Without a buttress of cleverness, Cooties is mere freewheeling idiocy.

Director Wes Ball's film is a mad dash from one place to the next, with little time in between for rest, recuperation or plot development.

The acting in Black Mass is tremendous.

Everest is a sprawling mess of a movie, one you feel like could have been great but instead roams all over the place and winds up being just pretty good.

If you’re a major fan of the "Love Live!" world, this is possibly enjoyable. If you’re not, it is shrill, garish, confusing and badly paced, with cheap-looking animation and characters that resemble Walter Keane’s big-eyed waifs.

Muylaert goes for answers and, at times, they may come a little easily for all of the turmoil that leads to them.... But Casé’s performance overwhelms any such quibbles. She is a delight, and thanks in large part to her performance, so is The Second Mother.

Wolf Totem doesn’t feel so much like fully formed narrative film as it does a trumped up National Geographic special on Inner Mongolia eager to make use of shiny new IMAX cameras.

A scary fun-house ride that expertly blends jittery tension and laugh-out-loud humor.

Jason Schwartzman has become, without question, the go-to actor when you want a character with off-putting, even annoying traits, yet need to have the audience side with him just enough not to want to strangle him.

Although this movie isn’t as well-made as Gibney’s best work, like “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” or the Oscar-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side,” it’s plenty interesting, and serves as something of an appetizer for Danny Boyle’s biopic “Steve Jobs,” due Oct. 9.

It's mindless entertainment with enough thrills and chuckles to make the time pass painlessly. Just don't examine anything too closely.

So what drives these men? “Because it’s there” merely scratches the surface. Meru may not answer the question completely — likely nothing can — but it is a thrilling, harrowing attempt.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau never made a movie called Grumpy Old Men Go Camping. If they had, it surely would look a lot like A Walk in the Woods.

What spares Learning to Drive is an awful lot of comedic talent and artistic good will. Clarkson and Kingsley imbue average material with easy charm and wit, clicking onscreen with the smooth platonic chemistry of old friends.

Director Craig Zobel (he made the creepily effective “Compliance”) lets the story unfold in wonderfully hushed fashion.

What Rukun wants, one suspects, is closure. What he gives the rest of us is a face in which to see the pain the butchers caused, a reminder that the architects of a massive tragedy remain present and unrepentant, the personification of the evil men do and a warning that it could happen again.

It’s not as terrible as the premise suggests, thanks to some flourishes on Joseph’s part and an intriguing performance by Wes Bentley. Efron’s absurdly winning persona doesn’t hurt, either.

Bang, boom, bam. That’s about the size of things in No Escape, a movie banking on its admittedly first-rate action drowning out its political tone-deafness.

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is a hit-and-miss affair, easy on the eyes but nothing to write home — or a term paper — about.

It would be unbearable if it weren’t so completely self-aware.

That American Ultra works as well as it does is a testament to its two lead performances.

Newbie director Aleksander Bach handles the project with a competent precision. The film doesn’t rise above the genre and the plot is muddled, but he pulls off the basic elements with a distinctly chilly European style.

Pat and silly, the movie offers a wheezy moral that a buttoned-up American just needs a sensitive Latino and some ethnic cuisine to end the blues.

There was a dark side to this complex man, and while it takes director Daniel Junge a while to get there, he does eventually in Being Evel, his entertaining and sometimes uncomfortable documentary about the daredevil.

[An] enormously entertaining documentary.

Bacon can play just about anything, and he’s having a good time here as a guy not quite smart enough to keep himself out of trouble, but wily enough to try to dig himself out of it. It’s fun to watch.

Marielle Heller’s debut directorial effort is incisive and universal, despite its very specific and detailed setting.

People Places Things is filled with that kind of heart-piercing comedy that makes a viewer cringe and laugh at the same time.