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.