Peter Keough

A sometimes clever but ultimately clichéd comedy.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Fatal Assistance has few answers, and adds little clarity.

A film that ultimately says more about banality than evil.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The best part of Ron Howard’s long-winded and fitfully moving Pavarotti occurs at the beginning with footage from 1995 of the world-famous tenor — who died in 2007, at 71 — visiting an opera house built in the middle of the Amazon jungle. The legend has it that Enrico Caruso had performed there 100 years before.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.