Sara Stewart

Pollak obviously had fun, but you get the feeling the best bits never made it in.

Crowe makes the most of his own quiet presence, and this ode to the world’s never-recovered soldiers and their families is a fitting meditation on the insanity of war.

It’s his home movies with Love and baby — some playful, others drugged and drooling — that fans will find the most emotional viewing. As the credits roll, it’s hard not to just root for the sensitive, progressive, fiercely creative Cobain and wish that he’d lived long enough to find a little peace of mind.

Is it never funny? No, it’s not never funny. It’s just not funny nearly often enough.

Antarctic Edge will make good viewing for science classes of all levels, and ideally inspire a new generation to continue this hardy mission.

On the whole, though, you couldn’t do much better than Monkey Kingdom to get kids invested in learning about, and protecting, the natural world.

It may fall into some conventional paces as a triumph-over-adversity story, but Desert Dancer does manage to movingly convey the chilling, ultimately triumphant experience of Ghaffarian’s struggle for creative expression under a regime that tried to crush it.

The bloodshed is artful, at least.

This ponderous drama from director Kazuaki Kiriya quickly gets weighed down by its own blood-drenched armor.

Though Valderrama gives a standout performance as the avenging Angel, brother of the late Jesus (Kareem Savion), two smaller roles are also worthy of note: Paz de la Huerta as a spacy bartender at Pianos, and J. Bernard Calloway as Dre, a bouncer who’s seen it all, and who can be reliably found eating a healthy salad as he sits outside his nightspot.

Despite James Wan’s capable direction and very game cast, the whole thing goes increasingly wobbly like a bad axle, until it’s just a tangle of metal and bullets and yelling.

Many of the images — and Salgado’s accounts of taking them — are as soul-shattering as they are breathtaking.

It’s refreshing to see a nonwhite lead, and the husky-voiced pop singer is likable as a brave-hearted kid searching for her mother. But man, is there a lot of Rihanna in this movie: She also provides what seems like the entirety of the film’s soundtrack, making it feel like a vanity project (is “vanimation” a thing?).

The very German lack of emotion is so acute it can be hard to tell when Hausner’s playing for laughs, but Friedel is hilariously — if morbidly — tedious as the tortured writer whose pickup line is, “Would you care to die with me?”

Like Cam, Tracers is fun to look at, if not too bright, and even includes a line I can only assume is a winking reference to Lautner’s claim to fame: “There can only be one alpha in every pack.”

This Cinderella is all dressed up with nowhere very interesting to go.

Unlike many working in this genre, Mitchell doesn’t punish young women for having sex: This is a gender-blind demonic delivery vehicle.

Dreadful, misogynist slog of a film.

Only in his early 20s, Zephyr Benson makes a remarkably assured debut as writer, director and star of Straight Outta Tompkins, his tongue-in-cheek title for his past as a middle-class drug dealer in lower Manhattan.

As they’re akin to spectators at a magic show, viewers ought to keep an eye out for what the Merchants of Doubt don’t want us to see.

This is nothing but nasty, misogynist torture porn.

A horror movie with an anti-globalist bent that’s more interesting than its halfhearted scares.

A few university officials talk on camera, but not many do, and it will be fascinating to watch the fallout from this scathing indictment of a system that, the movie claims, has all but encouraged sexual predators to do their worst.

Director Niki Caro, whose 2005 film “North Country” gave creative life to another true story, doesn’t allow this one enough narrative twists; it starts off at point A and heads straight for point B, much like one of its many racing scenes.

Scored by Bruce Hornsby, Lee’s film veers all over the place tonally, juxtaposing scenes of spurting gore with soothing jazz. Hess’ WASP-y mansion, with its huge photo portraits of African warriors, is an interesting study in mashing up race and class stereotypes, though the film’s rambling plot may leave your brain feeling a little mashed, too.

The film never pretends to be other than what it really is: soft-core porn for the ladies, diluted with an “R” rating.

Ryan Reynolds is chillingly perfect as a nice-guy factory worker struggling with schizophrenia and murderous impulses in this tonally wild indie, which is nearly too horrifying to be funny — but not quite.

Ultimately, for the show’s fans, it may not matter if “Sponge Out of Water” shows a hint of mildew. After all, my co-critic’s most enthusiastic note — “Hilarious!” — was written before the lights even dimmed.

I know this is a teen-boy fantasy — it was produced by Michael Bay, after all — but the female characters in Project Almanac are lamely retro, little more than props in short shorts.

Girlhood veers between being a celebration of sisterhood (albeit an occasionally violent sort) and a chronicle of the cycle of poverty.

Son of a Gun, from first-time feature director Julius Avery, begins with an enticingly dark first act in jail, but descends steadily downward into a mass of clichés.

It’s not quite “Once,” but Song One, featuring original music by Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice, captures a similar, unselfconscious beauty in the way music can make sense of big, ungainly emotions — as James puts it, “for three to five whole minutes.”

Director Uberto Pasolini (“Machan”) has a gem in Marsan, a virtuoso actor who plays the role delicately where another might have laid on the pathos too thick.

The Wedding Ringer is not so much a rom-com as an anatomy lesson. And the lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls.

Weirder and more contemplative than many of its time-traveling brethren, Predestination is a stylish head trip. It also marks Australian actor Snook as one to watch, as she demonstrates some serious gender-bending range.

Teen house-arrest thriller Dark Summer gets out ahead of any ripping-off-“Disturbia” talk with an early Shia LaBeouf joke. But its sleepy, hallucinogenic aesthetic is an entirely different — and rather less engaging — style, anyway.

You may well emerge from The Search for General Tso with a hankering for the titular spicy dish.

Director Tom Harper (“War Book”) defaults too often to gotcha scares, which is disappointing.

For piquing kids’ interest in history and nature, you could do worse than this goofy Ben Stiller franchise. But its third installment is more meh than manic, too reliant on wide shots of the ragtag Museum of Natural History cohorts striding down corridors. You get the feeling returning director Shawn Levy is ready to hang it up.

Hate to say it, but this film ain’t half the satire it could have been.

There are a lot of parallels with “Breaking Bad” here: the Southwestern setting, the dorky husband turned criminal, the blond wife and the scene in the carwash. But if you can avoid dwelling on its derivative qualities, After the Fall has its own case to make about how far the middle class has fallen — and continues to slide.

It’s well-executed but familiar territory, with a dearth of jarring moments. Those of us who aren’t friends and family of the crew could use a little wake-up shove here and there.

Heavy on quirk and light on wit, first-time director Gillian Greene’s comedy leans too heavily on the badly wigged Kranz.

Farrell feels like a weak link here, never quite as masterfully manipulative or brutish as the role calls for.

Fogel’s focus is female friendship, and the challenges presented by growing older and pairing up. It all makes for a rocky road, regardless of the romantic rival’s gender.

The film’s slightly confusing ending doesn’t spell anything out, but that’s all right: We’re left sitting in the dark shivering, reassured there are still some directors who can leave us well and truly creeped out.

Yes, it’s gross, and no, it’s not remotely original.

This crowd-funded — and overcrowded — collection of interwoven stories, directed by John Herzfeld, plays like an amateur-acting exercise in which each participant picks a name and a couple of defining props.

From time to time, it works.

The script’s by Robert Ben Garant, also behind last year’s scary-movie spoof “Hell Baby,” and this one teeters right on the edge of laughable, with its V.C. Andrews-like series of goth twists.

From its uninspired, sitcom-y look to its phoned-in dialogue (“I love you plus infinity”; “I love you plus double infinity”) to its creaky plot, Hit by Lightning is anything but electrifying.

As for the magical-realist horns, they make a nice bad-boy look for Radcliffe and a handy plot device, but are never really explained in a satisfactory way. They have the side effect of making anyone who sees them immediately forget them — which I suspect may be the case with this movie as well.

The best thing about the film – which is true of most of his roles – is Rockwell.

First-time feature director Jeff Preiss has a top-notch duo in John Hawkes, as the affable but troubled Joe, and Elle Fanning as his teen daughter, Amy, but neither can really get out from under the film’s heavy-handed tone, a one-note trip down a bleak memory lane.

Like the artificially sweetened junk food it is, this all goes down pretty easily.

Just in time for Mexico’s Day of the Dead holiday comes this gloriously colorful animated musical, which almost (but not quite) makes up in visuals what it lacks in snappy dialogue.

“It’s a little self-congratulatory and light on story,” says one student of another’s film project in Dear White People, which feels like director Justin Simien getting out ahead of inevitable (and accurate) criticism.

Sweet and funny — largely thanks to James Corden in the lead role — it’s never particularly surprising.

It’s not great art (in fact, it’s pretty low-rent CGI), but it’s passably entertaining.

For parents of very young children looking for a weekend distraction, “Color City” is passable fare — and will at least inspire kiddies to finish what they start, coloring-wise.

Perhaps faithful to the spirit of the man, but frustrating if you’re actually curious about the facts.

The considerable charms of Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton elevate this middling rom-com.

Khaou’s film features masterful performances from Whishaw and Cheng, whose dialogue is somehow intensified, rather than diluted, through the third-party voice of the translator. But some emotions, the film suggests, are impossible to adequately articulate in any language.

The Maze Runner isn’t based on a video game, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In it, our hero must lead his comrades through a dingy gray concrete maze while dodging cyborg monsters, and it all looks like every gaming trailer you’ve ever seen.

Curran (“The Painted Veil”) never imposes any additional structure on Davidson’s story, which may test the patience of some viewers. But I found the sprawling, wild visuals in Tracks, and the long silences as the sunburned Robyn traverses some of the world’s least hospitable lands, meditative and moving.

Finally, a post-“Bridesmaids” film that lets Kristen Wiig shine — and brilliantly taps into co-star Bill Hader’s vulnerable side, too.

Director Catherine Gund most successfully depicts the visceral impact of Streb’s work with her footage of the 2012 Olympics.

Kelly & Cal is at its best when focused on Lewis and Weston.

Take note, Lars von Trier: This is how you do a truly funny, subversive movie about a woman’s obsession with the human body and sex.

Schechter’s soul-scored film is impeccably styled for the time period, and its easy pacing reminds me of the gold standard for Leonard adaptations, “Out of Sight.” It’s not that good, but it’s within striking distance.

Compared to another recent teen weepie, “The Fault in Our Stars,” this one comes up wanting. That film’s strong point was the delight its heroine took in detonating romantic clichés; If I Stay seems determined to keep them on life support.

As it stands, there’s little to explain the existence of this confoundingly unfunny film. It’s as if a talented cast (Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler) assembled to make a comedy and at the last minute was told to play everything straight.

In Abuse of Weakness, Breillat, notorious for her sexually explicit films, casts the excellent Isabelle Huppert as her avatar, Maud, to tell the tale.

If Michael Fassbender wears a giant papier-mâché head for most of a film, is he still mesmerizing? Happily, yes.

The Giver is at its best when Bridges expounds on civilization’s lost beauty and savagery; at other times, it’s strewn with implausibility: For a totalitarian society in which everyone is monitored constantly, our hero is able to sneak around an awful lot.

There’s a secret at play in After, which director Pieter Gaspersz communicates via many side-long glances. I won’t give it away, but it’s a fairly far-fetched twist that feels out of place in this realism-based drama.

As About Alex moves toward its conclusion, it devolves into some plot resolutions that were a lot less predictable back in the ’80s.

On the whole, the film would probably be more at home on cable and at a reduced running time. I’d like to see a competition series of the same name, in which rival engineers compete to see who can endure having the hard-driving Cameron for a boss.

Lee may not want to let anyone in, but it’s hard to engage fully with a film that doesn’t seem to want to, either.

Concert sequences are engaging, though I was disappointed not to see any animated flourishes.

This cynical rom-com subgenre has been done to death.

This Disney sequel to 2013’s “Planes” is a lot like flying coach: serviceable, but not trying that hard.

As apocalypse scenarios go, this one feels both retro and commendably topical: Nuclear bombs, remember those? (Also: Edward Furlong, remember him?)

“Gatsby” meets “Gossip Girl” in this outsider-among-the-wealthy story set, like Fitzgerald’s novel, on Long Island.

A refreshingly naturalistic depiction of the dynamic of traveling companionship — at any age.

This pastiche of sitcomy episodes never gels into a plot.

The film doesn’t wallow in grief; it’s a thoughtful and nuanced portrait of a stage of life we often choose not to see.

Despite the dramatic dystopia, performances here are uniformly low-affect, which isn’t helpful given the exposition-heavy dialogue and unremarkable set (though Nick’s extraterrestrial visions have a pleasantly kitschy look). Also puzzling is the fact that the pivotal song is not actually performed by Morissette.

So why isn’t They Came Together more uniformly hilarious? Perhaps it’s that elusive problem of trying to explain why a thing is funny in the first place: Spelling it out deflates the joke.

Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, in his feature debut, achieves effective chills with only eight actors and a living room, intermixing quantum physics (shout-outs range from Schrödinger’s cat to “Sliding Doors”) with the very mundane human tendency toward bad judgment calls in a crisis.

If Think Like a Man Too was a man, he would be the world’s worst date: humorless, shrill, speaking primarily in clichés (“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!”) and absolutely terrified of women.

Like the reanimated corpse of a teen queen, this would-be cult movie looks the part, but has little going on inside.

Writer/director Andrew Levitas needlessly pads this captivating theme with over-used tropes.

As much fun as it is, this all-star tribute is awfully one-note, never questioning Gordon’s seemingly casual habit of befriending only the ultra-famous.

Gregg, who previously directed the very dark comedy “Choke,” never quite settles on a tone; from the opening scenes, in which Molly Shannon plays a neurotic stage mom and Allison Janney a chilly casting agent, it seems he’s going that way again, but a dramatic twist sends the film into less plausible territory.

The jovial, hyperverbal comic has played against type before, but his presence feels like epic miscasting in this underwritten dramedy.

It makes so little sense on-screen that all you can do is nod along vaguely sympathetically at its sheer creative bravado.

Nobody does the rebellious-elder thing as well as Duvall, and whenever he’s center stage in A Night in Old Mexico, this scrappy film from Spanish director Emilio Aragon is entertaining enough.