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.

The plot doesn’t take clever turns, the visual thrills aren’t all that thrilling, and you’re ultimately left to get your heist-movie kicks elsewhere.

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.

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.

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

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.

Joe is one more in the line of Southern Gothic miserabilism that includes “Winter’s Bone” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” films that many have praised but some find condescending.

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.

In the Heart of the Sea plays as if the joke was real and everyone on the production had caved in. The result, as a movie, is a joke.

It’s a Christmas nightmare, stuck with two obnoxious relatives who think they’re funny, and won’t shut up.

There’s nary an honorable death that resonates, although we do get some creative visual perspectives on enthusiastically digitized brutality. But wasn’t the game good for that already?

McAvoy’s performance is a deep, deep shade of gonzo and by far the most enjoyable aspect of Victor Frankenstein — you don’t often see over-acting this enthusiastic or this flecked with spittle.

What I found more disturbing was the casual misogyny of the convoluted story line.

Though Zefferelli’s version was trashy and downright nuts, at least it made you feel the love. This pallid replay just seems endless.

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.”

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

Stupid, sadistic, misogynistic, confusing, and more than a little ridiculous. Here’s the thing, though: It keeps you watching, if only to see how tortured the plot or characters are going to get. I’m not sure that “entertainingly awful” is a recommendation, but the shoe fits.

To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.

It’s a big deal for the NFL and ESPN, no doubt, and Draft Day serves as 110 minutes of product placement for both.

Unfortunately, Mann also leans on ill-fitting story elements that he might easily and smartly have avoided, and the movie’s rhythms and credibility pay for it.

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.

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”).

Big Eyes may not be Tim Burton’s absolute worst movie — we’ll always have “Planet of the Apes” — but it’s pretty close to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals his weaknesses as a director and, by their absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill, smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker of doubt that Burton has little interest in human beings unless they can be reduced to cartoons.

So this is the little movie that caused the big fuss. And little it is, a dopey bro-com that piddles along delivering mild laughs until it turns overly, unamusingly bloody in the climactic scenes.

It must have looked great on paper. On screen, it’s a soapy mess that even Joan Crawford in her delusional late-period prime couldn’t save.

It’s been a while since there’s been this much dead air onscreen; over and over, Smith sets up a sequence, lets his actors shpritz, and stands by as the energy fades into giggly catatonia.

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.