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.