Sisters has a patchily funny first act but unleashes pure comedic chaos once the party gets started.

Despite The Danish Girl’s lack of specificity regarding what motivates Einar’s transformation into Lili Elbe, the film is still quite lovely. Its compositions are lovely to look at, and the performances engaging.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip has sporadic laughs for the under-10 set and absolutely nothing for the poor parents sitting next to them.

The trouble comes, and not just for Fassbender, when it’s time to tackle the actual text. The toil of it is exhaustingly felt. The lines are spoken, but their weight sometimes is as vaporous as that Scottish fog.

The characterizations are sincere, but overly familiar.

Dougherty appears determined to work his way through the underbelly of our most cherished seasonal festivities. Plus, it’s an extremely welcome change of pace from the “found footage” barrage of the past 10 years.

Director Howard, his actors, and indeed the entire salty sweep of the film are all aided tremendously by visual-effects supervisor Jody Johnson and his team’s spectacular combination of live action and flawless, awe-inspiring CGI creations, chief among them the great, white whale.

The religious charlatans who are the primary characters in Don Verdean are ripe for comic deflation, but the film’s unsteady tone has no discernible target.

Chi-Raq constantly shifts tones from comedy to drama and back again, while most of its dialogue is delivered in rhyming couplets. The transitions can sometimes be bumpy, but never when Samuel L. Jackson pops up as nattily dressed and off-color one-man Greek chorus.

This time out, Nakashima plays it fast, loose, and seriously fucked-up with a father-daughter tale of Tokyo woe that makes Paul Schrader’s "Hardcore" look like a picnic.

Sergio Leone and John Ford would likely both recognize Nowar’s film as an echo of their own Monument Valley adventures.

The movie simply trudges along, tirelessly making its rounds, just like its holy sister walking impoverished streets with grim purpose.

Creed isn’t a complete TKO, but it goes all 12 rounds with vitality and flourish.

Daniel Radcliffe cleans up nicely as Igor, the man behind the madman who makes the monster in this, the 60th (thereabouts) film to adapt or riff on Mary Shelley’s prescient 1818 sci-fi/horror novel. Happily, director Paul McGuigan, working from a script by Max Landis, takes the story in some new directions by choosing to retell the tale from the perspective of the famed hunchback.

Mostly Legend just lurches.

The Good Dinosaur may not be as revolutionary as 1914’s “Gertie the Dinosaur,” but as Jurassic World already demonstrated this year, we never tire of these prehistoric critters.

Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot

Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.

Julia Roberts is the only central character whose appearance is drastically different in the two time periods, and it remains to be seen if the pretty woman with the million-dollar smile will be accepted as a character bearing a pinched face and dead eyes or whether it will seem like stunt casting despite a solid performance.

This “one crazy night” taps out at lightly kooky; there’s nothing here that gets within striking distance of the sheer weirdness of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" or the darkness of "After Hours", to name two genre stablemates.

This concluding chapter is a solid culmination of a franchise that has had its ups and downs. Lawrence’s superb performance grounds the film, as she oscillates between badass archer and increasingly disenfranchised political pawn, and mercifully the late Hoffman’s CGI scenes are kept to a minimum.

This movie won’t be for everyone; you’ll need to dive back into European arthouse cinema from the Sixties to find anything quite like it.

If you’re yearning to take a sentimental journey, Brooklyn is the perfect destination.

Might be more engaging were it not for the melodrama heavily larded into the screenplay (cobbled together by numerous writers).

It’s a frustrating thing to unsnarl. Straddling the thorny fence of dramedy, Love the Coopers is a sometimes too serious, often not funny entry in this year’s tra-la-la movie sweepstakes.

Love is a maddeningly myopic film, mainly due to Murphy's squarely white-male heteronormative experience.

Room is ultimately not something you’d readily call enjoyable, but it is a cathartic and provocative reminder that life is full of possibilities and outcomes.

Despite the vividness of the movement and the philosophical underpinnings of the cause and its tactical shifts, Suffragette unfolds in a sequentially predictable manner.

A drab, anemic machine, Spectre, may bring the spectacle, but it lacks a soul. Someone get Idris Elba on the phone.

The comic strip’s late creator Charles M. Schulz would undoubtedly approve of The Peanuts Movie, given his progeny have ensured the film remains true to his artistic and humanist vision.

Director Catherine Hardwicke doesn’t need that easily-cut path through long grass; she already has a willing cast and story to get to the guts-splaying.

With this kind of competition doc, a filmmaker has to be incredibly savvy and soothsaying in selecting his subjects early on: They have to be both charismatic enough to hold the camera’s gaze and competitive enough to advance to the final rounds. In both respects, Baijnauth struck gold with his five baristas.

Solomon’s skills as a raconteur, the employees’ unabashed love for their work, and the constant stream of rock music playing in the background advance the film into something much more than a talking-heads documentary.

Sure, Peeples has a nice (if unmemorable) voice, but the vapid storyline with fantastic overtones transports Jem and the Holograms into another dimension, one that’s utterly flat. Control. Alt. Delete.

Still, "The Haunting" these films are not.

It is an unabashedly good-natured film that doesn’t ram its religious ideology down your throat.

Writer/director James Vanderbilt...sticks to Mapes’ version of the truth, and the film serves as a valedictory for Mapes and Rather. Still, the movie never negates the truth’s other strands, while also showing what a human profession journalism is.

Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan never completely go as far as they might have, satirically speaking.

There’s never any doubt that redemption is the end-game for Jones, but the claim for his saving is weak sauce; the case against him has been too emphatically, if unintentionally, argued.

The German film Victoria gives off a lustrous intensity. Filmed all in one take in pre-dawn Berlin, the film is a technical marvel inset with small jewels.

Bone Tomahawk is not your typical Western retread, to be sure. If someone had told me that it was adapted from one of Joe R. Lansdale’s genre-hopping horror stories I would have believed it. Kudos then to director Zahler, who on his very first film, buries that g--damn tomahawk deep in the audience’s memory.

Bruce Willis shows up, in full Bruce “yippee-ki-yay, mofo” Willis mode, to little effect, and while Hudson’s sassy camp follower is a hoot, there are just too many narratively bizarre subplots falling out all over the place.

Director Eisner helmed the excellent remake of George R. Romero’s The Crazies back in 2010, but this film shows none of the lunatic flair for the ghastly that the previous film so easily served up.

Still, as a reminder of the banality of evil and the way a country can conveniently “forget” its casual barbarity (did someone say Guantánamo Bay?), Labyrinth of Lies is a more chilling tale than you’ll find in any horror film this season.

At best, Goosebumps is a who’s who in the Stine literary oeuvre, featuring characters who were terrifying on paper but rendered toothless here.

Sorkin smashes the cradle-to-grave biopic mold with Steve Jobs. R.I.P., I guess. It’s called a mold for a reason.

The parade has now moved on and Freeheld seems more like a footnote than a groundswell.

For sheer, sepulchral eye candy at this most horror-ific time of year, del Toro’s Crimson Peak leaves Tim Burton – reigning misfit king of hyper-stylized, goth-y weirdness – in the dust and well-nigh forgotten.

For the most part, Spielberg appears content to allow the story (admittedly, a tad bit long) to do the talking, though he goes badly off-track in the sappy ending reminiscent of a Fifties sitcom’s notions of hierarchy within the American family. Given the Spielberg film canon, it was inevitable. The guy just can’t help himself.

The film is as thin as a picture postcard.

The atrocities against children begin to acquire an unwelcome redundancy in their relentlessness and threaten to inure the viewer.

Yakuza Apocalypse is Miike at the top of his game, breaking cinematic rules at every chance while crafting seriously subversive cinema that defangs both the real-world Yakuza, the Japanese government, and, heaven help us, Sanrio, too. Knitting, I tell you! Knitting!

Dependably fascinating.

Ill-conceived from any number of angles, this Peter Pan origin story, scripted by Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift), plays topsy-turvy with J.M. Barrie’s beloved characters.

Iwish I could say 99 Homes delivers a shockingly good sucker punch to the American electorate and a stand-up-and-cheer piece of socially conscious filmmaking, but it’s not. It lacks the satisfactory denouement of, for instance, Michael Mann’s The Insider (and Garfield is no Russell Crowe), in part because the events it depicts are still happening across the country (albeit to a lesser extent).

Much more a comedy than a heist film (think Ocean’s 11 rather than Casino or Rififi), Ladrones moves at a pretty entertaining pace and maintains a good sense of humor about itself.

Knock Knock is a nasty bit of business, and fans of Roth are not likely to be disappointed. But for everyone else, the joke's on them.

Don’t come to this documentary expecting to learn more about the girl named Malala.

Both Farmiga and Akerman emotionally connect in the film, which culminates in an ultimate act of maternal sacrifice more moving than you might imagine. Finally! A slasher movie with both brains and heart, both intact.

Peppered with clever, self-referential one-liners that whip by almost too fast to catch them, Deathgasm is – like most metalheads/punks/Morrissey fans – a helluva lot smarter than one might at first suspect.

That Peace Officer cannot provide a complete picture of the myriad of problems that come with the increased militarization of police isn’t an indictment of the film. This trouble is too big for one film to contain.

While there are a few loose ends in Drew Goddard’s screenplay, which is faithful to but necessarily less detailed than its source, the film is a triumph of storytelling, a tribute to the power of the crowd-pleaser.

Still, you find yourself rooting for these women, even if their adventures aren’t always up to snuff.

Set against the gray backdrop of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this is old-school melodrama writ big from a director who’s probably better known to mainstream American audiences as the man behind the spectacular Wushu action epics Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower.

A ruthlessly satisfying thriller, The Keeping Room will linger with the viewer long after the credits roll.

A slick but slight film that unfortunately resurrects everything that was problematically self-indulgent about so many New York rom-com indie films that have come before. This is irrelevant navel-gazing at its most tepid. Nothing (new) to see here, folks.

Filmmakers Boden and Fleck don’t appear interested in eliciting your full-out sympathy for these low-rollers, though the happyish ending seems somewhat a sellout (albeit a satisfactory one). Who’s to blame them? After all, everybody loves a winner.

Sicario is at its best when its borderlines are fluid and indistinct.

It’s a shrewd last move in a movie that’s uncommonly smart about when to buck convention and when to conform to the warm feels we all want.

By now, we’ve grown accustomed to the signature touch of Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), who is one of the best creative minds to see the innovative narrative potential lying dormant in technical cinematographic advances. This does not always provide the underpinnings for great stories, but bien sûr his movies are almost always quite something to see.

Duris and Demoustier are excellent in a pair of exceedingly complex and emotionally fractious roles, and Ozon’s supremely confident directorial hand and clear affection for these characters transforms The New Girlfriend from a could’ve-been psycho-thriller into a smart, humanistic examination of identity reshaped in the shadow of grief.

Channeling your inner child, you may find solace in Hotel Transylvania 2, but in the end it has no bite, doing continued disservice to the Universal monsters it scabs out, and adding another soiled feather to Sandler’s cap of mediocrity.

A life-affirming documentary if ever there was one, A Brave Heart is a litmus test for gauging compassion, one I would recommend everyone take immediately.

Maybe Stonewall will have more value to younger viewers for whom the riots and gay marginalization in general are distant history and might be vivified by watching the film. Yet even though the film’s heart seems genuine, its structure is buttressed by falsies.

Best yet is Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, big as a Russian bear and as ice-cool as the country’s signature 80-proof spirit. Is it unpatriotic to wish this was his movie, not the twitchy American guy’s?

Playing a 70-year-old seeking renewed purpose as an intern at an Internet start-up, Robert De Niro is gentle as a kitten. Is it disrespectful to want to greet this icon of American cinema with a snuggle and a tumbler of warm milk?

The Green Inferno feels like a retread of a retread.

In video segments scarier than any couch-jumping antics on a talk show, actor Tom Cruise salutes the organization’s Napoleonic chairman David Miscavige like a soldier in an army of darkness, and rambles on about a world free of suppressive persons like he’s auditioning for the loony bin. One thing is clear in Going Clear: The man has taken one super-big gulp of the Kool-Aid.

An odd mix, to be sure, but full-tilt performances from Mara, as meth-addicted, widowed mom-cum-kidnappee Ashley Smith, and Oyelowo, playing the stone-cold killer turned cornered kidnapper Brian Nichols, help this spiritual thriller rise (very slightly) above other, more hamfisted, heaven-friendly fare.

This is a movie you feel deeply in the pit of your stomach. Sometimes, it literally hurts to watch it.

Cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou has shot the ridiculously photogenic grasslands in truly spectacular IMAX 3-D, and rarely have I seen it done better.

The trouble comes when somebody opens their mouth and you’re reminded this is supremely silly stuff, and overall a much lesser version of teens versus the titans of post-apocalypse industry – a copy of a copy of a copy.

It’s fun, but it’s no "Class of Nuke ’Em High."

By necessity, Black Mass begins in a hole it can never dig out of. It’s the portrait of a monster told in a flat line.

The best thing you can say about The Perfect Guy is that it plays out like a gelded version of Fatal Attraction, lacking anything dark or dangerous. It plays it too safe, and who wants a guy like that?

Weitz (About a Boy) is a sharp observer, and Tomlin and the rest of the cast are so superlative that any anxiety is quickly quelled. You’re happy to follow this movie over the river and through the woods.

This is a lovingly rendered, feel-bad chamber piece chock-full of elliptical psychodrama.

The Christian faith-based film genre takes a dramatic leap forward with 90 Minutes in Heaven, a well-appointed work based on Don Piper’s bestseller, that, for a change, doesn’t look and sound as though it was written, performed, and recorded in some church basement.

An unnerving descent into the extreme, anxious corners of a mother’s relationship to and comprehension of her 9-year-old twin sons – and vice versa – gone weirdly haywire, Goodnight Mommy is required viewing for both lovers of neo-gothic paranoia and mommy-haters everywhere.

Refreshingly, this isn’t so much a found-footage movie – although it was backed by "Paranormal Activity" overseers Blumhouse Productions – as it is a completed faux documentary, complete with onscreen titles and a cripplingly hilarious end-credits sequence featuring Tyler being Tyler.

It appears that this franchise has hit a dead end, running on nothing but fumes.

Viewed entirely on the exceptional virtues of its CGI animation (flashbacks occur via traditional, hand-drawn animation) and its occasionally raunchy humor, Un Gallo con Mucho Huevos is a small gem of a film. But its trivialization of cockfighting will surely be a rightful stumbling block for many potential audience members.

Phoenix mines a Hitchcockian vein, but it is Hoss' sensitive performance and Petzold’s intelligently paced direction that makes this film shine.

What A Walk in the Woods doesn’t have, however, is plot, character development, narrative conflict, and resolution – in other words, a destination.

With 7 Chinese Brothers, Austin-based filmmaker Bob Byington has made his most accessible film yet. The humor is less arch than in his previous comedies (among them Somebody up There Likes Me, Harmony and Me, and RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), and it’s plentiful and less diffuse than in his earlier works.

A remarkable documentary in its own right.

By the end, I was moved. Not floored, but moved.

While this isn’t anywhere near a classic of the comedy-horror genre, it’s still a well-written work of splatstick that’s more downright engaging than 90% of the “serious” (i.e., mediocre) horrors that have flooded theatres of late.