Unbroken stirs a moviegoer by default; it’s an astounding story of human endurance that has been brought a little too safely to the screen.

Into the Woods is forced in some places but exquisitely right in others, and it gains strength as it goes.

As for the performances, only homely Giovana has heart and depth. The two boys lack chemistry, even in chemistry class, due in part to the trite dialogue, or at least as it is translated in subtitles.

Seeing Ben Stiller, the late Robin Williams, and their magically roused gang together again, this time in London, is initially all about indulgent, nostalgic smiles rather than new wows. But then comes the movie’s exceptionally clever and fresh final act, which delivers genuine surprise along with many laughs.

The unforced cleverness of the opening scenes gives way to lazy plotting, awkwardly staged musical numbers, and car chases. By the end, the movie resembles just another formulaic, family-friendly piece of product, one the kids will enjoy and you’ll endure as it goes in the DVD player for the 40th time.

Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation has more substance than a sitcom, even though it’s broken down into three TV series-like episodes. But it’s no “M*A*S*H” — a film to which some have compared it — either.

The film that director Morten Tyldum has made from Hodges’s book is a shinier, less trustworthy thing, but it’s ripping old-school Oscar bait, and if it sends moviegoers off to check the facts, all the better.

It’s a slap-happy movie and often scurrilously funny — the sound of a gifted comic mind finally finding its onscreen voice.

Scott’s “Exodus” is dutiful, deeply earnest, and more than a little dull.

Where Wild disappoints is in the didactic, show-and-tell approach of Vallée’s direction and of the screenplay.

As the title implies, though, Keep on Keepin’ On has more on its mind. The film’s as much about the young Kauflin’s struggles — as a 21st-century Asian-American naïf trying to succeed in a 20th-century art form created by African-Americans, as a blind man navigating the often callous New York jazz scene. It’s also about the ongoing health of jazz itself as the music recedes further from the mainstream into the protective world of festivals and small clubs.

It’s a handsomely mounted, intentionally claustrophobic film; too claustrophobic over the long haul, with relentless close-ups that constrict the galvanic emotions on display.

The Babadook remains a potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood. The ending, remarkably, gets to have it both ways, reminding us that some of the scariest monsters are the ones we learn to live with.

Powell never achieves the absurdist, uncanny poetry of that scene in Herzog’s film where a “demented” penguin marches into oblivion, but he does arouse wonder at nature’s sublimity.

Like the children’s films of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Bad Hair explores such social pathology, in part, in the guise of a kids’ movie. But it also takes on the intensity of more pointed films such as “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) and even Hector Babenco’s sensationalistic “Pixote” (1981).

It is a delight for flamenco fans and provides a fascinating introduction for those unfamiliar with the music. But as cinema, despite the lush cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, it is lacking.

The movie’s tone is hushed, restrained; emotional damage is crammed way back where no one can see it yet defines everything through a murky prism.

It’s a movie content to stay within the show’s comfort zone, changing things up mainly with flashier, 3-D visuals, a couple of which are dazzlers, and a theme that doesn’t connect in any notable way.

A new misadventure whose negligibly refined formula somehow ends up being more consistently entertaining.

Despite his neuroses, VanDyke displays self-awareness and humility, and a charisma that ranges from the goofiness of Owen Wilson to the grandiosity of his hero, Lawrence of Arabia.

This odd, ungainly western is harsh in its details, wayward in the telling, yet increasingly powerful as it wends its way back East toward civilization.

It’s a cheat, a cash grab, and it makes for 125 dystopian minutes of set-up with no resolution. But come back next November, folks, and we’ll show you the rest! They should have called it “Mockingjay, Part 1 — The Shakedown.” Or “The Hunger Games 3: Rubble Without a Cause.”

In a sense, there can be nothing ordinary about such an extraordinary place. Furthermore, Wiseman’s special gift as a filmmaker has been to show how searching attention reveals that there really is no such thing as ordinariness.

Humorless, pretentious black-and-white tone poem about a very young Abe Lincoln.

What you may not be prepared for is the way that humor does play a part in the story, in the sense that recognizing the total absurdity of a theocratic police state is one way to rise above fear and keep one’s mind free. In Rosewater, ridicule becomes a weapon of liberation.

It’s a gentle epic, based on a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, that uses pencils, ink, and impressionistic washes of color to convey a glowing visual otherworld, one that stands in contrast both to Takahata’s earlier work and the hard-edged lines and bright tones of much anime.

A cruelly precise, often bleakly comic account of upper-middle-class privilege coming unglued when the cosmos throws a curveball.