Some might find the dual conclusions too blunt in their irony, but “Norte” does not try to be consoling. Crazy as Fabian’s ideas seem, they might be the ones that prevail.

If The Trip to Italy begins shakily, it ends with expansive bliss, a father and son reconnecting off the shores of Capri as Gustav Mahler’s art song “Ich Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (I Am Lost to the World)” sends everyone heart-stoppingly home.

The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.

Sadly, the film rapidly devolves into an AARP version of a Jason Bourne-like vendetta, only bloodier and less meaningful.

The government, even under the new, more moderate leadership of President Hassan Rouhani, has reason for concern. Unlike Rasoulof and Panahi’s previous, more metaphorical films, this one confronts its subject head-on with unflinching candor.

Huppert’s amazing performance not only masters the physical rigors and deformations of her character, but more importantly captures her cold capriciousness and the enigmatic innocence that one of Maud’s friend’s labels “perverse.”

It makes for a structurally glitchy inspirational exercise whose climax carries all the goosebump-making drama of a Pats preseason game.

Violette demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn’t the only one who suffers for it.

Though at times Siddharth can resemble a well-photographed report on India’s social and economic ills, Mehta subtly employs different styles to sustain the poetry, poignancy, and drama.

Walking a line between droll comedy and a darker, more unsettling drama that the filmmakers aren’t quite up to, Frank is an entertaining curio with flashes of inspiration. That’s also a pretty good description of Frank’s music.

A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.

You could argue that the only thing that’s automatic about A Dame to Kill For, really, is some of the firepower that its hardcases are packing.

It’s a preposterously overstuffed strategy that, go figure, not only works, but even cures a thing or two that ailed the previous movies.

Land Ho! is a hot spring of a movie: It fizzes a lot, and you come out feeling better than you went in.

Gibney lays out the full picture, availing himself of terrific concert footage, archival materials, and interviews with Fela’s colleagues and family members (including eldest son and musical heir Femi Kuti). The portrait that emerges is of a larger-than-life personality who seems to have been closer to those who didn’t know him than those who did. (Again, much like Brown.)

Rich Hill might fairly be called “Boyhood: The Documentary,” and, not surprisingly, it offers a reality harsher than — if just as compassionate as — Richard Linklater’s dreamy time-lapse drama.

The opening and closing scenes of this film evoke those in “Crimson Gold.” They are long shots of the outside as seen through a security gate. In “Crimson Gold,” the view is of a chaotic street in Tehran. Here, it is the empty sea. This difference demonstrates what Panahi has been deprived of, and what the world has lost because of it.

None of this is as riotously zany as it wants to be.

Bizarre, fascinating, and frustrating documentary.

The movie runs an hour and a half. Lowry’s book can be read in less than a day. It still gives anyone — child or adult — more than enough to wrestle with.

The repartee, as ever, is weak. Even with all the extra layers of digital detail, it’s still tough to keep these four straight. And the CG characters’ slimy rendering and motion-capture expressiveness could go down with “The Polar Express” as a study in inadvertent, technologically misguided screen creepiness. Wackier would have been OK, guys — it’s the Ninja Turtles.

The movie has a problem, too: Spall is likable, Kazan is adorable, Driver is amusing enough as the blowhard best friend, and Radcliffe as Wallace is . . . a passive-aggressive lump.

Unfortunately, this is one movie about food that I’m forgetting already.

If ever a movie were lost in translation, it’s Mood Indigo, the latest from the scattershot genius Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Science of Sleep”). With his penchant for sad-sack dreamers and gonzo visual gags, Gondry can make a director like Wes Anderson look like a prig, and “Mood” allows him freer access to his fancy than usual.

Taking its title from the site where Christ was crucified, the controversy-courting film has a lot of Catholic church business (and doctrine) on its mind, and veers from poetically eloquent to jarringly blunt in hashing it all out.

Bring on the bread and circuses. Into the Storm features laughable dialogue, far-fetched situations, and generic characters played by actors who almost look like more famous stars. I still had a blast; and if you lower your resistance, you may too.

For the most part, Fluffy’s material is just that — fluff, with a touch now and then of bile and bad taste.

Usually a French comedy such as this requires some crude modifications before a studio like Touchstone can remake it for American audiences. In this case, though, they just need to lose the subtitles and dub in the voices of actors like Rob Schneider or Adam Sandler. Until then, bon appetit!

Code Black shows the passion, frustration, and skill of those who work to heal despite the system, but it remains in the dark about why that system is broken and how it can be fixed.

The motley crew’s repartee makes for comedy that’s surprisingly consistent, yet freewheeling and sharp enough to pinball from Kevin Bacon to Jackson Pollock and back.

Unfortunately, though, Rossato-Bennett and Cohen seem to think that the technique is a panacea. In fact, it is not even original, as music therapy in nursing homes has been around for some time.

Above all, it is predictable.

A triumph — a messy, qualified triumph that even at 138 minutes makes an incomplete case for Brown’s meaning to American life and culture, but a triumph nevertheless.

The film is crisply shot, expertly paced, solidly acted, and it gets a goose when Bill Pullman shows up in the late innings as a good-old-boy lawyer. (By contrast, it’s never convincingly explained what stake the union official played by Elias Koteas has in the drama.) All that’s missing is a reason.

Based on her short film, Candler’s Hellion pads its slender, commonplace, but potentially rewarding premise with contrivances, clichés, repetitiousness, and, when all else fails, implausible, arbitrary melodrama.

As a director, Cahill’s a capable and sometimes breathtaking stylist, and he accomplishes remarkable things on a modest budget, topping up the visuals with patterns, rhymes, and concordances.

Frustratingly elusive and seductively louche, Lespert’s “Yves” probes a cryptic myth and a fragile soul, penetrating neither, but conjuring up a taste of Saint Laurent’s suffering, genius and style.

The great pleasure of le Carré-land — for some, it’s the frustration — is that one’s own moral certainties are quickly stood on their head.

And So It Goes looks like it was shot on outdated video equipment and has a forced, jokey script by Mark Andrus (”As Good As It Gets,” “Georgia Rule”).

It’s all ridiculous and enjoyable, and at the movie’s center is an actress creatively guessing at what omniscience might feel like.

Is Borgman a fable? A fairy tale? A parable? An allegory? A burlesque of Western bourgeois life in the 21st century? One thing Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s film isn’t is a black comedy, even if that’s what it’s meant to be. The movie’s black, all right, but a comedy has to be funny.

As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.

What follows is no “Citizen Kane,” or even “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), Todd Haynes’s arty tale of a reporter trying to track down a missing glam rock star, in which Collette also starred, playing the missing man’s alcoholic wife.

Boyhood is a stunt, an epic, a home video, and a benediction. It reminds us of what movies could be and — far more important — what life actually is.

Ed Harris, who voices Blade Ranger, the no-nonsense helicopter who heads the fire-and-rescue operation, doesn’t lay it on too strong. Julie Bowen, as Lil’ Dipper, an air tanker, does.

This frantic farce about a married couple whose video frolic goes viral would be much less bearable without the topspin Segel imparts to even his silliest dialogue. But he looks hollow-eyed and gaunt, like a man starving himself to prove a point. I want the old, lumpy Jason Segel back. Eat, bubbe, eat.

Give credit to writer-director James DeMonaco for at least attempting to give his action thriller some heft with a plot that concerns our obsession with violence, ham-fisted as it is. But The Purge: Anarchy is still just an excuse to bombard us with high-powered weaponry, armored vehicles, vigilantes, and masked marauders in creepy Joker-like makeup.

So where does that leave this coming-of-age comedy written and directed by Jan Ole Gerster? Somewhere in the middle, lukewarm and inoffensive, trying hard not to be plebeian or pretentious.

“Venus in Fur,” the 2010 David Ives play that conquered off-Broadway in 2010 and Broadway in 2011, has been thoroughly and maliciously Romanized.

Visually, this movie is big, bold, often awe-inspiring.

Third Person staggers well over the two-hour mark only to self-destruct in a burst of overwrought cleverness.

Begin Again is pleasantly predictable if you’re in an undemanding mood. If you’re not, it’s unbearable, like hearing a treasured folk song given a Hot 97 makeover.

On the level of a popcorn thrill ride, Snowpiercer is a beaut.

Though Derrickson offers some new twists on old tricks, and evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible, the story soon devolves into variations of many movies we have seen before.

Green and his cast deliver a wonderful surprise. Echo himself, a generically precious alien, is the least of it. The funny, moving, authentic bond among the kids in the movie is the unadvertised draw.

It just plonks down the actress and a handful of stellar co-stars without much in the way of a script, storyline, or actual jokes. Yet you may still come out with a smile on your face. It’s very odd.

Knappenberger can’t paint his subject as an imperfect human being because Swartz simply means too much to too many people right now. He’s a focal point for social and political change, with communal grief as its engine.

Despite the climactic hugs all around and spiritual healing celebrated by a tearful service in the cathedral, some moments en route make an impression.

It has been said before but it’s worth saying again: Gore Vidal was born to the toga, even if he never actually wore one.

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger isn’t so much inspired as disgusted by the notorious gangster in his newest documentary.

One thing you have to give Bay credit for: He has a knack for bringing A-list talent down to his level. Like Mark Wahlberg, Oscar nominee for “The Fighter” and “The Departed.”

Charming, but not seductive.

In other words, Citizen Koch is preaching to the choir. Which might not be a pointless exercise, seeing how the choir failed to show up for the last midterm election in 2010, and might need extra motivation not to repeat that mistake this November.

Rossi gives us a survey course when what we need is a seminar; the movie is a useful “What’s Wrong With College 101” but the advanced study remains to be done.

Korengal is a more diffuse film than “Restrepo,” less reportorial, and not nearly as emotionally overpowering.

Think Like a Man Too vastly surpasses the septic “The Hangover Part III.” If Story and company keep thinking like filmmakers, maybe three will be the charm.

Behind the familiar hits, Jersey Boys is a story about the pressures and rewards of professionalism. Far too little of that has made it into this biopic. It’s just too mediocre to be true.

There’s a thin line between the iconic and the generic, and The Rover, a grim post-apocalyptic drama from down under, wanders back and forth across it in an adrenaline daze.

Yet for all the love emanating from client-pals Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Emeril Lagasse, and Steven Tyler, there’s a sadness to this movie that remains just off camera.

At its best, The Great Flood is hypnotic — at its worst, numbing.

Including the high expectations set up by the film’s early going, Eubank had a thoughtful thriller in the works but along the way he got his signals crossed.

It’s a warm, sympathetic, very sloppy, and often very funny little movie about a young woman who, among several other things, is not remotely ready to be a parent and knows it.

West’s film differs from the “Blair Witch” template in that the footage is never actually “found.”

A messy, congenial empowerment story that knows how aggravating adolescence can be when you refuse to fit in.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 recaptures those lyrical highs. But returning writer-director Dean DeBlois also aims to layer on more poignancy for Baruchel and his castmates to play. At points, we’re left feeling a little detached.

A hugely enjoyable shambles. It’s a comic deconstruction of that most useless of Hollywood artifacts — the blockbuster sequel — that refuses to take itself seriously on any level, which, face it, is just what we need as the summer boom-boom season shifts into high gear.

Enjoyable, occasionally grueling, and overstuffed with incident and agenda.

The first three-quarters of Ida are as astonishing as anything you’ll see at the movies this year.

Though at times it threatens to become too generic to be original, or too original to be generic, it retains enough indirection to frustrate those looking for thrills and to engage those willing to be challenged. And by the time the bottom drops out in a characteristically enigmatic ending, Night Moves distinguishes itself as a genuine Reichardt movie.

The fact is that this is a pretty good summer-kablooie movie, and Cruise is better than pretty good in it.

Intelligent and earnest, The Fault in Our Stars works well enough to keep a doubter from feeling mugged by sentiment.

Puzzle is neither puzzling nor much fun. It reminds you how much better Julie Delpy told the same story in “2 Days in New York.”

Compared to his previous films, The Dance of Reality offers a nearly coherent narrative and a gentle, reconciliatory tone.

It’s clear what MacFarlane is shooting for — nothing less than the chance to be both the Bob Hope and the Mel Brooks of his generation. Be careful what you wish for.

While this is Jolie’s show, obviously — and she’s terrifically arch — the surprising dearth of other compelling characters doesn’t offer much distraction when things get off track.

The characters look as if they’d be more comfortable with intertitles than spoken dialogue. And the faces — Marion Cotillard as Ewa, the beleaguered Polish immigrant of the title, holds a close-up as well as Lillian Gish or Louise Brooks.

Regrettably, it’s terrible poetry: a roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.

You may be put in mind of HBO’s recent “True Detective” — the low-down Southern locations, the time period (here the mid-1980s), some truly horrible crimes, a general air of diseased moralism — but Cold in July, while stylishly done, isn’t close to that good.

Funny thing, though: The sunnier that Barrymore gets in her scenes with Sandler, the more the iffy elements and leaden bits seem to just melt away.

“Days” is fast, smart, well-acted, and intermittently inspired, and if you don’t know or care who Beast or Blink or Storm are, you can safely skip it.

With an aptness that may even be intentional, The Double feels both over-familiar and oddly new. It’s safe to call it a Kafka-esque tale, even though the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel from which the movie is adapted was written in 1846.

A haunting experience, one that requires patience (and then some) but that offers spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic rewards beyond the immediate power of words to describe.

Best, probably, to appreciate the movie for what Slattery, Hoffman, and the cast do most effectively: craft a pervasive atmosphere of tired people trudging through tired circumstances that only seem to grow more, well, tiring.

It’s a solid debut, and it gets to the heart of suburban adolescence in ways that slicker, more ostensibly mature movies don’t. That includes Aunt Sofia’s “The Bling Ring.”

Presents enough teasing glimpses into the dancer’s personal and inner life to demand a fuller picture.

An engaged, engaging voyage of (re)discovery that’s too in love with its subject to qualify as food porn. It’s food romance.

An unusual story and sharp talents have been put through the Disney family-film machinery and come out flattened into formula. It’s an average movie, and that isn’t bad — just average.

An uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments. But the movie can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us.