Steve Davis

It’s meant to be thrilling fun, but it never takes off in the way imagined.

Cassel’s feline visage, covered in a velvety layer of fur for most of the movie, doesn’t fare much better. At times, he resembles an angry cast member from Cats rather than the tormented fiend trying to find his human self once again. It’s beastly.

The movie’s disjointed weirdness begs the question: Was Hess ever in the driver’s seat?

Animated films have trended toward a perceptive intelligence in the past few years, but Storks wades in shallow waters most of the time.

The script is replete with filler inserted in the name of “real life”: bad jokes and silly riddles, spontaneous songs, and improvised scenes in which conversations go around in circles.

The Vessel speaks eloquently. It’s a testament to the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Any adult attending this film with a pre-K offspring may need to reassure the child afterward that little Tigger back home won’t devour him in his sleep. No kidding. They’re that scary. The Wild Life is an ailurophobe’s nightmare.

Director Lane and screenwriter Thom Stylinski take a lighthearted, folksy approach to telling Brinkley’s life story, using fairly unsophisticated animation and twangy vocalizations in the spirit of the man’s carefully created image.

The entire plot exists for the sole purpose of the yawning revelation in the film’s last five minutes.

As in Richard Linklater’s lovely "Before Sunrise," the film’s principal pleasure comes from watching two people connect as they get to know each other over the course of several hours.

For the incomparable Streep, it’s yet another performance in high C.

The dialogue is enough to make your hair stand on end.

This weighty French/Polish production is chock-full of moral dilemmas borne from its unthinkable scenario. At times, it’s not an easy experience.

Up until now, Roberts and Franco have been second-tier actors in the industry food chain, but their first-rate performances in this better-than-average genre flick exude something called charisma. After this film, the two of them may graduate from watchers to players.

For a while, the freeing experience of the clan’s nonconformity gets tamped down, and the movie appears headed toward some kind of moralized conclusion. Once back on familiar ground, however, Captain Fantastic rights itself toward as happy an ending as possible, without too much compromise.

If the movie isn’t so fabulous, should die-hard fans who can quote the show by heart see it? Absolutely. (The gays are sure to love it.)

This is a guy who marched to the beat of his own drum, even one that’s got two spoked wheels and some handlebars.

Scatologically speaking, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is best described as one of those summer movie turds: It passes easily and then disappears with a single flush. It’s crap any way you look at it, though there are less pleasant ways to spend your time on a day marked by triple-digit temperatures.

In the end, trying to compartmentalize this movie in some neat fashion is folly. This is Todd Solondz and, refreshingly enough, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

This young actor is good, very good in fact. Watching him become beautifully alive in Viva is this little gem’s greatest pleasure.

It’s a movie from which you can’t look away, no matter how hard you may try.

While the underdog element of this tale is emotionally gratifying, it’s the humanity on unadorned display here that will move you beyond words.

It’s like being haunted by outsized chimney sweeps that never bathe. And for the most part, it’s about that scary.

In a film that otherwise prides itself on the subtlety of its anecdotal narrative and character development, the diagnosis is jolting, and about as welcome as some of the unsought counsel that streams from Marnie’s mouth.

For most of the film, Bateman, the director, manages to bring out the two principals’ anguish without resorting to sentimentality, until the unsatisfying last quarter of the film.

With its unconventional take on pet sounds, Keanu is refreshingly silly, an unabashed mix of humor and violence topped off by a big dollop of cuteness.

When it rolls, Barbershop: The Final Cut lets its hair down like few others do.

The studio’s 1967 version of Kipling’s classic tales (the current film qualifies as a remake of sorts) softened the source’s edges a bit, but it offered a New Orleans jazz-infused score unlike anything in the company’s previous animated features. The new Jungle Book retains the two best songs, although their inclusion may strike the unfamiliar as clunky and unexpected.

Admittedly, the original had its unruly moments, but there’s little to no discipline here. The storyline goes in six different directions, and the actors are unleashed in an apparent free-for-all as they vie for center stage at the Parthenon.

As the goofily endearing Doris, Field is perfect. She makes this movie work.

As Christy, Garner gives an earnest performance, her perpetually worried expression put to good use here as the Beams grapple with the unimaginable possibility of losing Anna.

Avoid it like the plagues.

In Triple 9 and so many other films today, the twists and turns of the contemporary thriller have become a Gordian knot that audiences are not invited to untangle. You may rightfully ask: Where’s the fun in that?

The movie is as lifeless as a mannequin until Ferrell appears near the end as the absurdly coiffed villain Jacobim Mugatu.

It may not sound like much of a storyline, but there’s a subtle beauty in the ability of human compassion to cure one’s shortcomings.

Given the likely reception to this movie, it’s unlikely there will be a sixth wave anytime soon.

The snap of a twig, the rustle of a branch – that’s about as scary as it gets in The Forest, a supernatural horror movie afraid of its own shadow.

At its best, Joy celebrates the passage of a demoralized woman who finds the steel in her spine. At its worst, it panders in the name of female empowerment, occasionally delivering moments of pseudo-inspiration that ring so falsely it’s difficult to hear anything else.

The characterizations are sincere, but overly familiar.

The movie simply trudges along, tirelessly making its rounds, just like its holy sister walking impoverished streets with grim purpose.

If you’re yearning to take a sentimental journey, Brooklyn is the perfect destination.

It’s a frustrating thing to unsnarl. Straddling the thorny fence of dramedy, Love the Coopers is a sometimes too serious, often not funny entry in this year’s tra-la-la movie sweepstakes.

The comic strip’s late creator Charles M. Schulz would undoubtedly approve of The Peanuts Movie, given his progeny have ensured the film remains true to his artistic and humanist vision.

Sure, Peeples has a nice (if unmemorable) voice, but the vapid storyline with fantastic overtones transports Jem and the Holograms into another dimension, one that’s utterly flat. Control. Alt. Delete.

At best, Goosebumps is a who’s who in the Stine literary oeuvre, featuring characters who were terrifying on paper but rendered toothless here.

For the most part, Spielberg appears content to allow the story (admittedly, a tad bit long) to do the talking, though he goes badly off-track in the sappy ending reminiscent of a Fifties sitcom’s notions of hierarchy within the American family. Given the Spielberg film canon, it was inevitable. The guy just can’t help himself.

Both Farmiga and Akerman emotionally connect in the film, which culminates in an ultimate act of maternal sacrifice more moving than you might imagine. Finally! A slasher movie with both brains and heart, both intact.

While there are a few loose ends in Drew Goddard’s screenplay, which is faithful to but necessarily less detailed than its source, the film is a triumph of storytelling, a tribute to the power of the crowd-pleaser.

Filmmakers Boden and Fleck don’t appear interested in eliciting your full-out sympathy for these low-rollers, though the happyish ending seems somewhat a sellout (albeit a satisfactory one). Who’s to blame them? After all, everybody loves a winner.

In video segments scarier than any couch-jumping antics on a talk show, actor Tom Cruise salutes the organization’s Napoleonic chairman David Miscavige like a soldier in an army of darkness, and rambles on about a world free of suppressive persons like he’s auditioning for the loony bin. One thing is clear in Going Clear: The man has taken one super-big gulp of the Kool-Aid.

This is a movie you feel deeply in the pit of your stomach. Sometimes, it literally hurts to watch it.

It appears that this franchise has hit a dead end, running on nothing but fumes.

A remarkable documentary in its own right.

It keeps its distance in the emotional depiction of its relationships, particularly the friendships among the Valley Boy quartet.

No talking heads here, just Marlon in all his magnificent complexity. For any cineaste, it’s a mind-blowing experience.

Predictable but never coy about it, After Words speaks to the fateful connection that sometimes occurs between two people under the most improbable circumstances.

The not-so-fresh Prince charts a familiar cautionary tale about the bad choices economically disadvantaged young men sometimes make early in life, but to its credit, it seldom feels hackneyed or cliched.

There’s something refreshing about the old-fashioned way in which it entertains, a mix of silly slapstick and sight gags combined with a gentle heart.

It’s hard to completely accept the up-and-coming Wolff as a total geek with no social or love life. With those puppy-dog brown eyes and enticing grin, the guy exudes intelligence and charm from top to bottom of his lanky frame. Up until now, the actor has shined in secondary roles, but in Paper Towns he proves he may be the next prom king.

Movies like The Vatican Tapes are by nature sloppy and derivative, seeking to evoke a thrill that’s long gone.

Tangerine’s greatest accomplishment, however, lies with director Baker, who filmed the movie using an iPhone 5S. It’s an amazing achievement – the fluidity of the camerawork is exhilarating at times, the intimacy of the close-ups sometimes unsettling.

While Manglehorn eschews the traditional third-act redemption you’ve seen ad nauseam in films that neatly wrap things up right before the end credits roll, it’s nevertheless refreshingly optimistic about people’s ability to change. For any of us entering life’s third act, hope springs eternal.

In the end, the preordained ménage à quatre that culminates the evening’s funny games titillates neither mentally nor erotically. Without any such catharsis, the whole thing feels like a big tease. No doubt what The Overnight could use at this point is another happy ending.

The jokes fly in the college intramural football comedy Balls Out like a fourth-down Hail Mary thrown deep toward the end zone: unpredictable, risky, and just a little desperate. But when they hit their marks – and make no mistake, the number of completed passes here is high – they score big laughs in the most unconventionally funny, weirdly absurd movie of the year.

Perhaps the film’s most telling moments, however, are wordless ones in which no actor appears. They’re the bird’s-eye views of American tableaux – suburban tract houses, elementary schools, interstate highways – that mimic similar sky-high perspectives just before a drone fires its missile.

The entire movie has a creepy aura of self-consciousness. In addition to the aforementioned definitions of aloha, the word also doubles as a coming-and-going greeting in the Hawaiian vernacular. Here, it regrettably signifies the possible goodbye to a once-promising career of a filmmaker who had us at hello.

That’s the problem with this well-meaning but ultimately hollow film romance: You don’t see it; you don’t get it.

Nothing in the film remotely resembles any location between San Antonio and Dallas, the beginning and end points of its labored trajectory. For someone in Fresno or Akron, this may not be a big deal, but for those of us in these here parts, it’s a damned distraction.

For all its unsubtle sentimentality (including a you-can-see-it-from-a-mile-away plot twist), it remains unclear whether Little Boy intends to celebrate the conviction of belief or to mock it. It’s an unfortunate confusion that permanently stunts its growth.

Something this bad can’t help but be good.