Peter Keough

It consists of a series of episodic encounters, misadventures, and musings redeemed in part by the presence of two scenic wonders, the unspoiled 2,190-mile grandeur of the Appalachian Trail and the spectacular crapulousness of Nick Nolte.

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”).

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

Exhausting and seemingly endless.

As played by Fiennes, who has the aquiline face and piercing eyes of Max Van Sydow, Clavius is no pushover. You believe his disbelief, so when it wavers, yours might as well.

This movie doesn’t make the case. In fact, had they upped the absurdity a notch, it would rival the comedy of Christopher Guest’s let’s-put-on-a-show mockumentary, “Waiting for Guffman” (1996). As it stands, it plays like an infomercial.

Frustratingly elusive and seductively louche, Lespert’s “Yves” probes a cryptic myth and a fragile soul, penetrating neither, but conjuring up a taste of Saint Laurent’s suffering, genius and style.

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

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?

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

Though Mazer’s ambition is laudable, he has not yet integrated the comedy of manners into the comedy of no manners.

Aside from the clever punning of the title, Spare Parts ends up as jury-rigged and programmatic as Stinky, the robot in the movie. And, unlike Stinky, it is dead in the water.

Perhaps that is Roskam’s ultimate point: volition and individuality are illusory; only love and death matter. That truth comes through with somber clarity in the film’s eloquent coda, which almost makes up for the silliness that precedes it.

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.

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.

Here Aniston suffers every manipulative cliché and contrivance in the tearjerker playbook. She works hard, and it’s painful to watch.

Somewhere between John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970) and “The Hangover” (2009) you will find Last Vegas. Not necessarily a bad place to be, except the film unfortunately has the madcap hilarity of the former and the emotional intensity of the latter.

It’s only the first week of January, but it will be hard to beat Hong Kong director Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers for the best opening credit sequence of the year.

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

Tom Hiddleston puts in a performance as Williams that ranks with that of Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in “I Walk the Line.” And Hiddleston gets to do it in a better movie.

Thunder falls into the common mistake of many children’s films — it underestimates its audience.

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.

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

That’s the key to this movie — the way Thérèse looks at things; it’s a rare film that focuses on a woman actually looking and how she responds to what she sees.

A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.

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.

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).

It sounds like the movie itself: contrived, implausible, derivative, and — even though both the first-time director Denise Di Novi and screenwriter Christina Hodson are women — misogynistic.