Rene Rodriguez

You don’t buy into their romance the way you buy into, say, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in the upcoming “La La Land.” All you see are two big movie stars playing make-believe.

In his debut, Alwyn comes off as a likable, sympathetic screen presence capable of handling more difficult material. He’ll have plenty more opportunities. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, though, will be forgotten in a month’s time.

The actors all suffer beautifully, but their pain doesn’t register: It’s all affectations and red-rimmed eyes.

The best science fiction leaves you with questions and ideas to ponder. Arrival is the sort of superficially profound movie that initially seems deep and weighty but stops making sense the moment you put down the bong.

For all its respectable airs, The Accountant mostly induces shrugs. Sometimes, B-movies fare better when they settle for being their lowbrow selves.

Falling into the trap that sinks most horror sequels, Blair Witch amps the jolts and shocks with more visceral frights (there’s some business involving an infected foot wound that is truly unnerving and also super gross) to diminishing results.

You start out fearing Don’t Breathe, but by the end you’re laughing at it — and the humor is not intentional.

If watching cartoon characters spout four-letter words is your thing, this might well be the greatest movie ever made.

The movie will disappoint basement-dwellers who worried a female-centric Ghostbusters would somehow ruin their childhoods, because it isn’t bad enough to hate. But the film is an even bigger letdown for fans of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon, who are forced to play most of this material straight, with no room for comic improvisation.

Set almost entirely in one location and shot in widescreen to accommodate its ensemble cast, The Invitation seems tailor-made for a talented filmmaker who wants to show off skills within the constraints of a small budget. But the script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (who somehow still find work after having written The Tuxedo, R.I.P.D., and Clash of the Titans), is flimsy and nonsensical in the manner of cheap, straight-to-video-not-even-VOD horror pictures, and Kusama’s direction is clumsy and uninspired. She also telegraphs too many of the plot’s twists.

The Jungle Book has its moments — the panther Bagheera voiced by Ben Kingsley, the python Kaa voiced by Scarlett Johansson and a funny porcupine voiced by the late Garry Shandling are all memorable creations — but the overall film feels cold and mechanical, befitting a movie that was made primarily because technology made it possible.

One question in particular hangs heavily over the entire film, a plot hole so distracting it becomes the only thing you can think about.

This huge, unwieldy movie is busy and overcrowded.

Race never delves under the skins of its characters, because they’re intended to be used only as symbols — reminders of an important chapter in history rendered quaint by this noble but patronizing movie.

The Coens feel out of step this time; they’ve lost their rhythm the way they did in The Hudsucker Proxy, where the style consumed the entire picture, turning what should have been humorous and snappy into a grating chore.

You come away from the movie lamenting the missed opportunity and wondering what a stronger, bolder filmmaker would have done with this material.

Familiarity is not without its pleasures. But Spectre is so confused and inert that Craig can’t even sell the signature “Bond. James Bond” and “Shaken, not stirred” lines.

Truth should have felt like a tragedy, a story about a monumental but fascinating failure of journalism, the flip side to the upcoming Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of sexual abuse within the Catholic church. Instead, Truth wants to make your blood boil. It succeeds — but not in the way the filmmakers intended.

Depp isn’t doing anything different here than he did in "Dark Shadows" or "Alice in Wonderland" or the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. Once again, he’s unrecognizable under elaborate makeup and prosthetics, and he speaks with a peculiar voice (this time a thick South Boston accent).

Ardor is never boring, but it’s never all that engaging, either. Here is a movie that ends with a can’t-miss scenario — a siege on a farmhouse in which the heroes are vastly outnumbered and outgunned — yet still fails to ever quicken your pulse.

A flamboyant but hollow exercise in glitz and pizzazz.

The clownish humor is imbued with a great, genuine pain. Unfortunately, the twist proves too much for the filmmakers to handle. The second half of The D Train collapses into a series of plot curlicues and narrative dead-ends. The picture loses its nerve and opts for a pat, wan resolution.

While We’re Young starts off as an empathetic, funny look at middle age and winds up as profound and schematic as a Neil Simon play — or, for the younger set, an episode of "The New Girl."

Here is a film in which nothing is at stake: Cars crash into each other head-on at high speeds, vehicles sail off cliffs and tumble down rocky mountainsides, people jump out of buildings and fall six stories to the ground, then characters just dust themselves off and continue as if nothing had happened. Even Wile E. Coyote wasn't this resilient.

With a script co-written by Penn himself and based on a well-regarded novel by the late French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, this one has to have some meat to go along with the gunplay, right? Sadly, no.

John Wick reminds you this actor deserves better. Reeves makes the movie entertaining in a background-noise way, but he can’t give it any gravity, even when the filmmakers pull the cheapest trick in the book to get the audience to root for the hero and hiss at the Eurotrash villains. Someone get this man some good work, quick.

The problem with Men, Women & Children — and it’s a big one — is that the movie isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know.

Fury aims for history, and the contrived resolution shows a timidity by Ayer that is uncharacteristic of his previous work. Still, the action sequences, which use actual vintage tanks and little CGI, are pretty extraordinary and, at times, incredibly gruesome. War is hell. That’s entertainment, folks.

Stories about scientists doubting what they know to be true — "Contact," for example — can be provocative and engaging, on an intellectual and emotional level. But I Origins challenges too little and ties up things too neatly for it to register as anything more than well-made, well-intentioned hogwash.

Watching an army of apes riding horses heading into battle is undeniably cool, but that’s the only thing the movie gives you: Neat eye candy. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is written at a level so low, even 8- year-olds will find it lacking.

[A] visually stunning, technically impressive and crushingly dumb and overlong picture.

After an exciting high-speed car chase reminiscent of the Mad Max pictures, The Rover settles into a two-character drama between Eric and Rey, but Pearce is so one-note that their relationship is never engaging.

Palo Alto is a pale imitation of the early novels of Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote about young ennui and misdirection from the inside out.

Edge of Tomorrow isn’t good, but it’s also forgivable. Just please stop the "Top Gun 2" rumors, Tom. Please.

As intriguing as Hardy is to watch, the picture can’t overcome its cinematic-stunt vibe.

One of the problems with director Mike Flanagan’s occasionally involving but ultimately dull thriller is that the whole movie hinges on a reflective piece of glass.

The movie is so grand in scale that you can’t help surrender to the spectacle, even if the stuff that’s going on with the people in the film is often close to risible.

In The Monuments Men, director George Clooney takes a wild, stranger-than-fiction true story and turns it into a dull, prestigious slog.

You expect something far different and better than the same-old.

Saving Mr. Banks is two movies crammed into one cumbersome, overlong drama.

Jackson has become too distracted by his digital toys to give his characters the same weight and importance he used in the Rings trilogy.

Sunlight Jr. is what is often described as a slice-of-life drama, but this one is more of a tiny sliver, and it doesn’t leave you with much to chew on.

All is Lost is more fun to think about than it is to actually watch: It’s a testament to a great actor, an experimental piece of cinema and a bit of a bore.

There’s a fleet and funny comic-book movie nestled inside Thor: The Dark World. You catch glimpses of it here and there.

Bad Milo! directly envokes a number of earlier pictures Vaughan clearly adores, including "Basket Case," "It’s Alive" and even the workplace satire "Office Space." But the movie fails to ground its promising (if preposterous) scenario in any kind of recognizable reality.

This Carrie becomes less involving as it goes along, ceding its emotional power to special effects and unconvincing gore, and culminating with a closing shot so lame and uninspired, it’s as if the filmmakers just gave up and called it a day.

What Passion ultimately lacks most, ironically, is passion, the artistic fervor that distinguished all his best pictures. This one feels like a throwaway by a gifted filmmaker who has run out of ideas.

Start with a heaping helping of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Throw in some "Percy Jackson," a dash of "Twilight," a spoonful of "The Vampire Diaries" and a sprinkling of "Harry Potter," and you end up with The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

Jobs works much better as a history of Apple than it does as a portrait of the genius who dreamed it up.

What seemed edgy and brash in Kick-Ass is now routine and old-hat. The first movie was a brash satire on formulaic comic-book movies — exactly the sort of picture the sequel turns out to be.

Lovelace is a timid gloss over on a hardcore subject — a movie that takes a wild true story and shoehorns it into a formulaic mold.

The phrase “casting is everything” has never felt truer than it does with 2 Guns, an unremarkable, standard-issue shoot-em-up that rests entirely on the charisma of its two stars.

The coming-of-age tale The Way, Way Back is sweet, heartfelt and utterly trite and predictable from beginning to end.

There’s a rollicking Wild West adventure buried deep inside The Lone Ranger, a bloated, mega-budget revival of the story of the iconic gunslinger and his Native American sidekick Tonto.

Monsters University feels half-hearted and lazy, like they weren’t even trying. At least show a little effort, guys.

Although there are some initial feints at using zombies as a metaphor for third-world issues and cultural differences, the picture forgets all that stuff by the final reel. World War Z opens with an undeniable bang. But if this is the way the world ends, we’re going out with a whimper.

What went wrong with Man of Steel? The early teasers promised Terrence Malick. The finished film is more Michael Bay.

The picture is perfectly watchable but rarely compelling, because the filmmakers are too timid to take any chances.

There’s nothing more to this movie than the set-up. Even though Cypher is slowly bleeding to death, and Kitai is running out of oxygen capsules that allow him to breathe in the toxic air, there’s no sense of urgency, either. At least Shyamalan, sensing the thinness of the material, doesn’t stretch things out.

The movie is intentionally elusive, like a memory you can’t quite fully recall, but the result has all the depth and weight of a greeting card.

For its first hour or so, Oblivion is a visually mesmerizing, intriguing picture that doesn’t feel like the same-old: It engages your eyes and piques your curiosity. Then, gradually, the novelty wears off, the clichés start to pile up and we’re back to Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia 101.

While the scope of the movie is bigger, its impact is smaller. "Blue Valentine" was a precise, heartrending portrait of a marriage coming apart at the seams. The theme of his new movie is a lot harder to discern.

Evil Dead is just a well-made gross-out, and it's kind of a bummer.

Reacher is so good at everything he does, and Cruise plays him in such a robotic manner, that the movie becomes a bit of a bore: The hero is practically omnipotent.

For a good hour, Seven Psychopaths is lively, bloody fun. Then the yawning starts.

The Master has become a contest between two gifted actors trying to shout each other down. The commitment to their roles is impressive, but it's tethered to a weightless, airless movie, a film so enamored of itself, the audience gets shut out.

You end up feeling sorry for all the actors forced to humiliate themselves, except for McConaughey, whose portrayal of sadistic, manipulative evil is mesmerizing, in part because it was so unexpected. He continues to surprise. Friedkin, sadly, continues to coast.

The best stuff comes early in Ruby Sparks, which was written by Kazan (granddaughter of Elia) and directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).

The movie is oddly impersonal - you remember the concept more than the story - and feels like something that was made simply for the opportunity to pair Streep and Jones for the first time.

It looks fantastic, but it's also hard to sit through, because by that point The Bourne Legacy has repeatedly proven there are no surprises to be had here, no more fresh stories to be mined from this well. The stunts look exhausting, though. No wonder Damon bailed.

To Rome with Love is so inviting, and most of its gaggle of characters so diverse and likable, it's doubly disappointing that Allen, who wrote and directed the movie, can't think of what to do with them.

Ted is more of an idea than a movie, a string of jokes and homages starring a cartoon and some game actors whose performances are destined to be enjoyed in chunks, rarely from start to finish, during momentary breaks of channel surfing on late-night TV.

As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World crawls toward its sentimental finale, you're rooting for that asteroid to get here, quick.

The whole of Prometheus - which was written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, and rips off everything from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Event Horizon" - feels derivative and passé: The film is a shiny, high-tech relic.

Depp and Burton are two gifted, like-minded artists whose affinity for oddball characters and humor makes them natural creative partners. But they also enable each other's laziest, most indulgent habits: Too often, they seem to be making movies to entertain themselves instead of the audience.

The Avengers has a knockout final 30 minutes, all gee-whiz crash and bang and eye candy that makes grand use of 3D and IMAX and all the other toys. But the Transformers movies did that, too.

For a good hour or so, The Raven is gruesome, ludicrous fun. Then it's just ludicrous.

The actors, many of them now in their mid-30s, look understandably fuller in the face and thicker around the waist. The jokes, too, are starting to show their age: They wobble.

The Hunger Games takes no risks.

A surprisingly sappy misfire from brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, a hug-it-out, touchy-feely movie that succumbs to the maudlin sentimentality they had avoided in all their previous pictures (The Puffy Chair, Baghead, Cyrus).

Eventually, though, Seeking Justice devolves into the usual business of chases and elaborate double-crosses that leave behind all vestiges of realism for the sake of popcorn thrills.

I haven't watched "Fargo" in a few years, but I still remember almost every scene. I saw Thin Ice two nights ago and cannot in all honesty tell you how it ends.

In his first starring role post-Harry Potter, Radcliffe must carry the movie with little dialogue and practically nothing to play other than fear, constantly reacting to creepy toys that suddenly spring to life and reflections in windows that shriek unexpectedly at him.

Steven Soderbergh has been telling interviewers that he's planning to take a sabbatical from filmmaking because he has lost his inspiration. His lack of interest is palpable in Haywire, a rote exercise in action filmmaking that is sleek and polished and instantly evaporates from memory.

The entire point of Carnage is to poke fun at the fragile civility of the upper-middle class - they're all animals inside! - but how much more fun would this material have been if the story hadn't been about polite white people?

The movie fails utterly at coming up with a story that merits all the eye candy.

Still, this is one French comedy that could have used a little more hand wringing and a little less whimsy.

The best thing about this mildly diverting but instantly forgettable comedy is that it seems to have awakened something in Murphy that had laid dormant for much of the past two decades.

If anyone other than Gus Van Sant had directed Restless, the film could have well been impossible to sit through.

Killer Elite is too formulaic to overcome a been-there, done-that feel.

The movie tends to lapse into soapy melodrama and heavy-handed preaching whenever possible, and the feel-good ending that appears out of nowhere essentially negates a lot of what has preceded it, adding one more moral to a movie already weighed down by life lessons.

The film is just a procession of increasingly grim and ugly scenarios and discoveries, capped off by a wildly frustrating ending.

Chasing Madoff is as much a journalistic exposé of Madoff as it is a love letter to Markopolos, shot in the style of "Natural Born Killers" by a director terrified of boring his audience. In Proserman, the documentary genre finds its own Michael Bay.

A big part of the problem comes in the casting. Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes - the kind of odd pairing of actors that comes only after your first and second choices have passed - are unconvincing and curiously unsympathetic as the architect Alex and his girlfriend.

There's an irrelevance to the movie that the filmmakers, hard as they try, can't quite shake - something awfully square about the picture: It would have played a lot better a decade ago.

James Franco looks more bored and distracted in Rise of the Planet of the Apes than he did when he was hosting the Oscars: Watching the movie, I kept waiting for him to pull out his iPhone, aim it at the camera and take a snapshot while mugging sheepishly. Has there ever been a film with a less engaged protagonist?

The movie wants to be an exploration of family ties and the various ways in which the people we love respond in times of crisis, but the drama is unconvincing, the characters are ill-defined, and Fischer, so good on The Office, seems a bit incomplete without Jim at her side.

The movie is pleasant overall and occasionally comes up with a big laugh. When the movie's over, though, it evaporates from memory, just like a one-night stand that didn't go nearly as well as you'd hoped.