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.