Ron Howard, who’s tied to this franchise like a man trapped in a decaying house by a huge mortgage, tries without success to blow life into David Koepp’s script.

I couldn’t tell whether the film was intended to be a comedy; as it became more and more improbable, both predictable and ludicrous at once, I heard audience members chortle again and again.

Demolition is a rarity: A film with a profound emotional truth at its heart that lies to us, scene by scene, from start to finish.

I recommend “Batman v. Superman” to anyone who thought director Zack Snyder showed too much restraint in “300,” who felt “Man of Steel” whisked by too briefly or who wondered how Ben Affleck could be made to seem one of America’s most animated actors while clenching his jaw as tight as a Christmas nutcracker.

The Bronze is one of those faux-naughty comedies that simply doesn’t have the courage of its lack of convictions.

The reason to see the movie is Field.

The Coen brothers’ new movie, set in Hollywood in 1951, brings easy laughs but dissipates from memory moments later, like the cheesy films to which it pays homage – or, perhaps, mocks.

Unlike David Foster Wallace in “End of the Tour,” a masterful look at depression, Stone’s just a self-centered, unaware bore. He doesn’t merit attention from the kindly, cheerful, anxious Lisa – or from us.

The conversion to 3-D has left the movie looking grim and dim. Almost every scene, whether indoors by candlelight or upon the open ocean, seems awkwardly dark; competent 3-D effects don’t compensate for this distraction. Equally drab are the performances, except for Gleeson and Whishaw.

However good DiCaprio may be, everything else feels overblown.

The 25-year-old Lawrence is too young – Mangano was 35 when the mop took off – but compelling to watch. Yet in “Silver Linings Playbook,” Cooper, De Niro and Russell all supported her with fine work; here they lie back and make the movie a one-ring circus where she has to be acrobat, bareback rider and clown. That’s too much to ask.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 has the technical polish and competent acting of the four-film series, though less intensity. It contains no surprises and ends with an anticlimax I have heard is faithful to the book, though it doesn’t amount to much onscreen.

Del Toro gets the ghostly elements right, with red and black flesh-torn spooks wailing warnings to the receptive Edith. But he goes wildly overboard in aiming for atmosphere after the story shifts to the Sharpes’ crumbling English manor.

While Shyamalan competently scares us from time to time and makes us laugh uncomfortably at the odd actions – aren’t we snickering at mental illness? – he has nowhere interesting to take this simple tale.

Once The Quest begins, the movie collapses. The ending turns coincidental, preachy and stupid.

The new team thinks that if mayhem is funny, five times the mayhem will be five times as hilarious. That’s not how movie math works, and too many scenes spin out of control.

Schwarzenegger, weathered and ironic, strides through the film with old-fashioned authority. Except for Clarke, who walks an ambiguous line between heroism and sinister monomania, only Big Arnie leaves the slightest impression after the credits roll.

The team of four writers supplies one surprise, and you’ll wait 90 minutes to see it. Before and afterward, stereotypical genre characters get trotted out.

Everything about this film, from the title to the metaphors, remains cloudy. And you can watch clouds only so long before you realize they don’t have any weight at all.

Though the film sat in drydock for a year, partly so technicians could convert it to 3-D, it looks as dull as it sounds.

The story’s unbelievable, end to end.

We don’t see his alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder after coming home, the decay of his marriage, the vengeful hatred that led him to strangle his captors in his nightmares. Nor do we see his conversion to Christianity after a 1949 Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles, an event he credited with saving his sanity, marriage and perhaps his life.

The Giver has an unsavory reek of box-office calculation about it, from the overworked “teens-must-save-a-world-ruined-by-adults” plot to the casting of pop star Taylor Swift in a small and irrelevant role.

Whether you take to it will depend on whether you consider “high-octane” or “nonsense” the more important word.

That’s the problem with Winter’s Tale, which tries to cram too many conflicting stories into one space and ends up defying us to believe any. Call it magic unrealism, a well-intentioned but clunky genre.

For a while, it’s fun to watch Bardem camp around in his rose-tinted glasses and stuck-my-finger-in-a-socket hairdo.

Elementary school-age boys may well be delighted, but it offers not a scintilla of stimulation for anyone else.

It’s rare that a movie stops making sense before anyone speaks a line of intelligible dialogue, but The Wolverine is a rare movie.