It’s also a movie that further establishes Vaughn as one of the edgier and more underrated genre voices of the moment, and that makes us wonder why Colin Firth hasn’t indulged in an action sideline all along.

The director of the much-anticipated adaptation, Sam Taylor-Johnson, made what could have been a trashy TV movie into well-conceived cinema.

To its credit, despite a rough start (witch burning and all that), Seventh Son does not succumb to misogyny.

Dazzling to behold yet puny of imagination, the movie takes the “Star Wars” formula — hero myths nicked from Joseph Campbell, cutting-edge visual effects, comic-strip dialogue, goofy-looking aliens — and reduces it to generic Big Box shelf product.

There’s no redeeming this softcore nonsense, which plays like a script that “Storage Wars” stumbled across in Joe Eszterhas’s old locker.

If you close your eyes you’d think it was a commercial for a “Great Love Songs” DVD collection.

I have not seen the film “Fifty Shades of Grey” but I doubt that it evokes the mystery, wit, and eroticism that Peter Strickland’s sumptuously claustrophobic fable of women in love does. All without nudity, bad dialogue, or the requisite wooden acting.

One of the advantages of time travel in a found-footage film is that it makes the chronology and causality so confusing that the problem of who’s shooting what becomes secondary. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow fast-forwarding through all the boring bits. For starters, I could have done with far less Lollapalooza.

Despite the best of intentions, a career-best performance from Kevin Costner, and outstanding work by Octavia Spencer and child actor Jillian Estell, Black or White succumbs to some of the same stereotypes it tries to dispel.

If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.

It will also make them laugh. Intentionally or not, director Rob Cohen (“Alex Cross”) has put together the most hilarious camp classic since “White House Down” (2013).

Here Aniston suffers every manipulative cliché and contrivance in the tearjerker playbook. She works hard, and it’s painful to watch.

Movies can convey the fever of new love more intensely than almost any other medium, and Song One is best when it shrinks the world down to James and Franny alone together in a crowded city.

This is a small, compassionate gem of a movie, one that’s rooted in details of people and place but that keeps opening up onto the universal.

At its best, Still Alice is a moving inquisition into the emotions and memories and connections that make us us and how we might cope when they’re taken away with slow, impersonal cruelty.

Aside from the clever punning of the title, Spare Parts ends up as jury-rigged and programmatic as Stinky, the robot in the movie. And, unlike Stinky, it is dead in the water.

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.

True, a lot of marmalade gets spread around, and at times the zaniness gets a bit too slap-sticky, but it’s all good clean fun.

A Most Violent Year, then, is something of a science experiment, with Abel the good rat trying to make it to the other side of the maze, uneaten and in full possession of the cheese. In its weaker moments, the movie struggles to get out of the lab. At its best, it reminds us that the maze is as big as the world and as timely as today.

American Sniper may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it.

His (Hawke) subtle performance also draws attention away from the creaky plot machinery, as does the Spierig brothers’ eye for the seemingly throwaway but pregnant detail.

Selma is at its very best when it gets into the nitty-gritty of the SCLC’s arrival in Selma amid colliding factions and forces.

A life is not plot; plot is not life. By scrupulously sticking not just to the accuracies of Turner’s life as we know them but to the tiniest of details, the chipped mugs on kitchen tables, the pantaloons on a passing merchant, the spray of storm surf across the bow of a ship, Leigh wants us to truly see the world Turner moved through. Only by seeing that world can we see how he saw and painted it.

After a while, you may suspect that things aren’t adding up. Later still, you begin to realize they may never add up.

It’s a self-reflexive tour de force, laugh-out-loud in its outrageousness, a true gift from the Movie God, who, if not Tarantino, is in this case probably Sam Peckinpah. You just have to endure 90 minutes of inanity to get to enjoy it.

Comparisons have been made to the films of Jim Jarmusch and early David Lynch, both warranted. Amirpour wears her influences like a badge of honor but she also has a nascent sensibility of her own, arguably more feminine and certainly more sensual.

He’s the dreamer in the machine, and if he truly is retiring, the world stands to look a lot more ordinary.

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.