Philomena is a tearjerker of rare honesty and craft.

Boston University product Gary Fleder (“Kiss the Girls”) directs the action with grungy efficiency, and the movie does hook us with a certain lurid anticipation of just how far things might escalate.

Frozen could also leave its mark as the next step in the Disney Princess feminist revisionism championed by last year’s “Brave.” Where that film staunchly pushed a men-don’t-define-me theme throughout, here it’s the requisite fairy tale ending that gets tweaked.

It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

This IMAX spectacular largely does what it’s supposed to fascinate, educate, and visually wow the audience, in 45 minutes or less.

Though fitfully entertaining, it lacks the conviction and urgency present in even the weakest of his quasi agit-prop productions.

The result is an extended home movie that is also a sociological experiment.

The film is unobjectionable, sentimental, and not a little dull.

The Armstrong Lie is one for the time capsule, because it preserves for future generations a very particular modern response to scandal: confession without remorse.

Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.

Very few people will take in this spectacle of a society amusing itself to death, of “reality games” and the vapid media hysteria that surrounds them, and not draw a parallel to our own televised bread and circuses. At its best, “Catching Fire” is a blockbuster that bites the culture that made it.

Despite the music, and no matter how the film’s editors slice it, the attempt to get a rise out of the audience by way of the endangered child device verges on emotional pornography.

The final questions in Pervert’s Guide to Ideology nag at us, and in a culture so built upon and so profiting by fantasies of Hollywood apocalypse, they deserve to.

All in all, maybe the best 90 minutes of romantic comedy in theaters this fall. Unfortunately, the film is 122 minutes long.

A meticulously observed, rapturously directed account of World War III and its aftermath as seen from the point of view of a spoiled young woman. The movie’s pretty fascinating before it goes bonkers.

So here’s a tip: Don’t desert this film before giving it a chance. You might not want seconds, but eventually it dishes up a satisfying slice of life.

By the end of this sincerely calculated, always watchable movie, everything has burned away but the fury, including whatever you may think or have thought about the actor you’re looking at. That’s how good the performance is.

Has its moments of visual invention and self-aware humor — mostly when the hero’s trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is around — but otherwise it’s an awkwardly plotted extravaganza.

You may not recognize the Vignelli name, but you certainly recognize their designs.

With his thoughtful exploration of the conflict between desire and responsibility, and his self-reflexive exploration of the themes of voyeurism, ambition, and personal identity, Reeves’s debut shows signs of a talented filmmaker.

Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.

In his eloquent, evenhanded, and meticulously constructed debut documentary, Jason Osder stirs the ashes of this tragedy and sheds new heat and light on such timely issues as the abuse of authority and the violation of the rights of citizens, especially the marginalized and powerless.

In the war between zombies and vampires for the domination of American popular culture, the zombies currently seem to have the edge. So suggests a montage in Rob Kuhns’s amusing but perfunctory documentary about the origins of the 1968 ur-text of zombiedom, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.

If you don’t really understand women — or don’t even want to — it’s easier to just call them a mystery and let it go at that. For all the close-ups, that may be why Blue Is the Warmest Color never gets close enough.

Somewhere between John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970) and “The Hangover” (2009) you will find Last Vegas. Not necessarily a bad place to be, except the film unfortunately has the madcap hilarity of the former and the emotional intensity of the latter.

It comes down to this: Which is more important, the innocence of a child or the survival of the species? And if the race survives, will it just become like the enemy aliens that must be destroyed to do so?

That Ginsberg is played by Daniel Radcliffe might come as a shock, but the shock wears off as the movie rolls on and you realize you’re in very good hands.

A scene between Yoni and Fahed in the pilot’s makeshift holding cell is a microcosm of everything that’s right about the movie, and not quite right.

12 Years a Slave is to the “peculiar institution” what “Schindler’s List” was to the Holocaust: a work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself. If there’s no Oskar Schindler here, that’s partly the point.

All Is Lost works quite brilliantly on its most basic narrative level.

It’s the kind of outrageous comedy that you might even take your folks to, though probably not your kids. Say what you will about Harmony Korine and his demented geriatrics, at least they take their trash seriously.

This one has more in common with Scott’s “Thelma & Louise” in the memorable way it escalates, inevitably but also unexpectedly, into a spin through wilder country, and a meditation on bigger themes.

First-time director Nick Ryan isn’t entirely up to the challenge in The Summit, but he does deliver some dramatic and visual highs in the attempt.

This movie doesn’t make the case. In fact, had they upped the absurdity a notch, it would rival the comedy of Christopher Guest’s let’s-put-on-a-show mockumentary, “Waiting for Guffman” (1996). As it stands, it plays like an infomercial.

It’s clear To is striving to keep the action gripping and creative. Modestly inspired is more like it.

The archival footage in Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali is wondrous. How could it not be, featuring the gentleman in the title.

This sounds like it could be austere and schematic, but the affecting, authentic performances from the first-time actors make these characters thoroughly authentic.

The Fifth Estate is itself the response of an entrenched and corporatized information system toward something it barely comprehends. It makes a media format that has sustained us for decades — the two-hour movie — feel like a 20th-century dinosaur.

In one amusing bit of dialogue, Stallone and Schwarze-negger kid each other about being smarter than they look. For a little while at least, we thought we might be able to say the same about Escape Plan.

The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.

Despite moments of black comedy and some memorable images, this “debut’’ doesn’t offer a lot to love.

A grade A, meat-and-potatoes genre flick.

Though perhaps more suited to PBS or classrooms than to movie screens, the documentary is engrossing and just may encourage more people to look less to pharmacology for answers and more within.

Lively, if overlong, documentary.

Escape From Tomorrow, Moore’s sometimes surreal, sometimes sophomoric, black comic phantasmagoria, makes for a bumpy theme park ride.

Rodriguez does a fair job of keeping the zaniness coming: Vergara’s machine gun bra, Gibson delivering exposition in a “Star Wars” prop, bad guys offed by helicopter blades in dementedly creative ways. It’s enough that you’ll hope Rodriguez makes good on that new faux trailer — for “Machete Kills Again . . . in Space.”

Carlos Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet is a failure of skill.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

Scott’s probably the perfect actor for this, since he’s too likably lightweight to suggest any emotion more crippling than exasperation.

Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.

Through luck or Huber’s eye for the odd detail, it adds up to an unexpectedly moving portrait of a maverick at twilight.

Not your everyday dilemma, but as depicted in this lushly detailed and passionately performed melodrama, the mores and traditions of this sequestered, seldom depicted group take on a broader relevance.

Bulging with period details and a large and busy cast, Parkland is well made and at times queasily fascinating. At others, it gives in to melodrama and the ticking off of facts.

The world of cinema is richer for the voice of Al Mansour; she speaks for the women of her country, and for people everywhere.

When it’s time for the hot sex scene between Timberlake’s ambitious Richie Furst and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), his boss’s luscious second-in-command, the encounter is as charmless and chemistry-free as the wooden banter that has led up to it. I’ve had dentist’s appointments that were sexier.

The movie’s an astonishingly detailed, visually painstaking state-of-the-art production that advances what the cinema can show us—even as the human story at its center feels a little thin after a while.

“You don’t need a man to define you!” Very true, and so much for feminism. The rest of the film takes a long, convoluted, predictable, and mostly unfunny route to prove that the opposite is the case.

The guys in Metallica are here to remind us that there’s a band behind the rage rock. The IMAX 3-D release Metallica Through the Never is all about reasserting their relevance, loudly.

Haute Cuisine proves the limits of cinema: It’s a movie that needs Taste-o-Vision.

The Muslims Are Coming! is at its best when the comedians talk to real people outside the controlled environment of a stage.

It’s another brightly rendered effort, but, as the title indicates, a lot of the real creativity seems to have been used up the first time around.

Another problem with “Inequality” is that it offers nothing new or surprising.

The film’s a character piece with a tightening noose of suspense, and while it has its artsy-indie-dawdly moments, it’s disturbing in ways that aren’t easy to shake. Is the movie necessary? Do we need a “John and Lee: Portrait of Two Serial Killers”? Because it shines a light, however hesitant, into the cramped, resentful mind-sets that fester in the corners of America, I’d have to say yes.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

What Don Jon is, surprisingly, is honest. R-rating aside, it should be required viewing for every 15-year-old boy on the planet.

In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.

You could argue that Gandolfini doesn’t have enough screen time, but what’s there is, as they say, cherce. The scenes in which Albert and Eva get to know each other are delightful miniatures of emotional intimacy, two bruised romantics amazed to find someone still on their wavelength.

Some documentaries are an embarrassment of riches. Salinger is merely an embarrassment.

A documentary about comedy needs to be funny. The old guys, as noted, have definitely lost a lot off their collective fastball.

In lieu of suspense, Rosenthal relies on a mood of free-floating anxiety, enhanced by West Virginia (actually British Columbia) landscapes where the sun never shines. As one-note as the title suggests, A Single Shot misfires.

The best thing about Money for Nothing is the many talking heads trying to explain what monetary policy is and what the Fed does: controlling the supply of money and, with any luck, guiding the economy.

See Steve McQueen’s “Shame” (2011) if you want a sense of how destructive this sickness can be to the soul. See Thanks for Sharing if you want to know what people can do about it.

What Greenbaum captures is compelling, and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Sports in their purest form are played by children, who are — most of the time — much too young to be tarnished by professional-level jealousy, scandal, sacrifice, and unfair expectations.

Bleak and beautiful, harrowing yet also curiously stirring, The Wall (“Die Wand”) is a stunning tale of isolation and survival that unfolds in a wild and silent world.

A startling fantasy of Muslim feminist empowerment that allows the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani to put on what amounts to a one-woman show.

As gripping as it is grueling, with performances that swing for the fences and a central mystery that seems an unresolvable tangle of knots until those knots come undone in a somewhat forced final act.

Just one more touch of “realism” in a sexual melodrama played so straight that it’s nuts.

Despite hard-working performances and the occasional sexual frisson from ingénue Déborah François (a kind of French Renée Zellweger) and seductive Romain Duris (who looks like Tom Hanks by way of Montgomery Clift), Populaire hits mostly wrong keys.

In a year when black filmmaking has surged with Oscar-touted films such as “The Butler” and the upcoming “12 Years a Slave,” Murray’s Things Never Said has a quiet eloquence of its own.

Drinking Buddies is further evidence that Wilde has more depth and ambition than mainstream Hollywood can currently handle, and it marks Swanberg as one of the subtler talents of his generation — a deceptively casual moralist whose films observe their characters without judging them yet whose conclusions are unmistakable.

The results feel a little life lesson-y but also well-earned and well-observed, and Hahn takes advantage of a rare lead role to locate both the ugliness and beauty in her character.

Not known for subtlety, Besson gets the expected laughs, and then some. He also exercises an unwonted finesse, not only with the allusions, but also with variations on the “f” word that, if not poetic, are at least funny.

Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.

Artistically, though, you can’t help but trust him. Like any star turn, Holliday’s performance rings utterly true. It’s that indefinable but unmistakable reality-beyond-reality called art.

This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.

The story gets both complicated and predictable.

As a five-minute sketch it would have been so-so. But as a 93-minute slog through witless puerility, it seems like an eternity in hell, baby.

Unfortunately, Hatley chooses not to offer much context or background history regarding that or other aspects of Helm’s half-century career, other than archival footage of Helm and the Band in their prime, press clippings, and comments from the Band “biographer,” Barney Hoskyns.

He (Cretton) just loves this place and these people so much, he wanted to give us more of them. For that, we should be grateful.

Who knows what they’re fighting about, but given the ecstatic ballet of fists and water, tossed bodies and smashed decor, centered by Leung’s majestic impassivity, it doesn’t really matter.

Imagination is what these filmmakers could use more of, as their ingenious concept doesn’t develop much beyond a gimmick.

The film looks great, boasting all the elegant period details that are expected in tasteful French adaptations of treasured national literature, with beautifully photographed Bordeaux landscapes and luxurious interiors. As for the human element, however, the mood is more apathetic than tragic.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.

Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.

The problem is that the movie offers no way of differentiating between them beyond their hairstyles.

In the end, it’s hard to remember another action entry that expends so much energy on frenetic blacktop choreography and attention-deficit editing with so little to show for it.

Instead of all-seeing, it’s more like seen it all before.