It’s predictable. It’s saccharine. It’s silly. It’s also, thanks to the consummate talents of Stamp and Redgrave, occasionally a joy.

White House Down aims to be a low-brow slab of mindless summer fun. Most of the time, it comes pretty close to hitting the bull’s eye.

Although not everyone in the cast is as comfortable with the dialogue as Acker, for whom it seems natural, there is a clear love for the material here in every performance, in every shot. It’s not stuffy or remote. It’s fun.

It’s fun while it lasts, but ultimately forgettable, kind of like the people they stole from.

A by-the-numbers thriller that wouldn’t even have made for a particularly good hourlong episode of a weekly crime procedural, never mind an honest-to-God feature-length movie.

It doesn’t offer anything new to the genre, but chugs along pretty well until the plot holes begin to pile up.

It’s cute, funny, exciting to look at but not quite magical.

Even as big-budget blockbusters go, this is a hard movie to connect with.

These are characters for whom true belief in a cause has probably become impossible; they know how much that costs. Marsh does a compelling job of illustrating that for the rest of us.

You certainly won’t find a lot of films like Sightseers. To call it a dark comedy is to undersell “dark” and oversell “comedy.” A very British affair, it exists to suggest laughter more than induce it.

It is a smart, well-acted drama, and another chance for Marling to exercise her unique talents, creating intriguing characters on the page and the screen.

If you like your summer-movie explosions huge, Man of Steel delivers. But it seems as if it might have delivered even more than a glorious noise.

The Is the End is a different take on the R-rated comedy, a raunchy laugh riot that actually gives you a little to think about.

Sometimes, a movie just has a magic about it, something that makes you look past implausibility and plot holes and whatever other shortcomings it may have and leaves you feeling good just for having seen it.

What a great movie.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is at once an awkward mingling of two complex life stories and a gripping, necessary look at how information is gathered, shared and, yes, stolen.

The Purge is one of those unimaginative horror flicks that depend on skreeky music and sudden appearances to startle, but never actually frighten, the audience. The characters are undeveloped, the twists clumsily telegraphed and unsurprising.

The Internship has some funny moments. The cast is too talented for it to come up completely dry. But for a movie about a place so filled with ambitious climbers, it is far too lazy.

As a film, it’s like science fiction, a visit to Planet Obscenely Wealthy. It is weirdly compelling.

Though everyone is older this time around, and the themes are darker, harder to enjoy, the conversation is just as engrossing. So is the film.

Now You See Me is a movie about magic, but its most astonishing trick is how little mileage it gets out of a stellar cast.

The jolts are of the jump-out-from-behind-the-door variety; you can see them coming from a long way off, too. Shyamalan seems to no longer have the confidence to let audiences figure things out or the patience to allow them to.

The film wraps up too neatly to be believed, not leaving questions unanswered so much as failing to ask them.

When you watch the movie, you’ll know more about these characters than they know about each other. But Moshe, who also wrote the script, brings the truth to light in dramatically satisfying ways.

There is no particularly cathartic climax to Frances Ha. Instead there is a more realistic depiction of Frances’ growth. Like Gerwig’s performance, it’s natural, it’s realistic, perfectly believable.

The film looks terrific, with a fantastical forest coming to 3-D life. Swooping birds, flying arrows and more make good use of the technology. But the best films use technology as a storytelling device, not as a substitute for story itself.

It’s hard to get excited about any of the on-screen happenings, because director Justin Lin can’t seem to hit the right notes.

It's an unnecessary movie, with some funny parts and a few callbacks to the original, as if visiting Las Vegas for a bit might bring back some of the original magic. It doesn't, but at least this time it seems like they're trying. A little, at least.

Where Assayas’ film really shines is in capturing that feeling, when adolescence is stumbling awkwardly toward adulthood, that the most important thing in the history of the world is the thing that is occupying your thoughts and emotions at this particular moment.

Even if its stunted ambitions come as a disappointment, Pieta nevertheless is an expertly crafted thriller and a fine addition to East Asian revenge cinema.

The film is anchored by a searing, incredibly intense performance by Michael Shannon, whose remorselessness as a hit man is as relentless as Shannon’s portrayal of him.

The dialogue is particularly bad, which is odd because the Duplass crowd typically excels at natural-sounding dialogue.

Star Trek Into Darkness is a giddy homage to what’s come before it, but it also at least tries to go boldly where ... well, you know.

The ending is sick enough to make it almost worth the wait. Key word: almost.

Ultimately, At Any Price isn’t terrible, but you can tell that’s hardly the endorsement the filmmakers were seeking.

The ambitious visual stylings don’t do enough to buoy a film that lacks a certain soaring spirit. If the adaptation is serviceable, it’s also dull — a disappointing fate for a story that’s anything but.

Mira Nair has crafted a handsome but clubfooted film that lurches through predictable hot spots. It most disappoints as a thriller, the flashbacks and voiceovers and romantic entanglements so dominating the proceedings you forget that someone is bound and gagged in real time.

By the end of the ride, we’ll see glimpse of happiness, sadness, joy, heartbreak, maybe even tragedy, if cell phone-shot recollections are to be believed. All bases are covered, in other words, in one late-afternoon ride, a ride Gondry and his cast will make you want to take.

The elements are all there. They’re just thrown together in haphazard fashion. A funny scene here, an attempt at a touching scene there, toss, repeat randomly, the end.

The acting is really good, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby. But boy, with a running time of nearly 21/2 hours and a near-constant bombardment of visual overstimulation, it’s exhausting.

An amateurish-looking disaster that makes you wonder if it isn’t some kind of in-joke, a stunt to see how bad a movie can be and still find its way into theaters.

The film is not without its flaws, but the story it tells is both terrifying and inspiring.

The movie is a pretty humdrum affair when it focuses on humans, even when actors are playing characters based on real people.

Simon Killer is a beautifully made look at ugliness and brutality, the kind of oxymoronic exercise that fascinates some and repels others.

Downey is as funny as ever, if not more so. He ensures that Iron Man 3 is a solid installment in the franchise, and helps to make it seem, at least for a time, that it might be something more.

There’s a certain kinetic charm to the first half of the movie, a freewheeling silliness to these outsized characters that makes you curious to see just how wrong things will go. But as the weightlifters’ plot spirals out of control, so does the movie’s.

The story is intriguing enough to make Mud a good movie. Led by Sheridan and McConaughey, the performances make it something more.

One would expect a film about French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir to look beautiful, to be shot in warm, sumptuous colors. And one would not be disappointed in Gilles Bourdos’ Renoir.

In To the Wonder [Malick] doesn’t give us enough to work with, leaving us with a thing of great beauty, but not much more.

It’s all a neat trick. Or exercise. Or brain-teaser. Whatever you want to call it, Upstream Color is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. But once you have seen it, once isn’t going to be enough

There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.

Quirky, funny and a little claustrophobic (by design), it’s confident enough in what it’s trying to accomplish to take the chance on the title. And what he’s trying to accomplish is ambitious.

As cautionary tales go, Disconnect is a pretty good one, but it’s not really a whole lot more than that.

It’s a juicy story squandered by the poor telling. It’s got all the trappings of a good ol’-fashioned Merchant Ivory pic — lush locales, exotic period trappings — but none of the soul.

Some of the imagery is memorable, in a twisted-horror kind of way. Zombie has no trouble scaring up atmosphere. But other scenes are ridiculous, unintentionally funny, particularly one he builds up to ominously, only to give us a silly payoff.

The story probably doesn’t stand up to heavy scrutiny, and at times the effort by star and director shows. But at least the effort is there.

It is undeniably fun to see such a great movie sliced and diced and put back together in so many ways. Too often when we see a movie we like, we just say it’s good, recommend it to someone and leave it at that.

Yes, in the end, Trance is pretty manipulative. But again, with Boyle behind the camera, it’s a more satisfying experience than it might have been. If we’re going to be manipulated, it might as well be by a master.

Long-winded, tiresome and free of any tension, The Company You Keep will ultimately be remembered as a Redford vanity project, in every sense of the word.

Helgeland has given us an impressive introduction to one of the most important men in U.S. history. But you can’t help wanting more.

The risk of telling three distinct-but-related stories is that all may not be of equal quality. That’s the case here, as the movie starts strong but gets progressively weaker, particularly in the third act.

There is nothing about Evil Dead as groundbreaking as Raimi’s films (particularly the first two). But it’s smarter and better done than a lot of what’s come since those movies were made, which is to say there is at least some thought behind the killings.

This is not an anti-religious polemic, though it easily could have gone that way. Instead it is a much more thoughtful film and in some ways more troubling. No one is trying to do the wrong thing here, but, as with most things in life, it becomes increasingly hard to know what the right thing might be.

It’s nearly impossible to sit through The Sapphires without a smile on your face. It’s a little shallow, sure, but, as with the girls’ troubles, when they open their mouths to sing everything feels like it’s going to be all right.

The story is good enough to tell itself, and the filmmakers should have let it.

What makes 56 Up, like the “Up” films before it, so remarkable is how it puts these stories together, giving us an ensemble of characters as interesting as any in a scripted drama.

Fichtner is always good; just trying to sort out his accent here is kind of fun. Plotnick is the key, however. He plays it straight, even as the world around him grows weirder by the minute. Often he seems confused by the proceedings, which is fitting: Join the club, pal. But we’re having a better time of it than he is.

There is a lot of yelling and emoting and it all gets strident very quickly — as in, the first 10 minutes. Hogan keeps everything self-consciously quirky, with lots of bright primary colors all over the place, but it feels like wild overkill.

Fanning is nearly perfect as Ginger navigates choppier waters than most teens have to. There is not a false note in her performance; no matter how melodramatic things become, everything about Ginger remains genuine.

Dumb fun can be, well, fun. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is way too much of the former and not nearly enough of the latter.

The movie, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer of “Twilight” fame and directed by Andrew Niccol, is just kind of dumb. Like the more famous books and movies, about a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf and a human girl, it often plays like a teenage girl’s idea of how literary romances play out.

Admission is pleasant enough. Even when off a bit, the talent of the cast assures that. But it’s still a disappointment. You might say it, ahem, doesn’t make the grade.

If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?

It’s engaging at times and wonderful to look at, but feels like it’s on the cusp of something bigger. But whatever that bigger thing is, it never arrives.

A popular topic for debate is whether television or movies are better right now. Movie defenders are not going to want to use Dorfman in Love to bolster their argument.

What stays with you is Franco, one of the more enigmatic actors around, going way over the top yet grounding his performance in … something. Whatever it is, it’s more interesting than all the wet T-shirt contests in the world, and it makes Spring Breakers worth watching.

The jokes only make up for the pedestrian plot for so long. There was a time when animated fare with generic stories sufficed. But now we expect more from them, because they have, pardon the pun, evolved. The Croods, like its title family, hasn’t.

Old Goats is a nice little slice of life, even if it’s a (partly) fictional one.

Overall the film never finds its footing, with its awkward shifts in tone accentuating the unease. There’s something a little off, and it’s Carell. We want to like him in comedies. It’s a big part of what’s made him a star. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone never really gives us the chance.

There is something immensely rewarding about being in the hands of a director whose confidence is such that he can lead us to uncomfortable places and we’ll go eagerly along for the ride, just to see where it leads.

Like Someone in Love is not a complicated story, but in Kiarostami’s telling, it is a rich one, and a rewarding one, too.

There’s a lot to be angry about. And though Rosebraugh shines a light on plenty of jaw-dropping corruption, it plays out like a shrill rallying cry without catharsis for the already initiated.

Dominik Moll downplays the overtly scandalous nature of the story, at least for a while, with a leisurely pace heavy on imagery. He’s made a beautiful-looking film that portends disaster. And disaster arrives, eventually. It just takes its time getting there.

There’s far too little of MacArthur’s strutting on display. Granted, that’s not the movie Webber was making. But you kind of wish it was.

This trip isn’t so notable. It’s not bad. Some bits are enjoyable. But ultimately, other than some genuinely impressive visuals, it never makes a compelling-enough case to justify its existence.

As an analysis of the causes of migration, it is one-dimensional and unconvincing. But as a social history of Latinos in America, it is provocative and fascinating. And as an indictment of decades of economic injustice and covert military action committed in the name of freedom, it is devastating.

Barsky’s film is light on biographical detail before Koch’s first term began, in 1978. That’s probably fitting. Koch obviously lived for the job.

Herzog’s longing for the ideological purity in which these lives are lived, free of paperwork and bureaucracy, taxes and technology, drives the film, which lacks an overall story arc. And that longing makes the title’s veracity a little suspect.

Using the interviews along with news footage and occasional re-enactments, Moreh conducts a kind of primer in the organization’s history, which is, in its own way, a history of modern Israel. It’s fascinating.

One reason it works so well: The film always looks believable, and it’s easy to get wrapped into Singer’s fairy-tale world.

The lyrical book is filled with touches of magical realism. On the other hand, the movie is sorely lacking in both magic and realism. It’s all very empty and blah.

Although Johnson performs admirably in the drama-heavy role — far better than many of his action-hero colleagues would manage — John Matthews is a character as boring as his name.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

Safe Haven plays out less like a love story than it does a two-hour audition tape Julianne Hough commissioned to land a lucrative lip-gloss-modeling contract.

Beautiful Creatures rises above the rabble thanks to an eminently watchable cast and a sharp screenplay by writer-director Richard LaGravenese.

While some of the sequels have been entertaining enough, A Good Day to Die Hard signals that it may be a better day for John McClane to retire.

What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in Lee’s performance. He is effectively stern as the king. More importantly, he makes Ha-seon funny and movingly genuine.

The whole film is an exercise in trust and the lack thereof. In the end, it’s a kind of horror film, really, a reminder that these sorts of things were endured by so many for so long, with hope an unlikely ally.