Tom Russo

The motley crew’s repartee makes for comedy that’s surprisingly consistent, yet freewheeling and sharp enough to pinball from Kevin Bacon to Jackson Pollock and back.

Green and his cast deliver a wonderful surprise. Echo himself, a generically precious alien, is the least of it. The funny, moving, authentic bond among the kids in the movie is the unadvertised draw.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 recaptures those lyrical highs. But returning writer-director Dean DeBlois also aims to layer on more poignancy for Baruchel and his castmates to play. At points, we’re left feeling a little detached.

While this is Jolie’s show, obviously — and she’s terrifically arch — the surprising dearth of other compelling characters doesn’t offer much distraction when things get off track.

Funny thing, though: The sunnier that Barrymore gets in her scenes with Sandler, the more the iffy elements and leaden bits seem to just melt away.

Best, probably, to appreciate the movie for what Slattery, Hoffman, and the cast do most effectively: craft a pervasive atmosphere of tired people trudging through tired circumstances that only seem to grow more, well, tiring.

An uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments. But the movie can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us.

This is mythology that’s famously transportive in every sense, but the animators struggle to take us anywhere truly captivating, or even clearly defined.

The thematic stuff, while well-intentioned, is also clunky, and ultimately beside the point. Action, obviously, is what you’re after.

As with all of Disneynature’s features, there’s astonishing documentary work on display in Bears — but a leaner, less conspicuously structured view of the wild might have had even greater impact.

The film was technically astonishing and yet brazenly simple.

It’s fun in stretches, but also busily forced.

The animals are so magically entertaining to watch here (helped by some gently mischievous narrative assists), the educational treatment is a fun time in its own right.

The well-worn plot basics are dressed up nicely by the film’s consistently clever humor, as well as a celebrity cameo roster that’s stacked even by Muppet standards.

In the film’s sharpest visual sequence, they land in ancient Egypt, with the filmmakers entertainingly cribbing from “Indiana Jones” and “The Wizard of Oz” to get them out of tight spots.

It’s a brutal bit of screen poetry that’s matched too infrequently by the aching human stories director Fedor Bondarchuk is so anxious to tell.

Once again, the most resonant drama here is all about conveying a self-loathing born of inescapable circumstances.

Anderson’s stab at rendering the Mount Vesuvius catastrophe with a 3-D “Titanic” gloss.

Eckhart doesn’t really do any of that classic grunting as Frankenstein 2.0, but maybe he should have.

The plot doesn’t take clever turns, the visual thrills aren’t all that thrilling, and you’re ultimately left to get your heist-movie kicks elsewhere.

Hart’s clowning here is that rare case where louder is, in fact, funnier.

Stallone and De Niro simply don’t generate enough combative spark to make this anything more than an amiably mediocre diversion.

However well-intentioned the movie may be, it spills over with flat cutesy humor, making a slog out of an experience that should be filled with wonder.

Boston University product Gary Fleder (“Kiss the Girls”) directs the action with grungy efficiency, and the movie does hook us with a certain lurid anticipation of just how far things might escalate.

Frozen could also leave its mark as the next step in the Disney Princess feminist revisionism championed by last year’s “Brave.” Where that film staunchly pushed a men-don’t-define-me theme throughout, here it’s the requisite fairy tale ending that gets tweaked.

At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.

A scene between Yoni and Fahed in the pilot’s makeshift holding cell is a microcosm of everything that’s right about the movie, and not quite right.

This one has more in common with Scott’s “Thelma & Louise” in the memorable way it escalates, inevitably but also unexpectedly, into a spin through wilder country, and a meditation on bigger themes.