyed wraiths.

Plays more like an exercise in nostalgia than a dramatic re-creation of a triumphant fight for civil rights.

Though Mira shows skill at evoking mood and building tension despite the constrained circumstances of the premise, the narrative quickly and embarrassingly breaks down.

For the most part, though, the film maintains its low ambitions; it is mostly inoffensive, only occasionally ludicrous, and at times, at least for me, genuinely moving.

Fatal Assistance has few answers, and adds little clarity.

Gimme Shelter is sometimes moving and inspiring, but you have to wonder: Though Kathy and her movement give teenagers shelter, do they give them a life?

Last Days aspires to the kind of no-frills, psychological terror of Duncan Jones’s brilliant “Moon” (2009) but, despite some determined performances, settles for the clichés of the abortive “Apollo 18” (2011).

Though fitfully entertaining, it lacks the conviction and urgency present in even the weakest of his quasi agit-prop productions.

It comes down to this: Which is more important, the innocence of a child or the survival of the species? And if the race survives, will it just become like the enemy aliens that must be destroyed to do so?

Despite moments of black comedy and some memorable images, this “debut’’ doesn’t offer a lot to love.

In lieu of suspense, Rosenthal relies on a mood of free-floating anxiety, enhanced by West Virginia (actually British Columbia) landscapes where the sun never shines. As one-note as the title suggests, A Single Shot misfires.

Despite hard-working performances and the occasional sexual frisson from ingénue Déborah François (a kind of French Renée Zellweger) and seductive Romain Duris (who looks like Tom Hanks by way of Montgomery Clift), Populaire hits mostly wrong keys.

Imagination is what these filmmakers could use more of, as their ingenious concept doesn’t develop much beyond a gimmick.

The film looks great, boasting all the elegant period details that are expected in tasteful French adaptations of treasured national literature, with beautifully photographed Bordeaux landscapes and luxurious interiors. As for the human element, however, the mood is more apathetic than tragic.

If one were to compare this film to one of Jobs’s own products, it would be more like the Cube than the iPod.

Epstein and Friedman may have the best of intentions, but in the end they’re exploiting Lovelace, too.

A film that ultimately says more about banality than evil.

What might have proven an illuminating perspective on familiar issues disappoints as Bouchareb fails to turn his outsider’s point of view into new insights, and instead takes the easy route, falling back on familiar stereotypes in his tour of US misogyny and xenophobia.

Few comedians talk so much to get a laugh, and sometimes the strain shows... And the directors don’t do him any favors by the annoyingly frequent close-ups of audience members in convulsions of laughter.

This remake, like Frank’s horrible hobby, remains an exercise in empty repetition.

Fascinating but frustrating.