Roger Moore

So while this Spider-Man is, if anything, more competent than the first film it’s still not one that demands that you stick around after the credits. There’s nothing there.

It’s a load of horrific hooey.

Locke will hold your interest as it presents a side of the burly, bluff “Dark Knight” villain we have never seen before on screen.

Mansions is like “Vehicle 19″ or “Takers,” dumb, noisy junk.

After Walking with the Enemy, two hours and four minutes of torture, rape and mass shootings, you’ll feel you’ve been tested, too.

Melissa K. Stack’s script has snap and crackle to go with the pop, making this female wish-fulfillment fantasy an “Eat, Pray, Revenge” that delivers the punches that two “Sex and the City” movies never could.

Writer-director Lucia Puenzo, adapting her own historical novel, concocts a disquieting and chilling thriller out of what might be a lost chapter in the infamous career of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele.

Director Omid Nooshin gives this story harrowing touches largely through arresting camera angles and aggressive editing. He ensures that “Last Passenger” features a couple of jaw-dropping moments even as it traverse familiar ground.

Blue Ruin joins “Shotgun Stories” and “Joe” as vivid reminders that however homogenized American culture seems, there are still pockets that are distinct, with people who live by their own rules and their own bloody code.

More interesting as history, re-written, than as the moral parable this true story became.

The singing is nice, the peripheral characters interesting. But a love that others don’t approve of, that may get in the way of a big concert debut? That makes Gabrielle a bit too Lifetime Original Movie for its own good.

It’s gorgeous, intimate and beautifully photographed. And it’s cute and kid-friendly, with just enough jokes to balance the drama that comes from any film that flirts with how dangerous and unforgiving The Wild actually is.

This thoughtful but windy and winded sci-fi thriller shortchanges the science – understandably - and the thrills. The directing debut of “Dark Knight” cinematographer Wally Pfister is a mopey affair with indifferent performances, heartless romance and dull action. It transcends nothing.

Whatever the film’s other failings, it presents an incredible story with a credulous, approachable innocence that it to be envied, whether or not you believe a word of it.

Fading Gigolo is John Turturro’s idea of an old school Woody Allen comedy, so he wrote Allen into it.

Costner and Garner are good and Langella properly menacing, but Leary has lost his fastball and seems to be holding something back in his quarrel scenes with Costner. Costner has to carry the film, which he does.

Oculus earns its frights the old fashioned way — with convincingly traumatized characters, with smoke and with mirrors.

If this sequel proves anything, it’s that more is not always better.

Joe is the movie that will make you remember how good Nicolas Cage once was and can be again.

Under the Skin isn’t conventional, thrilling or particularly satisfying in a sci-fi aliens-are-hunting-us sense. But it manages something far more sinister and fascinating. It gets under your skin and imprints on your memory.

Berninger is hero and villain of this comic essay in ineptitude masquerading as a rock band on tour doc.

It’s good to see Depardieu in an English-speaking role again, but he can only carry A Farewell to Fools so far by himself, especially when he never commits to “simple” heart and soul.

The performances are perfunctory and the scenario standard-issue even if the execution of this no-budget thriller is top drawer.

Film buffs will see Goodbye World as a sort of “Trigger Effect” meets “Return of the Secaucus Seven” — growing up, learning to look at the world through more jaded adult eyes as the world ends.

A soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories.

Writer-director Richard Shepard did “”The Matador” and “The Hunting Party”, and he surrounds Law’s lunatic Dom with assorted underworld figures who have mellowed where Dom did not.

A mesmerizing movie, a history lesson about the pre-blockbuster era in science fiction movies.

It’s OK for April, in other words, but not up to the higher standards of a Marvel summer blockbuster.

Watching this head-slappingly stupid movie is an exercise is seeing David Ayer sucked into the drain that Arnold’s been spiraling down ever since his “comeback.”

It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But Noah makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The purists can always go argue over “God Isn’t Dead.” The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.

Like "42," Cesar Chavez lacks the budget to feel truly epic in scope. The violence is scattered, shocking and personal, the struggles within the union muted but the outrage — is palpable.

A romantic melodrama that’s so well-cast and acted and made with such loving care that you could almost forgive how long it takes to get to its obvious conclusion, how melodramatic the whole “sordid” affair is.

“The Raid” was a great action film in which the violence, excessive though it was, served as obstacles in the hero’s simple quest. In Raid 2 the violence is the movie, its excess used to cover for an inept story, thinly-drawn characters and dead spots.

The pace is stumbling, the characters are broad, the makeup and the performances uneven, though Sorbo dives into his tactless, unethical indoctrinator role with Satanic glee.

Funnier than the last Muppets movie, with far better songs (by Bret McKenzie), punnier puns and all manner of geo-political gags, cultural wisecracks and star cameos.

Divergent, the latest outcast-teen-battles-The-System thriller, is similar enough to “The Hunger Games” that hardcore Katniss fans may dismiss it. But it’s a more streamlined film, with a love story with genuine heat and deaths with genuine pathos.

Among the cast, the Oscar winner Cotillard acquits herself the best, bleary-eyed and bitter.

Jake Gyllenhaal does tour de force double duty in the intimate thriller Enemy, a cryptic essay on identity. He is terrific in both guises, but he is trapped in a frustrating puzzle without a solution.

A nasty, elemental thriller, basically a four-character play with blood and guts and sex and drugs and dares

Pitt and Arianda utterly inhabit these dolts and their delusional dreams. They’re careless and clumsy, never thinking things through, never seriously considering the inevitable consequences of what happens when you poke the bull.

Perry has made better movies, and perhaps worse ones. But never one as dull as this.

The cast doesn’t have the sassy swagger of the “Fast & Furious” crew. Paul, surrounded by co-stars of the same modest height, isn’t particularly charismatic in this setting. He’s not a natural “quiet tough guy.” But the actors are second bananas here — to the Koenigsegg Ageras, Saleens and Shelby Mustang that feed America’s Need for Speed, on screen and off. And the cars deliver.

Goldblum is always best at being Jeff Goldblum, and his oily/silky charm tends to unbalance the neat, brittle little tragedy we’re watching.

The film is full of sharp observations about academic contests today, with Tiger Moms and tough-love Dads browbeating the kids from the wings. The ending is kind of a tap-out, but Bateman keeps this clipping along, maintaining the mean streak and potty mouth that makes Bad Words the dirtiest and funniest comedy of the new year.

The cloying narration and the inclusion of Fonda are just warnings for that moment, 70 minutes in, when this comic chemical train goes completely off the rails. Rockwell, Wilde, Monaghan are worth the price of admission, but “Better Living” would have been better off with more chemistry and less cutesy.

Deneuve suggests the self-absorption of the beautiful, coping with the petty insults of age, making Bettie a bundle of nerves wrestling with a complicated past and an increasingly frazzled present. See it for her performance, and a lovely slice of French scenery.

For all its fun flourishes and tepid over familiarity, fans are going to dig this. It is, after all, the movie they paid for. They’re the folks who “like this sort of thing.” The rest of us can be forgiven for waiting for it to show up on Netflix — on TV.

Dull, carnal, and explicitly so in both regards, it’s a slow-moving slog through one crushed soul as she relates the empty, passionless pursuits of her youth.

Things drag, here and there. But kids will dig the slapstick, the talking dog and giggle at what flies out of the Sphinx’s butt, or drops from the rear-end of the Trojan Horse. Adults will be tickled at the usual Dreamworks parade of one-liners, running gags and puns, and feel a little sentimental.

A nail-biting thriller in the classic Hitchcock style.

The design... is stunning, an improvement over 2006′s “300.” And the action never disappoints. It’s a pity this colorless cast doesn’t hold a candle to the Butler/Headey/Michael Fassbender/David Wenham crew of the original, that the writers couldn’t conjure up thrilling speeches to match the original.

Unlike “The Passion of the Christ,” there’s no Aramaic with English subtitles, a lot less blood and no anti-Semitism. No character feels like a caricature... But it’s also dramatically flat, with few actors making much of an impression as they play saints and sinners.

We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson. His latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details.

Non-Stop is a solid, workmanlike action picture that builds slowly, bends over backwards to over-explain itself and its villain, and delivers a lulu of an ending.

In detail and combat spectacle, Stalingrad is hard to beat. And whatever its failings, one can’t help but be curious about a story as connected to national identity as this one, a film that like today’s Russia, feels more Soviet than Russian.

It’s a comedy of sight gags, zingers and awkward pauses — lots of those. Sentimental at times, yes. But funny. Always.

It’s an intimate, quiet and slow-paced romance, a simple, richly rewarding movie in the classic style of India’s greatest filmmaker, the late Satyajit Ray.

Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.

A genuine “bodice ripper” of a thriller, with the requisite heavy breathing that comes after said bodice is ripped. The sex isn’t explicit, but Olsen and Isaac suggest the heat that gives this doomed affair its momentum.

The Wind Rises was a dream project for the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, and this gorgeous film makes a fine capstone for his career.

Barefoot is “Rainman” meets “Benny & Joon.”

Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie. Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

What keeps us around until the closing credits, where Hart and Hall bust each other up, is the electrical charge between those two. They’re the Wimbledon Finals of sexy, sassy, drunken comic banter — two pros, evenly matched enough to put on a great show, even if they make us forget about the rest of the movie around them as they do.

Winter’s Tale has no narrative drive and too little heart to come off.

Greenwood and Richardson make a fine, discordant couple and the young leads have a certain chemistry. If only Feste had realized she’d stripped almost all the conflict out of the story.

There’s nothing deep in this script, and the delayed romance, between real-life lovers Roberts and Evan Peters (of “American Horror Story”) sets off no sparks. The characters are sort of a grab bag of “types.”

With this “Girl” and her bicycle, the cute bits, rare laugh out loud moments, occasionally zippy lines and limply obvious farcical predicaments are never more than instantly forgettable.

Tedious as all this vampire exposition is (and there’s a LOT), the jokey tone here is much appreciated, with everyone “a few corpuscles shy of an artery” and the action as predictable as “a porcupine in a hot tub.”

Clooney, for the first time in his directing career (“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”) never finds the sweet spot, and never quite wrestled the script into a shape entertaining enough to make the liberties he and Heslov took with the facts worth it.

The Lego Movie amuses and never fails to leave the viewer –especially adults — a little dazzled at the demented audacity of it all.

It’s over familiar, a movie that plays like recycled, R-rated outtakes from “Rules of Engagement” or “How I Met Your Mother.”

For all its filmmaking care and care-worn performances, is nothing more than a beach book, inconsequential and utterly out of place in January.

The saving grace of this more-rude-than-funny film are its cast. They’re just a quartet of Simi Valley “Woohooo” girls in the opening, but the players make each member of this motley crew distinct, human and out of her depth. And Janet (Flanagan)? You’ll want to party with her.

A fascinating documentary experiment in fathoming the heretofor “unfathomable” genius of Johannes Vermeer.

The humorless, generic, and chatty Frankenstein served up here makes you wonder if the good doctor, in all his patching-together of parts, didn’t forget the brains.

It’s the sort of movie whose finale leaves you wondering, “Why do they always leave out what happens next?”

Gloria has a palpable loneliness about it, and Garcia makes us feel that and fear the emptiness that is staring Gloria in the face. Not a lot happens in this closely-observed character study, but few recent movies have dared to show this stage of life, the creeping solitude that memories of your disco past cannot fend off.

Run & Jump is an uncommonly offbeat and charmingly unconventional romance, an Irish comedy that lets itself get very serious, now and again, and is all the richer for it.

The dialogue is dull, the performances perfunctory and while it is novel to leave out “the explainer” character — that slim hope that a priest, an expert on the Occult or whoever, can give the characters answers — common to this genre, leaving that character out robs the film of pathos and urgency.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini motor mouth and the perma-sneering Ice Cube.

Branagh & Co. keep up appearances with a thriller that works mainly because all of its parts — locations, fights and plot twists — are well worn from all the thrillers they’ve been in before.

Better than any animated film released in the doldrums of January has a right to be.

Fiennes holds it all together by force of what he does show us about the man, his kindness tempered with cruelty, the charity he practiced and preached, the morality he could never live up to. It’s the visible great man who makes The Invisible Woman worth watching.

Gooding brings just enough streetwise credibility to make Brown work.

Many moments will make you avert your eyes.

The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in The Wait.

At times, with its stiff, charisma-impaired cast, its digital sets and slo-mo slaughter, The Legend of Hercules has a whiff of the Augean Stables about it — if you catch my drift.

Divorce Corp is a lot pointed outrage that damning as its seems, feels suspect.

Cranston takes small bites of this Beef Jerky Tartar script and chews, chews chews — savoring every corny fake-Russian line like the voice actor he was before “Breaking Bad” made him a star.

They waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.

As exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.

Beyond Outrage reaches above and beyond most Hollywood underworld movies to deliver a tale of righteous revenge doled out only after showing us how much it is deserved.

It’s a movie of pointless scenes.

It’s perfectly passable holiday entertainment for people who dated during the “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” era. Just don’t expect this Grudge Match to be much of a challenge.

Osage County does offer up one almost-heartbreaking moment. But it’s so icky that, like the rest of the film, you kind of want to wash it out of your mouth — with supermarket Merlot — rather than savor it.

The characters are only superficially sketched in, but we still fear for them, understand their code and above all else, appreciate the dirty, bloody, high-risk work these professionals do. That they go through all this and risk everything, by choice, is something Berg, to his credit, never lets us forget.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy The Wolf of Wall Street.

It’s a charming, whimsical and ever-so-slight film, a bit of an over-reach but pleasant enough, even when it falls short.

“Walking” takes care to ID each new dinosaur species introduced, including factoids about what they ate and any special skills they might have had. It’s downright educational. Just don’t tell your kids that.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

Looming large above this “Long Walk” is Elba, in a mostly still performance, one of quietly compelling authority that dominates every moment.

Like the characters in this inter-connected world, you may feel the need to let go of The Past, only to realize, after the credits, the hold it still has on you.

The buffoonery goes epic in this sillier than silly sequel, a broad, down and dirty comedy overfilled with funny people trying to one-up one another on the set in the classic “best line wins” school of comic improvisation.

A lump of cinematic coal Perry’s shoving into America’s stockings this holiday season.

The disco decadence, the seedy era before Times Square became a theme park, the lowered expectations of an endless recession, everything that was then and is now makes up American Hustle. And that’s what makes this the best movie of this holiday season.

It barely has a fright in it on its own, this bloody, Mexican-made supernatural thriller set in the hill country near Tijuana. But open it with a hot “Blue is the Warmest Color” sex scene, toss in a few other hot and heavy moments and a generous helping of nudity and you can be sure, at least, of getting a Hollywood studio’s attention.

It was never going to be “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Reserve that honor for the film that inspired it. But Saving Mr. Banks is still one of the best pictures of the year.

Look for Jackson’s cameo in the opening, which sets the tone. Call it another visual triumph for New Zealand’s vision of Middle Earth.

Twice Born fails to tug at the heartstrings or wring tears from us. Hirsch plays exuberant and callow well, Cruz is tragic and earthy as ever. But the two of them never really click — sex scenes included.

We’re taken back to a naive era, when the boundaries of “smut” were narrower, when even the images of an unlikely “adult” star (she never did sex films or “real” porn) seem now like good, clean fun.

An old fashioned romantic mystery that benefits from a wizened, much-honored cast and a still-exotic setting.

As colorful as it and its people are, Cooper lets the brawling and the bigger-than-big performances get the better of him, and his story. Out of the Furnace feels undercooked, as a result.

Walker has few “big” scenes, no memorable dialogue and plays up the exhaustion, which tamps down the emotions of his performance. So even an action packed finale can’t rescue this dramatically thin exercise in one-man showmanship.

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

Lee, in a sort of humorless send-up of Tarantino, substitutes kinky for mystery, explicit sex and violence for sex and violence with real shock value. When it comes to this remake, you plainly can’t teach an oldboy like Lee new tricks.

There’s wit and whimsy in this 53rd Disney cartoon, a distant cousin of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale, “The Snow Queen.”

The Jason Statham vehicle Homefront is such a generic tough-guy-against-the-odds ’80s style actioner that you’d swear Sly Stallone starred in it. He did, back in the day. Or versions of it. This one, Stallone just scripted.

The movie is so “interior,” it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens.

Modestly entertaining and uplifting version of a “greatest story” that has proven as malleable as it is timeless.

So it’s no “Starbuck,” which most people won’t mind because Americans don’t read subtitles. But even in this form, Delivery Man and the guy who plays him still deliver where it counts.

Most credit goes to Coogan for the success of this odd coupling.

Deep thoughts about re-directing cynically manipulated celebrity, lump in the throat moments at people rising up against their oppressors, a couple of memorable deaths and attempts at sacrifice play as flat when there’s nothing around them to serve as contrast.

An amusing, well-acted and sharply-timed holiday comedy, old friends getting together to prove that careers, families and kids aside, they’ve still got their R-rated edge, just as they did in college.

For all its sure-handed sense of place, its occasional grace notes of loss, grief and misery, This is Where We Live fails to seize and break our hearts, keeping its glum characters at arm’s length and doling out “hope” in tiny, cloying teaspoon-size servings.

Try as she might, Collyer cannot help but judge these people, a not-quite-fatal flaw in a movie about the down and out.

The bad guys really stand out, with Mikkelsen pulling off something he never managed as a Bond villain. He’s genuinely frightening.

And Dern, a great character actor who made his mark opposite everyone from Redford and John Wayne to Jane Fonda, embraces the roll of a lifetime.

Dallas Buyers Club is one of the best pictures of the year.

So even though this isn’t the greatest of “Expectations” — David Lean’s black and white version in the ’40s will your heart — it’s still a pretty grand one.

The film stumbles into a cross-country odyssey that dominates its last third. That is fascinating, but not properly set up, much like the film itself. How I Live Now skips over the “How,” loses itself in the “I” and never lets the pathos of “Live Now” pay off.

The design is brighter and sharper, the jokes are broader and the villainy utterly generic in this by-the-(comic)-book adaptation.

Writer-director Ted Koland can be a little obvious. It’s not a deep movie. But everybody, especially Ramsey, is dealing with something. And Timlin (TV’s “Zero Hour”) gives heart to this wonderful, nuanced character.

Frozen, undercooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.

Last Vegas isn’t “out there” in a “Hangover” sense. It’s comical comfort food, with actors doing the sorts of things they’ve done for decades. But even if this is the safest Vegas romp of them all, this cast never lets us forget that we’re in very good hands.

Writer-director Jaco Van Dormael (“Toto the Hero”) spins flashbacks and time-lapse photography, stunning montages, whirling, circling cameras and stunning underwater, deep space and Martian landscape photography into a film that is as intentionally opaque as it is overlong.

A most romantic way to spend your time at the movies this fall, a “date picture” about do over dates that works, this time around.

The script here is pretty stale stuff, with an under-developed side story of the cop (Karen Mok) on Donako’s trail and dialogue (in English and Chinese) that is often banal.

It’s a film of limp police procedures — stake outs that aren’t really clandestine, generic prison scenes, interrogations by underlines that suggest the leading players weren’t available on set for the entire day.

Hemingway wins us over and, in the end, comes off as earnest in her desire to use her celebrity to help shine a light on the maladies that have shattered her family, time and again.

Watts masters Diana’s look — the way she carried her head and used those wide, coyly expressive eyes — but is only passable at impersonating the voice.

Sure, it’s good-looking, cautionary and clever enough. But there’s not much in this “Game” that you’d call thrilling or fun.

Among the players, the wild-haired Bardem stands out, and a vampy Diaz sets the stage for uninhibited future in villain roles, or deadly-sexy car sales.

As Jackass japes go, though, Bad Grandpa was better in concept and in its short, punchy TV commercials than it is as a feature.

Exarchopoulos is a revelation, wearing her neediness, vulnerability and arousal with every muscle in her face, her posture, even her hair. It’s an utterly naked performance, literally and figuratively.

A mildly entertaining sermon about American “Cowboy Capitalism” as it rubs up against “The French Way.”

This culture-clash/mother bonding story was never going to be “Frozen River,” but you do sense that a lot of potential was squandered in denying these mothers big moments of mourning, bigger confrontations with the fathers of their sons.

So yes, even if you know how this story goes, there are moments that work wickedly well in between the needlessly drawn out ones, by which I mean the entire, predictable third act.

The film captures the magic and manic energy of the performances, the inventive choreography and spine-tingling tunes.

Concussion deserves more of an audience than just the film festival circuit. And it’s not just an introduction to a writer-director with talent, but to a slew of under-employed and superb actresses, and the hunky Tchaikovsky.

Mark Jarrett’s amiable road picture has a morbid whimsy and a coming-of-age hook.

The tempered violence, the nature of the villains, the easy bonhomie of our leads and a cast peppered with great supporting players make Escape Plan go down easier than the other “Rambo/Last Man Standing/Expendables” pictures that brought these two aged action stars back from the dead.

This solo ordeal won’t be to every taste, but All Is Lost is a grand vehicle for the actor and for that viewer ready to consider his or her own mortality, the problems, conflicts, strengths and shortcomings you’re sure you leave behind when you just sail away.

Needed more movie to go with its message.

The aloof, guarded Cumberbatch plays Assange as a mixture of brilliance, hucksterism, ego and naivete. He carries the baggage of an actor who plays “smart,” with a menacing edge.

McQueen and his stellar cast take us on a difficult journey, an odyssey that will make you want to avert your eyes. It is to their great credit that we don’t.

So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.

A rough and rough around the edges tale of children growing up on the mean streets of the wrong side of Brooklyn. It’s a coming of age story of a self-absorbed, downtrodden punk with a dream who learns about the love that comes with responsibility.

The performances and Greengrass’s way with action immerse us and make Captain Phillips a tight, taut,edge of your seat thriller even if you remember the ending.

Spinning Plates is a surprisingly affecting juggling act, with each story having its compelling third act revelations of the extreme obstacles each eatery and its owners have faced and will face.

A graphically violent, sexually explicit teen horror tale, it was close to being ahead of its time, in its time. Now, it plays like a quaint, fairly obvious period piece — from 2006.

Affleck? You never believe a word he says, not a gesture. This is the sort of acting he did in the sort of movies he made before he started writing and directing his own movies — bad.

Though it is funnier and out-charms “Tio Papi,” it lacks the whimsy, magical realism and kid-friendly sentiment of the sleeper hit, “Instructions Not Included.”

To fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two.

Parkland is a fascinating insider’s view of those fateful two days in November of 1963, when a president was murdered, his assassin was gunned down in custody and generations of conspiracies were born.

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

A movie comedy that is funnier in performance than it ever was as a script.

In Don Jon Gordon-Levitt hasn’t made a great movie. But he has made a fun one, short and sweet, with a third act punch that is so to-the-point it’ll take your breath away.

Since the movie’s street side dream doesn’t add much more than a gimmicky “interpretation” of their sound, you’re left with a deafening dirge –well-played, but really, no improvement on your basic concert film.

A fine and fun film tribute to the milieu, the men, women and machines in a sport that was never deadlier or more glamorous than its Disco Decade incarnation.

By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out (at great, boring length), The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches and our patience.

The singer and tabloid darling Chris Brown more than holds his own with this crew, apparently not even needing a dance double.

Prisoners is never less than engrossing. It’ll keep you guessing. It’s just too bad that the last thirty minutes make us feel like the prisoners, here.

Apparently at Holofcener’s urging, Dreyfus just tends to overwhelm the movie with her regular, if charming, bag of tricks, as if that’s enough. And it isn’t.

Thanks for Sharing is a bit of a head-snapper in its tone changes, stumbling into flippancy. The light moments are appreciated, but they do tend to undercut the sobriety of it all.

Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, The Family has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.

The ending of the movie is a real grabber, the sort of thing that lifts and improves a tediously long and otherwise mediocre film and tricks you into thinking it was better than it really was as you leave the theater.

It’s too long and wildly uneven. And the longer it goes on, the more uneven and oddball it seems.

The performers are more competent than compelling, a common failing of faith-based films. Blame the edge-free, freshly-scrubbed characters that they play. Sadly, even as a safe-for-seniors saga ready-made for The Hallmark Channel, this is pretty thin gruel.

Blue Caprice is a chilling portrait of motive, manipulation and mass murder.

Like Vin Diesel, it has bulk, lumbering clumsily along as it repeats Diesel’s greatest hits — the ones that don’t require him to drive a fast and furious car.

If it weren’t for the well-intentioned moments of pathos — a tear or two, hear and there — Tio Papi would be a complete waste of time.

As edgy female wish-fulfillment fantasy, showing that fantasy’s consequences, Adore engrosses and engages, never titillates and never betrays even the tiniest hint of revulsion.

It’s never more than a theme park that isn’t worth the price of admission.

Maybe they all took a gander at that random, ridiculous scenario and hoped that the car would be cool enough to bail them out. It isn’t.

DePalma flirts with the lurid and tosses in some interesting third act surprises, but never finds his way back to the sexually charged tone and shocks of his earlier thrillers.

It’s disappointing that Spurlock didn’t have the access, the footage or the spine to depict any of the cynicism behind such creations.

Blame it on the weak chemistry of the stars, blame it on the way the script refuses to let them develop chemistry and the perfunctory way the story is dispensed with, but the sparks aren’t there.

A regal, majestic and downright arty take on this teacher, champion and philosopher whose life spanned much of the twentieth century.

This is a movie that floats by on dazzlingly silly banter and well-slung slang.

In Spanish with English subtitles, has a lovely, big budget sheen (Shlomo Godder was the cinematographer) and a cast that plays this as documentary real.

The frights are passable, the foreshadowing (extreme close-ups of nails being pounded through boards, etc.) telling and the humor — sick as it is — quite funny.

If you love exposition and shapely if bland young actors in leather, skinny jeans, knee boots, Goth cocktail dresses and heavy eye makeup, this may be the movie for you.

Cage, without having to play a ghostly motorcyclist or hot rod driver from Hell or sorcerer or sci-fi hero or kinky cop, reminds us that he used to know subtlety. So even if Frozen Ground breaks little new ground in the serial killer thriller genre, there’s hope Cage will leave the ham behind before Alaska freezes over.

Savannah gets by on touches of grace and spirited performances, especially by Caviezel. After being so serious for so very long, it’s great fun to see him take on a “genuine character” with all the boozing, brawling and shooting that entails.

It is as slow, slick and superficial as the director of “21″ and “Killers” can make it.

The patchwork story and pacing robs The Butler of the wit and heart that might have made it a companion piece to the far simpler and more powerful “The Help.” Daniels settles for a soapy, preachy American history version of “Downton Abbey.”

That makes Kick Ass 2 more sour than sweet, a movie that jokes about comic book fanboys but stops short of mocking them the way the first film did.

It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints feels like a fresh and poetic treatment of a prosaic story that should be utterly worn out by now.

Planes looks, sounds and feels like a direct-to-video project, which in an earlier age when people still bought DVDs it would have been. In theaters, it’s nothing more than a laughless 90 minute commercial for toys available at a retailer near you.

The quest, which takes our heroes to the Sea of Monsters, aka The Bermuda Triangle, is generic in the extreme. The fights/escapes all lack any sense of urgency and peril.

Appreciate Elysium for what it is, sci-fi that’s smarter, more topical and more invigorating than most of what passes through that genre these days, and another sign that its director is the most promising chap to enter the field since the inception of Christopher Nolan.

It’s too short to do justice to its subject, but in an era when young women build careers and get rich off “secret” sex tapes that somehow make their way onto the Internet, maybe that’s all this subject deserves. Lovelace was but an aberration, an amusing, then quaintly grim footnote on our way to a Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian future.

It’s a “Waiting for Godot” set in the solitary work and lives of two highway line-painters.

It aims for that “Hangover” blend of the sick and the sentimental. And it doesn’t work.

We knew Livingston, Kendrick and Johnson (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) would work in this setting. But Wilde adds to the growing repertoire she showed off in “Deadfall” and “Butter,” films no one saw but which revealed that she’s a lot more than a pretty face.

Witty, warm and wistful and in just the right proportions, Spectacular is the best-acted film of the summer.

You’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly.

Filled with Smurf wholesomeness, Smurf puns and posi-Smurf messages about never giving up “on family,” The Smurfs 2 still sucks Smurfberries.

It’s engrossing, violent, frightening and funny in the ways it captures the way kids speak with no adults around, and the way kids act when society’s rules take a back seat in time of war.

Drift is utterly conventional in so many ways. But the relatively unknown cast, the rough hewn setting and startling cinematography — footage that rivals many a surf documentary’s best shots — give it a boost.

This Wolverine gets our hopes up, and falls short.

So many “lose my virginity over the summer” comedies, from “American Pie” to “Superbad,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” to “Girl Next Door.” But aside from the hilarious “Twilight Saga,” how many have told that torrid tale from the girl’s point of view? The To Do List is a summer romantic comedy dedicated to rectifying that imbalance in a single stroke.

Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be.

The reason to fall into Blue Jasmine is Blanchett’s cagey, broken turn.

The worst comic book adaptation since “Jonah Hex.”

Red 2 goes down easily, from Marvin’s demented moments of relationship advice to Dame Helen’s tender and amusing “Hitchcock” reunion with Sir Anthony. There’s a knowing twinkle in their eyes, and in everybody else’s. “Yeah, we could’ve done a Bond film,” they seem to wink. “And it would’ve been a bloody fun one, at that.”

The Conjuring is like a prequel to 40 years of demonic possession thrillers.

Whatever their other gifts, they cannot find the fizz here and can never get Wiig to commit to the sort of film that she, even when she was making it, must have realized was beneath her in her post-”Bridesmaids” glory.

There is absolutely nothing new in this variation on the time-honored creature-feature tropes. But the fun just builds and builds as our heroes and our Irish island come to a solution that seems — on the surface — awfully Irish in its logic.

While small children may be enchanted by this little gastropod that could, adults will be more sorely tested. For all the horsepower Turbo boasts about, the movie tends toward the sluggish — as in slow as a slug.

This is as thorough a take-down of a business and its practices as you’re likely to ever see.

Garlin doesn’t discover anything new about this well-documented phenomenon. But rounding up his (under-employed) comic pals and turning them loose on Little League is funny enough by itself.

It’s another pointless romp through Sandlerland — where the women are buxom, the kids have catch-phrases and the jokes are below average.

Del Toro’s robots have weight and mass, and their epic, Hong Kong-smashing fights with the four and six-legged, clawed and horned monsters are visually coherent, unlike the messy blur of the “Transformers” movies. There’s a light, humorous feel to “Pacific Rim” because the science is silly and logic takes a flying leap.

Hot Flashes don’t generate much heat — comical or otherwise. A pity, since that rare menopause comedy is a terrible thing to waste.

A darker-than-dark British comedy.

It’s a pretty conventional “Lifetime Original Movie” sort of story. But co-writer/director Thomas Vinterberg (“Dear Wendy”) makes it work by building a sense of frustrating unease into it all.

It’s coherent enough, but entirely too long and unpleasant when it could have been one brutishly edgy hoot after another.

In Let Me Explain, you’re never NOT aware that you’re watching a gifted, rubber-faced/rubber voiced performer (his “Laugh at My Pain” concert film was a surprising hit in 2011) work too hard to make inferior material go over.

Gore Verbinski’s film is an overlong array of noisy, digitally-assisted chases, shootouts, crashes and explosions with the occasional flash of homage to the “real” Lone Ranger that suggests a better movie than the pricey, jumbled compromise Verbinski delivered.

The funniest kids’ cartoon of the summer.

It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

It’s just romantic enough and barely funny enough to qualify as a romantic comedy. But it works, despite never being graceful or unstuck enough to take flight.

The performances and the ready supply of one-liners make this an amusing look at a new generation getting lost down memory lane.

Give it up for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. You’ll never see them work harder at a comedy than in The Heat, a stumbling, aggressively loud and profane cop buddy picture where they struggle to wring “funny” out of a script that isn’t.

White House Down is a corker, real competition for “Fast & Furious 6″ as the dumbest fun you’ll have at the movies this summer.

Director Sebastian Cordero — he did the John Leguizamo journalism thriller “Chronicles” — serves up chilling and all-too-real ways to die in space and maintains tension even if suspense is in short supply in a tale told in flashback.

Fill the Void’s greatest virtue is in the ways her characters take us beyond stereotypes even as she herself questions the value system of a culture that is so focused on religion, marriage and procreation that it holds few attractions to those not born into it.

The more correct title would have been “Retribution,” which could work for any number of Statham vehicles over the years. But Redemption is just different enough to make us remember “The Bank Job” or “Killer Elite” or that he’s about to give those fun-but-silly “Fast & Furious” movies a proper villain.

Manages a tear or two, and enough laughs to get by, even if from first scene to last the strain to stop just short of cloying shows.

There’s not much new here, but at least Byzantium has well-acted, compelling characters telling its time-worn tale with style. That’s the best we can hope for, these days, from this genre that will not die.

What we have here is a gripping story rather dryly told, a somewhat frustrating essay on Scandinavian passivity without the pathos of the similarly themed Oscar winning Danish film “In a Better World.” It’s the helplessness that gets to you.

The first 25 minutes or so of this “Contagion” meets “28 Days Later” thriller will leave you breathless. And the rest of it serves up novel and often entertaining solutions to the various “zombie problems” that this over-exposed genre presents.

Monsters University is a prequel that is far more conventional, not nearly as witty or clever as that original.

Doueiri has brilliantly and simply put a compassionate human face on a part of the world where ethnicity still trumps education, class and achievement, where even the successful face, at best, second-class citizenship in their own country.

Robert Stone directed the wonderful environmental movement history documentary “Earth Days,” and that earns him the benefit of the doubt for his latest, Pandora’s Promise. He needs that benefit, because what he sets out to do in 87 minutes is upend 50 years of green movement anti-nuclear power dogma.

If every generation gets the Superman it deserves, Man of Steel suggests we’ve earned one utterly without wit or charm.

An often hilarious/generally irreverent comedy.

Like many such films, the subject seems more fascinating than the Far Out Isn’t Far Enough’s treatment of him.

As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows.

This is a good cast, but it’s all played at a rather shrill pitch that must work better on the stage. The intimacy of the screen makes it all uncomfortably in our face.

It’s still a welcome, entertaining and overdue delivery of credit where credit was and is due.

There are interesting story elements and locations. But the claustrophobia of the car works against it.

The performances are pretty sharp... But the situations feel contrived, the romantic pairings a bit arbitrary. Strip away the narration, and this would be more cinematic. Take away the setting and this is fairly routine stuff.

Interns Wilson and Vaughn swap lines like veteran jazz musicians who still have a sense of play about them — an endless supply of nicknames, high-and-low fives, dated slang and goodwill — theirs for each other, and ours for them.

If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.

It works, after a fashion — a romance that isn’t a romantic comedy. But Bier, a wonderful director, proves that “Love” isn’t all you need to make us swoon. You need a lighter touch.

Mostly, it’s just a clumsy lecture about who we’re becoming, haves vs have-nots, with the haves armed to the teeth.

The best of them you could certainly see as full length features, chilling little tastes of a complete vision — story, characters, horrific situations and visual aesthetic. The worst? Simply generic.

Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

A winking comedy with dark underpinnings and some of Shakespeare’s most wicked wordplay.

For all its showmanship, Now You See Me has a lot less up its sleeve than it lets on.

An undemanding, childish adventure picture.

A summer movie that staggers down that fine line between sentimental and snarky, a tale of nature and nurture and first love that manages to charm more than any R-rated movie about horny teens has a right to.

Owen and Riseborough play their characters awfully close to the vest, not investing in anything that would allow this story to take the romantic or melodramatic turns we expect. But truthfully, that hamstrings the movie.

It’s too much a movie of “types,” and loses track of story elements that would seem important enough to warrant further exploration. The whole Christian conservative law-and-order mantle feels like a fuzzy afterthought on Jane, forgotten far too soon.

Epic isn’t epic, but it isn’t half bad, either. It’s just that as high as the bar has been raised on this sort of animation, this is more evidence that a strong story is worth more than any next generation software.

Bad movies are rarely as much fun as these “Fast and the Furious” pictures. And make no mistake about it — they’re bad.

As "Hangovers" go, Part III isn't challenging or unpleasant, just instantly forgettable. It won't take much to sleep this one off.

The players utterly inhabit their banal characters, but Hartigan only delivers a couple of scenes that merit all this attention to detail.

The line between “cute” and “cutesy” is violated, repeatedly, in the sometimes funny, often cloying comedy The English Teacher.

As our old friend Ricardo Montalban said thirty years ago in “The Wrath of Khan,” still the best of the “Star Treks” — “It is veeery coooooold in space.” “Into Darkness,” for all its dense textures and epic scale, left me cold.

Rock is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.

The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy “In Living Color,” button down this judge and find ways to break formula and make him hilarious.

Frances Ha turns melancholy and almost painful to watch in its last act as she and we see the dead end dead ahead. And the film doesn’t seem to earn the finale the two of them cooked up for us.