Visually, the film’s technique is thrilling. There’s hardly a camera setup anywhere that doesn’t look like it could be a frame ripped from a comic book or graphic novel.

The Dog reveals both expected and unexpected things about this oddball character to keep you interested.

Few genuine moments throw into even sharper relief the tedious trappings which surround this, your average teenage tragedy.

Rich Hill attempts to lay bare these kids’ lives, striving for gentle intimacy, but the result feels more like arthouse pandering.

It’s an impossible standard, maybe, but in 42 minutes, TV’s "Friday Night Lights" delivered all-star-level emotional complexity and action. When the Game Stands Tall is strictly JV squad.

Occasional animated inserts inspired by Chantry’s work as an illustrator, while accomplished, inject an off-note of whimsy that doesn’t quite square with the script’s stabs at edgier humor.

The viable chemistry between these two leads keeps the ball in the air, even when the balls land elsewhere in strained homophobic gags.

It’s McHattie’s bizarre turn as the beleaguered town’s mayor that steals this show. Taking his cue from another infamous Ontario public servant, he gives a performance that can only be described as bat-shit crazy. Fitting, eh?

With Calvary, John Michael McDonagh (who wrote and directed "The Guard" and is the brother of Martin “In Bruges” McDonagh) has crafted a darkly hilarious and deeply ruminative update on the passion play.

The film begins to get a bit lost as the story develops and pushes toward a wobbly climax and conclusion. And what to make of that sled, which is the first bit of knowledge Jonas receives. Rosebud, anyone?

What the movie ultimately demonstrates is that the sum total is less than the individual parts when you add together Rocky, the Terminator, Indiana Jones, Mad Max, Blade, Zorro, Hercules, and the Transporter.

A consistently workmanlike helmer, Liebesman (Wrath of the Titans, Battle: Los Angeles) keeps the pace brisk and the overall tone closer to that of the recent G.I. Joe vehicles, infusing this glorified toy commercial with an almost aggressively knowing sense of humor and exactly one fun action sequence on New York’s most conveniently located mountaintop.

Because “all in” – to me, at least – suggests a certain standard of enthusiasm, of emphaticness, and what this latest Step Up movie indifferently chunks out falls far short of that standard.

Those expecting a charming bonbon à la Midnight in Paris may wish to lower their expectations. Magic in the Moonlight’s story is exceedingly threadbare, a first draft that never got fleshed out or tightened up.

Into the Storm captures the magnificence of tornadoes, their awful beauty when they set down, the devastation they wreak, and the enormity of their consequences. The film features a rich array of well-developed characters – including the storm itself – which makes it ever more involving as it unfolds.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is elevated comfort food. The flavors aren’t complex, but it’s nourishing nonetheless.

For the most part, Code Black is a riveting document despite its tendency to jackrabbit around in its themes and personalities.

For better and worse, the story unfolds as the late Brown himself might have related it, scattered across time, told with more impulse than clarity.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an outlier: a space opera in a largely earthbound movie cycle (excepting the occasional red-eye to another dimension in the Thor pictures), candy-colored and bopping where the other Marvel movies are muted and imposing, and the funniest one to date, without a doubt.

Inherently funny, with a terrific sense of timing, an amazing gift for mimicry, and an ability to perfectly imitate all kinds of everyday sounds, Iglesias is always charming and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

If anything gets lost in the mayhem, it’s Johnson’s reliably charming personality.

The Killer Inside Me is hardly uninteresting, and you get the sense that everyone involved tried really hard to pull off this difficult adaptation. But it would be impossible to view The Killer Inside Me as anything but a vast miscalculation.

Persecuted is a profoundly conservative, Christian ideological take, guised as a classic Seventies paranoid thriller. Certainly unique, this is another targeted release, specifically aimed at groups sharing its beliefs.

Patinkin and King’s characters’ wrangling with spirituality is sincere, and specific. Everything else in this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink film feels like too many ideas stored up over an especially long winter.

The best comic-book movie in a long time, though based on no comic, Lucy is a film that mates classic Besson with Quentin Tarantino in a go at the mystical, world-solving vision found in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Terrence Malick’s "The Tree of Life."

Even when plausibility fails, I Origins is elegantly cosseted by its dreamy camerawork (courtesy of Markus Förderer) and pretty people.

Certain scenes play as if Reiner forgot to show up on the day of filming, so the actors and cameraman just winged it. Perhaps his embarrassing (and pointless) turn as Leah’s clueless accompanist with the bad toupee distracted him from his principal responsibilities behind the camera. What a Meathead.

Forget divining who’s predator and who’s prey. Everybody’s chum here.