No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

What it feels like, mostly, is a Whit Stillman movie made by someone other than Whit Stillman.

The heroine’s voice-overs, delivered into the microphone of a Bell & Howell tape recorder in Minnie’s bedroom, are the movie’s motor. They’re proud and insecure, profanely comic, dripping with adolescent wisdom and self-absorption.

The result is something that feels fresh, even revelatory — a work of elegiac bio-doc impressionism. Listen to Me Marlon gets under the skin of the most mysterious performer of the 20th century and forces us to recalibrate all our feelings about him.

Ultimately, what Fantastic Four delivers is change for change’s sake, rather than change for the better.

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton starts out strong, peaks quickly, and then gets tangled in complications and compromise and falls apart.

A celebration of a time when secret agents dressed impeccably, bantered with style, and had exceptionally cool toys. That the movie is almost instantly forgettable is part of the pleasure.

Religious allusions aside, Alleluia is like “Psycho” combined with “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Norman and Norma Bates as the conjoined criminal couple on the run.

Grim, ridiculous, and dull.

Unfortunately, the material flounders from the broadly farcical to the bombastically melodramatic. Race and ethnicity aren’t so much the problem as gender is. Despite Gainsbourg’s efforts, her character becomes a caricature.

It is first and foremost a moral tale, and an overpowering one.

Just because David Foster Wallace would almost certainly have hated The End of the Tour doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthwhile movie. And in fact James Ponsoldt’s dramatic adaptation of Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s memoir about his 1996 road trip with Wallace is pretty excellent: heartfelt, probing, funny, above all touching.

In addition to directing outstanding performances, Edgerton also suggests psychological processes by means of space, architecture, and décor, exploiting the walls, doorways, windows, and mirrors of the new house to indicate the status of a relationship or self-image.

Because Demme genuinely likes people and is interested in them, Ricki and the Flash feels like “Stella Dallas” as remade by Jean Renoir — it’s a humanist suburban fable.

Like a great silent movie, it creates its pathos and comedy out of the concrete objects being animated, building elaborate gags involving everyday items transformed into Rube Goldberg devices that sometimes entrap the characters, or, when properly manipulated by them, provide a means of achieving their goals.

There is a surprise waiting in Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, a labor of love that Pirozzi painstakingly assembled over a span of close to a decade, although the story it tells holds no mystery.

A wide-ranging new survey of the toy’s global subculture and appeal.

Over and over in The Look of Silence, we hear people tell the filmmakers, “The past is past.” The wound is healed, they say, and if you don’t want trouble, don’t reopen it. The movie itself proves otherwise.

In the end, this feeble effort remains tainted, however unfairly, by the creator’s personal life. Maybe Allen should have titled it “Rationalizing Man.”

Rogue Nation unfolds with fluid, twisty, old-school pleasure — you settle into it like a favorite chair.

What’s interesting about Vacation is that it holds on to the original’s acrid cynicism for the first 40 minutes or so before turning predictable and bland. There are some real, nasty laughs to be had here, but they’re front-loaded.

Will miracles never cease? Alas, they do. Pausing pregnantly between clauses to add to their trite profundity, Quentin recites the moral of the story, and it’s as phony as the towns of the title.

David Sedaris contributes a story about talking to a hotel clerk over the phone, which doesn’t add much to the discussion but is very funny.

Though the outcome is a matter of public record, it still unfolds like a suspenseful tragedy. Suffice it to say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

Pixels may feel flatter to kids of the ’80s than it does to moviegoers too young to have known Pac-Man from Ant-Man.

This is a genre with especially sturdy bones, and when Southpaw connects, which is more often than you might expect, you feel it down to your toes.

The film is slow going with its mix of stilted political discourse and restless village folk just looking to celebrate life and dance. At times, it’s like “Footloose” gone didactic.

This walkabout ends less dramatically and not as tragically as the one in Roeg’s film, but perhaps with a greater poignancy. And Gulpilil, four decades of hard living later, is as magnificent as ever.

Subtlety and irony are not among the film’s virtues.

Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

In Dito Montiel’s treacly, programmatic film, Williams succumbs to a recurring neediness, earnestness, and sentimentality.

Unfortunately, director Bill Condon and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher are clueless, and come up with an incoherent, implausible, contrived mishmash.

The movie’s OK, nothing more.

A very entertaining romantic comedy, conventional on the surface while standing all sorts of genre clichés and gender assumptions discreetly on their heads. Its subversions are lower-case, embedded in the laughs, but they’re there and they matter.

Despite the self-conscious derivativeness and allusions, Tsai’s debut already demonstrates the contrariness and motifs that have distinguished him as a unique, difficult, and transcendent filmmaker.

Behind the cool, nonjudgmental gaze of Cartel Land is a despair that never comes to terms with itself.

The movie takes a decent “Twilight Zone” idea -- what if you had a second chance at youth? -- and runs it into the ground with watchable but diminishing returns.

Occasionally the camera gets jumbled around, blacks out, and hisses with static as if it had been tossed in a dryer. Then it regains composure and reveals — an old playbill! A figure in a mask with a noose! The birth of a new franchise and the death of a great genre.

Mitch Winehouse has disavowed this movie and his portrayal in it, but it’s hard to argue with the scene where he shows up on St. Lucia, where Amy has fled from the hounds of the global media, with a reality-show camera crew of his own.

You’ll have to appreciate what fleeting cleverness you can here.

Hunter has a scene with Pacino in a cafeteria where she expresses a degree of emotional pain, just through how she looks at him and holds her head, that’s at once awful to see and magnificent. It’s hard to figure out what Pacino saw in the script. What Hunter saw was this scene and getting to act with Pacino.

The film captures both the claustrophobic and melancholic mood of Giger’s house, and also, perhaps, his mind.

The first hour of Magic Mike XXL is deadly.

"I'll be back," the man said, and he kept the promise, but I'm not sure we wanted him back like this.

A bonbon of embarrassment comedy.

But, oh, the action. Tommila and Jackson have a couple of escape sequences that are exhilaratingly choreographed, never mind that one employs a meat freezer as its key prop. Kids should dig these bits. After all, off-kilter as Helander’s sensibility continues to be, he’s got a passion for popcorn-movie energy that can be contagious — especially when he’s not trashing Santa.

The film is engrossing and entertaining if sometimes trite and manipulative and totally bogus.

The 100-Year-Old Man may appeal to viewers who like the madcap and the whimsical, no matter how self-conscious. Me, I’ll take Max von Sydow’s moroseness any day.

Unlike “Something in the Air,” or even “Saint Laurent,” Eden is utterly apolitical.

These promising themes aren’t given much more than surface treatment, making for a movie as conveniently tidy as some coming-home schmaltz on basic cable.

She (Seyfried) provides some real charm, something the movie otherwise lacks. She also seems like a plausible part of the action in a way that Kunis never did.

As a directorial debut, Losing Ground astonishes with its assurance, subtlety, and style.

It is hard to rate Vikander’s acting abilities from this performance. Her sly automaton in “Ex Machina” had more emotional range.

The movie only looks like a coming-of-age freak show from the outside; in reality, it’s unexpected proof that flowers can grow even in a prison.

In other words, this movie isn’t just about an adolescent boy — it pretty much is an adolescent boy.

Full of energy and attitude, it’s the sort of movie that likes to startle, if not necessarily shock. No wonder Dope was an audience favorite at Sundance last winter.

It is a joy for audiences seeking entertainment, an ingenious work of craft for those paying close attention, and a wallop of feeling that’s still too rare coming from a cartoon.

All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity. Many of the actors are from the streets themselves, and such locations as a crash pad rented out by a dotty lady could never be dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.

A bittersweet, wryly comic, keenly observed look at senescence.

It’s an easy film to watch and become engrossed in, and it’s just as easy to forget, despite a true-life twist that darkens the final minutes without making much of an impact on the whole. Expertly shot, excitingly edited, smartly acted, The Connection never quite connects.

Alonso sustains an atmosphere of otherworldly immanence in a vivid setting, with a style involving long takes with characters posed as if in tableaux vivants.

It’s all as entertaining as it is outlandish.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

Jurassic World is a roadworthy retread, a summer blockbuster that has more than its share of absurdities and bald patches but gets by anyway because dinosaurs.

Though the narrative of “Marnie” bogs down toward the end, this does not diminish its spell.

What happens when a rigorously non-mainstream filmmaker tries to reverse-engineer a mainstream romantic comedy? The result, in all its charming perversity, is Results.

Less a straight doc than a psycho-cinematic inquiry into unknown territory, it’s really something to see. Whether it’s something to believe is another matter.

The character is sweetly sympathetic — less “Tammy” than “Mike & Molly” — and the laughs and chaos are all the more infectious for it.

There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.

Despite the lumps in the batter, Love & Mercy ends up involving and affecting, because the performances are honest and the stories it tells are inherently dramatic.

The film is stuck in the inconsequential rut of the series. The characters are static, and the comedy is situational rather than dramatic.

Even in the city’s most crowded place, Giroux makes his lovers seem like the only couple on Earth.

More disappointing than the film’s inertia and amorphousness is its sacrifice of the real-world themes of class, money, corruption, and power. Unable to decide what story he wanted to tell, Téchiné hedges his bets and loses everything.

Slow West doesn’t really go anywhere we haven’t been, but because Maclean is discovering the genre for the first time, we see through his fresh yet jaundiced eyes.

Aloha is as generic as its title. The islands exist solely as an exotic backdrop for the pretty Hollywood haoles to play in. Business as usual, and I never thought I’d say that about a Cameron Crowe movie.

Good Kill is by necessity a grim piece of work, one that fields a powerful and unexpectedly terse performance from Ethan Hawke while stumbling over plot developments that seem increasingly forced. Niccol can be forgiven his outrage even as it leads him to create drama out of agenda instead of the other way around.

Such miserable people; why should we care? Maybe because Ceylan does. By staging this petulant misery in a snow-filled world of melancholy, unearthly beauty, he underscores their tragedy.

Bonello takes on the point of view of Saint Laurent himself, exposing a visionary world seen from within that is as strange and wonderful as that of a magnificently stitched garment turned inside out.

A work of quiet, crystalline empathy, I’ll See You in My Dreams is notable for reasons that nearly overshadow its modest yet indisputable charms. It’s a drama about the kind of people invisible to the movies and much of our culture — senior citizens in the early evening of their lives — and it grants its characters individuality in ways that are almost wholly free of cliché.

Related with stolid majesty, with long shots of brooding landscapes and close-ups of opaque faces, the film provides poor preparation for the subversion of genre conventions to follow.

The thing barely makes a lick of sense. Rapturous on a scene-by-scene basis and nearly incoherent when taken as a whole, the movie is idealistic and deranged, inspirational and very, very conflicted.

It’s simultaneously silly and progressive, a familiar movie moment reserved for the girl you’d least expect.

The shock, really, is how tender Mad Max: Fury Road ultimately becomes. The film just wraps that tenderness in one of the most epic action extravaganzas of recent years. It's enough to renew your faith in movies.

The duo provide a bit of wit and warmth amid the contrived subplots and the self-satisfied moralism.

A 2009 film only now getting theatrical distribution in the United States, it is perhaps Farhadi’s richest, most complex and ambitious.

Far From the Madding Crowd is a Masterpiece Theatre version of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, shot with sumptuous taste and care, rife with emotions repressed and unbound, and featuring expertly nuanced performances from a tony, mostly British cast. It will greatly please discerning audiences while causing Hardy to spin discreetly in his grave. That’s a fair trade-off, especially if the movie sends you back to the book.

The movie captures that heady adolescent sense of time stopping and the moment mattering while standing far enough back to let us acknowledge all the pitfalls Marieme is moving too fast to see.

So despite Tcheng's effort to add a metaphysical layer to the film, it pretty much repeats the narrative seen in many other documentaries about the fashion world, from Wim Wenders's “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” (1989), to “Unzipped” (1995), to “Valentino: The Last Emperor” (2008).

Plympton will be cheated if Cheatin’ doesn’t at least get nominated for a best animated feature Oscar.

A documentary lovingly and somewhat shambolically directed by James D. Cooper, gives the duo their due and in so doing opens up a singular view on an era, its energy, and its excesses. For fans, it’s a must-see; for others, a slightly overlong tour of a seminal pop explosion and the men who made it.

Ultron’s goals never make much sense beyond the basic kill-the-Avengers-and-destroy-the-Earth checklist, nor does he develop as a character over the long haul. He’s just a static baddie, fun to look at and handy with a quip but ultimately as dull as unpolished chrome.

The film at times genuinely touches on the bittersweet magic of first love.

As a suspenseful true crime story, 24 Days succeeds. As a warning against the ever present dangers of anti-Semitism, it is eloquent and disturbing. It’s in combining the two that Arcady mishandles the case.

The Forger wants to be many things: gritty crime thriller, heist picture, domestic drama. Family bonds get “forged,” too, right? Director Philip Martin, who’s mainly done British TV work, is best known for “Prime Suspect 7.” Martin keeps things moving a little too briskly, perhaps. Scenes generally feel underdeveloped, and transitions abrupt.

This big, brawny historical drama feels more personal to its maker as both an artist and an Australian. For better and for worse, the movie’s a labor of love and of national identification.

A sometimes clever but ultimately clichéd comedy.

The film is so bizarre, contrived, manipulative, and meretricious that anything is possible.

It’s an awkward balancing act. The result is more Benigni than Bertolucci, and though Diliberto achieves moments of poignancy and touches on insightful psychological truths, it doesn’t look like he’ll be winning any Oscars soon.