Peter Keough

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.

Charming, but not seductive.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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