But being Charlie – what’s going on inside this angry kid’s head, what made him turn to drugs, and finally turn away – that is more elusive. And that is the film’s great disappointment: that something so clearly conceived in earnestness and from real-life, first-person experience ends up feeling, well, kinda fake.

Matt Brown’s movie is a perfunctory highlight reel, featuring tepid performances and dull cinematic technique. Although the movie’s 108 minutes are hardly infinity, its duration gives the concept a run for its money.

For most of the film, Bateman, the director, manages to bring out the two principals’ anguish without resorting to sentimentality, until the unsatisfying last quarter of the film.

Civil War’s main battle sequence is so effective because it’s six-on-six, and we’ve spent the past decade getting to know the combatants.

It is a loud yet lifeless movie, with threadbare tropes and useless 3-D. You're better off picking up a controller and directing your own story.

Combining elements of slapstick, horror, and psychodrama (not to mention Darwinism, bestiality, and harelips), Men & Chicken is a film – nay, a world – into which you just dive, and unlike most of the stuff out there, from one moment to the next, you have no idea what is going to happen. It is a black comedy that nimbly switches tones so often it can feel like whiplash.

As long as Sing Street stays on this sweet, sentimental path, the film is an agreeable toe-tapper. Scratch the surface too deeply and you’ll find some historical inconsistencies, idealized events, and a depressing environment roiling in Conor’s familial home and nation.

Mother’s Day, the movie, feels as contrived and inauthentic as the holiday itself.

With its unconventional take on pet sounds, Keanu is refreshingly silly, an unabashed mix of humor and violence topped off by a big dollop of cuteness.

Helping Elvis & Nixon remain in conjectural mode is the fact that neither actor – Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon – looks particularly like the character he is playing. Yet both actors make their roles believable through apt choices in body language and vocalization.

The actors are all game, but the job’s beneath them – Hemsworth, a pro, and a real champ at faking enthusiasm for this dud; Theron, still doing camp but this time with no tempering complexity or empathy; Blunt, stuck playing a frost-bitten Mommie Dearest.

Hanks is perfect in the central role, drawing on both his dramatic and comic acting skills.

Saulnier and co. have crafted a gleefully merciless update on Deliverance, except instead of city folk vs. hillbillies, it’s punk rockers vs. neo-Nazis, and it is one of the most brutal, visceral films to come along in quite some time.

Compadres feels less like an actual movie and more like a half-dozen movies thrown together, and absolutely nothing sticks.

Criminal is a perfectly passable thriller, if you’re cool with no one here passing as an actual human being.

When it rolls, Barbershop: The Final Cut lets its hair down like few others do.

The studio’s 1967 version of Kipling’s classic tales (the current film qualifies as a remake of sorts) softened the source’s edges a bit, but it offered a New Orleans jazz-infused score unlike anything in the company’s previous animated features. The new Jungle Book retains the two best songs, although their inclusion may strike the unfamiliar as clunky and unexpected.

The fabricated story that propels the movie, though tenable as events that might have occurred, is insufficient to seize our attention. It’s like a bent note that never finds its correct register.

The whole film is a delicious excuse to gawk – at the magnificent costumes, at the diplomatic dance of museum personnel and party planners, and at the sumptuous squish of so many egos sharing space.

The film offers elliptical hints as to what evil may or may not be lurking in the house, a four-story set designer’s dream.

It’s a fun watch, and familiarity with Los Angeles isn’t required to get a kick out of these toe-dips into Koreatown and Tehrangeles and all the other micro-communities that make the city a macro-paradise for eaters.

Hush has a solid first half before the cat-and-mouse shenanigans begin to seem repetitive and prolonged. Still, at 82 minutes Hush is a concise and well-executed horror nightmare.

Maybe a dare to Desplechin, in fact: Next time, more Esther, less Paul. She’s still got stories to be told.

There are a number of things that work in The Invitation: The cast is uniformly great (Tom Hardy – er, I mean Marshall-Green – is a standout, Lynch basically has a monopoly on the creep factor at this point in his career), and the film is elegantly shot.

The film is an exhilarating and inventive spectacle that makes every other action film from the last 10 years look as obsolete as the Lumière brothers running that train at you back in 1896.

The filmmakers insert their own bulldozer midway through the story, rendering the metaphoric literal and the literal absurd.

There are a lot of laughs in The Boss. The problem is that the space in between them is stagnant and shapeless. Falcone, who also directed and co-wrote "Tammy," is a dud as a filmmaker.

You miss out on this and you miss out on something entirely, amazingly original and jaw-droppingly entertaining. C’est magnifique!