Peter Keough

So here’s a tip: Don’t desert this film before giving it a chance. You might not want seconds, but eventually it dishes up a satisfying slice of life.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

Escape From Tomorrow, Moore’s sometimes surreal, sometimes sophomoric, black comic phantasmagoria, makes for a bumpy theme park ride.

Though Derrickson offers some new twists on old tricks, and evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible, the story soon devolves into variations of many movies we have seen before.

Though engrossing and aesthetically admirable, at times the humorless artiness verges on absurdity. It’s hard to take a film too seriously when plum jam and Bach’s “Chaconne” vie for equal cinematic significance.

A grade A, meat-and-potatoes genre flick.

In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.

The performances are meticulous and passionate, the narrative low-key and obliquely sensitive enough to conceal, until the traumatic incidents keep piling up, the film’s contrivance.

Anchoring this diverting, disparate collage are interviews with those who still believe in Van Tassel’s faith and message.

Another problem with “Inequality” is that it offers nothing new or surprising.

Entertaining if inconsequential gangster farce.

All in all, maybe the best 90 minutes of romantic comedy in theaters this fall. Unfortunately, the film is 122 minutes long.

Writer-director Zach Clark doesn’t rise much above that level of subtlety in his lampoon of the phony goodwill and soulless commercialism of the Yuletide season. Luckily, he has a cast that elevates the puerility into genuine pathos and absurdity.

Despite the music, and no matter how the film’s editors slice it, the attempt to get a rise out of the audience by way of the endangered child device verges on emotional pornography.

The Visitor arrived at the height of a sci-fi and horror film revival, when “serious” directors... embraced genre conventions and made them their own. Paradise stole from them all. But unlike these directors, his ambition was coupled with delusional ineptitude.

Occasionally the camera gets jumbled around, blacks out, and hisses with static as if it had been tossed in a dryer. Then it regains composure and reveals — an old playbill! A figure in a mask with a noose! The birth of a new franchise and the death of a great genre.

Intentionally or not, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down is the comedy hit of the summer. No other film equals its comic sophistication. Each nutty scenario is surpassed by the next, ludicrous story lines coalesce with expert orchestration, and absurd details return with perfect timing to build to a crescendo of hilarity.

Has its moments of grace, but too often resorts to conventions and a tone of high lugubriousness.

One of the advantages of time travel in a found-footage film is that it makes the chronology and causality so confusing that the problem of who’s shooting what becomes secondary. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow fast-forwarding through all the boring bits. For starters, I could have done with far less Lollapalooza.

The story gets both complicated and predictable.

Despite the derivativeness, Chism shows talent and shrewd instincts in the timing and direction of the comedy — she handles the requisite dinner table disaster scene with aplomb.

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.

It is at least 10 movies in one, some of them ingenious parodies, but all adding up to a cluttered, confused anticlimax.

As a portfolio of visionary images of surreal landscapes and hallucinatory flora and fauna, the movie sometimes dazzles. But as a metaphorical narrative, it often fizzles.

The Captain pretends to be a serious movie about the banality of evil; sometimes, despite itself, it is.

The voice-over narrator (Perrin) recites environmentally pious platitudes that offer little enlightenment about what’s on the screen. This is annoying when something strange and unfamiliar is being shown.

Lassgård won’t let you off easy: A scene in which Ove weeps hopelessly before the magnitude of his loneliness will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who has suffered a loss. His Ove is a man indeed.

Westmoreland’s narrative is cluttered with undeveloped subplots and loose ends. He compensates by evoking the era with images drawing from painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Toulouse-Lautrec and soundtrack music that ranges from Strauss-like waltzes to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”

Though programmatic in its plotting, “Effie” does aspire to obliqueness in its imagery. In “Mr. Turner,” Leigh evokes the painter of the title in the film’s stunning visuals. In “Effie,” the pseudo-medieval lushness and literalness of the Pre-Raphaelites permeates much of cinematography by Andrew Dunn.

It is hard to rate Vikander’s acting abilities from this performance. Her sly automaton in “Ex Machina” had more emotional range.

Though director Ziad Doueiri’s uneven treatment of this provocative premise suffers from contrivance and implausibility, it nonetheless arouses profound questions about fanaticism, cultural identity, and the essential mystery of other people, even those we think we know best.

West’s film differs from the “Blair Witch” template in that the footage is never actually “found.”

It’s an awkward balancing act. The result is more Benigni than Bertolucci, and though Diliberto achieves moments of poignancy and touches on insightful psychological truths, it doesn’t look like he’ll be winning any Oscars soon.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A film that ultimately says more about banality than evil.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Fatal Assistance has few answers, and adds little clarity.

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

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.

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

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

A sometimes clever but ultimately clichéd comedy.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.