Steve Persall

For those viewers who've watched Stewart's recent progression in offbeat films like Camp X-Ray and Still Alice — when she held her own opposite Academy Award winner Julianne Moore — it shouldn't be a surprise. Clouds of Sils Maria matches Stewart with another Oscar honoree, Juliette Binoche, with equally impressive results.

It's all more extravagant yet less charming then before.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a relentless marvel of sense-pummeling stunts and gargoyle horror that needs to take a breather once in a while.

The movie is as quietly assured as its heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, gracefully played by Carey Mulligan.

Black's performance is the key to making The D-Train more than just another sophomoric bromance. The wild-eyed mania is still evident, but channeled through a filter of pity.

What really offends about Hot Pursuit is its lazy approach to comedy, and so many short cuts making bad jokes possible.

As usual, psychological anguish is a key element of Marvel heroes. Age of Ultron boasts a cast of actors that "serious" filmmakers would kill for, so the gravitas they're capable of conveying amid such outlandish fantasy is the franchise's stealth advantage.

In the end, this is a pleasant parable, brimming with Rockwellian visuals and homespun decency. Harder hearts will dismiss it as corny and manipulative, which it is. Sometimes there's nothing wrong with that.

Like its heroine, The Age of Adaline is afraid of its emotions, and stuck flat-footed in time.

Garland's original screenplay brims with intelligence, unafraid to let characters speak over our heads. Yet it remains a pulpy delight, due largely to its uniquely mad scientist.

True Story may someday be used in both acting and journalism classes, the former for what students should do, and the latter for what they shouldn't.

What is off limits to steal when everything is available, not only in a digital age but clacking through a projector? Isn't fame always at someone else's expense? Even Baumbach borrows, notably from Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. Fair, and funny enough.

Furious 7 is so entertaining that you don't notice Dwayne Johnson is missing from action much of the time, only that he kills it when he shows up.

This is a story to make blood boil and change demanded, so future waves of incoming freshmen — even that term is male-centric — won't have their dreams ruined.

Danny Collins isn't the most artistic or surprising movie, and Fogelman's appropriation of Lennon's music to explain what's obvious gets stale. But it does contain a wonderful performance by Pacino, when it was debatable if we'd ever say that again.

It Follows has an impressively sustained sense of dread, less explicit gore than measured tension. Mitchell slyly inverts the conventions of dead-meat teenager flicks, although not with wink-wink comedy like the Scream series. This movie is serious about creeping out viewers, and Mitchell is just artistic enough about it to create a minor masterpiece.

A drab dream with squirmy-cuddly aliens, floating space bubbles and too many Rihanna musical interludes.

Get Hard becomes an increasingly unpleasant comedy, wasting two very funny stars in a barrage of prison rape gags, lazy stereotypes, toilet stall indignities and insincere acceptance of people already marginalized in movies.

Flawed as it is, The Cobbler retains interest throughout, chiefly because Sandler isn't bad in a rare semi-dramatic performance.

The Gunman becomes a highly capable shoot-em-up but not much else.

Schwentke keeps things lively and loud, with a mildly alarming body count, smashing glass and gunfire.

Gabe Polsky's movie about the dynastic Soviet Union hockey team is surprisingly light on its skates, despite being a Cold War history lesson and conventional sports documentary.

This Cinderella is achingly old-fashioned, with scant humor, a regressive heroine and godmother effects that aren't special.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a downgrade from the first, doing lots of thing wrong that 2012's sleeper hit did right.

The movie's glaring problem is the design and execution of Chappie, whose look is unremarkable except for a pair of polymer rabbit ears ready for meme posterity.

In spite of its incessant piling on of double-crosses and triple dog dares, Focus is a pleasant change from Academy Award seriousness. It's reassuring to see Smith resurrect the charisma that After Earth stripped away, and nice to see Robbie do anything, anytime.

Kingsman is as violently kinetic as anything Vaughn has made, a list including Kick-Ass (the good one) and Craig's U.S. breakthrough, Layer Cake. But Kingsman is also wildly uneven, often slowing its roll to stiff-upper-lip pacing necessary (or not) to create a new British secret agent movie mythology.

Two Days, One Night is deceptively slight of drama; it's simply a procession of real moments encountered by a simple character deserving more happiness than life allows, fleshed out by an extraordinary actor.