Hicks may devote too much time on hospital errands and bedside moments as Terry’s health declines. But he succeeds at honoring the career of one man who is helping another’s.

While The Good Lie certainly doesn’t shy away from scenes designed to make us shake our heads at man’s inhumanity to man and scenes designed to make us dab at our eyes, it’s the kind of movie that earns those moments.

The Book of Life is a delight. In an animated universe cluttered with kung-fu pandas, ice princesses and video-game heroes, Gutierrez and del Toro have conjured up an original vision.

Regardless of Crudup’s ranking as a box-office draw, he’s every inch the movie star in Rudderless, a rather strange but engrossing film with one of the more jarring twists of any film in recent memory.

Pitt is at the top of his game, playing a man who has forgotten whatever he used to be and has wholly embraced his role in this war.

The Best of Me was a better film than I expected. Much of that is due to the performances delivered by Marsden, Monaghan, Liana Liberato and especially young Australian actor Luke Bracey as the younger version of Marsden’s character.

Nearly every scene is contrived, but Melfi has a nice way with dialogue, and the cast is uniformly outstanding.

The music is brilliant, Chazelle’s writing and directing are something to behold, Teller is really good — and Simmons delivers one of the most memorable performances of the year.

I Am Ali serves as further testimony Ali wasn’t simply a great boxer, he was a great man who happened to be a great boxer as well.

This film moves effortlessly from some pretty intense dramatic moments to hilarious scenes showcasing the contrasting lifestyles of the gay and straight worlds to some vignettes of incredible poignancy.

A movie about this subject matter is a tough sell, but Swank and Rossum are brilliant, and in its own unique way, You’re Not You is one of the best buddy movies of the year.

Jeremy Renner doesn’t put much movie-star mustard on his performance as a newspaper reporter in Kill the Messenger, and that’s one of the reasons the work is so strong.

Vlad’s numerous speeches about love, honor and family grow tedious, along with the film’s wooden dialogue in general. And it quickly becomes obvious that Dracula Untold is more interested in being cool than making sense.

The actual case isn’t all that complex or compelling, and the eventual explanation for what happened is almost an afterthought. By the time all the ghosts and feuds have been put to rest, it’s surprising how little we care about these characters.

Disney’s bland comedy Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day might have been a little more entertaining if it had been a little more, terrible, horrible, no good and so forth.

For the most part, thanks in great part to Benson’s rich screenplay and Chastain’s nomination-worthy work, I was immersed in this story no matter who was telling the tale.

For the most part, thanks in great part to Benson’s rich screenplay and Chastain’s nomination-worthy work, I was immersed in this story no matter who was telling the tale.

The best thing about The Hero of Color City is its good voice talent — and its running time of only 77 minutes. Other than that, this is a pretty lame computer-generated animated movie that will likely not engage kids much past the first grade.

At times Reitman (adapting Chad Kultgen’s 2011 novel) can be a bit preachy and scolding about the pitfalls of surrendering one’s “RL” (real life) to one’s online existence, but just about any parent or any teenager seeing this film will empathize with any number of the interconnecting plot lines.

Everything about this film feels forced, clunky and overwrought.

The editing, with so many twists and turns and so many supporting characters needing their due, is without hiccups. And thankfully, there’s plenty of dark humor.

Level Five (1996) is a poetic if occasionally opaque film essay on the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

It’s easy to see how an unhappy transition to suburban mommyhood might be enough to unhinge any self-respecting former punk rocker but, even so, it’s a little hard to take the angst-ridden mid-life shenanigans in Kelly & Cal seriously.

This film is a winner. It will not only entertain you, but also make you think about what it takes to bring happiness into your own life.

At times Jimi: All Is By My Side feels pure authentic. More often, though, it’s meandering and melodramatic, with far too many scenes of Hendrix jabbering and squabbling with two key female figures in his life, and not enough of the music.

The Boxtrolls has a rich, edgy texture that makes it stand out from other animated films.

The Equalizer features some gruesomely creative violence, but it’s equally memorable for the small, gritty moments set in that diner, or on the rough-and-tumble streets of Boston. And most of all, it’s got Denzel going for it.

Even though we’re trafficking in mostly melancholy territory about lost souls trying to regain their footing, it says something about the tender artistry of the filmmaking, and the beautiful work by the actors, that I’m actually keen to spend more time with these characters and see this story unfold from different perspectives.

This is not a movie you forget about as you’re heading for the exit. I’m not sure it’s a movie you’ll ever forget.

Beyond the visuals, what makes The Maze Runner so compelling is its attention-grabbing storyline.

What a wasted opportunity.

Neeson is in nearly every scene in the movie, and he carries it well. Yes, he’s played this nails-tough, world-weary, scotch-loving, ex-law enforcement type again and again — but he’s as good as anyone in the world at playing those types, and in this case he has some rich material to work with.

This is a smart movie about complicated people in search of something approaching inner peace.

This understated documentary, though, has no agenda to shame any one family or agency.

In his dynamic and revealing documentary Finding Fela!, director Alex Gibney captures the many sides of Afrobeat king Fela Kuti, a complex character who is at once inspiring and vexing.

The Drop is filled with many such small, near-perfect moments where there’s so much more going on beyond the simple exchanges of dialogue.

This second film is again heartwarming and includes some nice performances from Connick, Gamble and Morgan Freeman.

It’s fascinating and boring, intriguing and exasperating, but ultimately it felt like a jambalaya of ideas that didn’t quite mesh into a satisfying experience.

The Identical evangelizes and entertains with sincere mediocrity. If the style is unremarkably mainstream, the message is theologically murky.

Even most of the fine actors, including Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Cheryl Hines, at times seem lost as to whether they should be playing the material for laughs, or going for a more straightforward approach and letting the laughs come to them.

It lands just this side of camp, with a perfectly cast Kevin Kline hamming it up as the aging bounder Flynn, and Susan Sarandon really hamming it up.

Lespert’s film, made with Berge’s blessing, does not sugarcoat the demons that plagued Saint Laurent.

To Be Takei is a celebration of a man of great resilience, infectious humor, a voracious appetite for the richness of the human experience, and the best laugh in the history of laughing.

Writer-director Hiroyuki Okiura, however, does not match the high expectations for story and design set by other Japanese animators.

Every once in a while Are You Here strikes comedic gold.

Working from Justin Lader’s smart script, Moss and Duplass expertly portray a very typical couple going through a rocky time — and they’re just as effective when the weirdness kicks in during their getaway weekend.

It’s interesting that When the Game Stands Tall is essentially a movie about losing.

Director R.J. Cutler is fond of time-lapse establishing shots and rapid-fire montages, none of them particularly effective in conveying this bizarre dual world Mia now inhabits.

This is one badass movie.

The exploration of gender politics grows tedious as the gender dynamic between the two leads reverses, and the same points are hammered home again and again.

Puenzo’s initial premise is more promising, though, than her sensational tone.

Filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller unfortunately adopts the format of prime-time docu-tainment.

The Giver doesn’t seem entirely consistent about its own rules and races far too quickly to a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion that raises three questions for each answer it provides.

The Expendables 3 is proof a movie can be exceedingly loud and excruciatingly dull.

If you’ve seen “The Big Chill,” you’ve seen this movie, with older grown-ups. Even if you haven’t, you won’t be surprised by much.

While the outcome is pretty predictable and borderline formulaic, this is a well-paced romantic comedy that works due to its engaging cast — with special kudos going out to Radcliffe and Kazan, but also Driver, who delivers perfectly as the fast-talking, libido-driven hunkster.

The cast is uniformly superb. But it is the palpable erotic tension between Solness and the mysterious, bewitchingly nubile Hilde (who he may have sexually abused or at least titillated a decade earlier) that drives the film.

Overall this is a solid, intelligent movie about the joys of expanding our horizons — in all directions.

If we don’t care a whit about the characters and their respective dilemmas, a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot is just a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot.

[A] basically brainless but intermittently adrenalizing, mostly-just-for-kids reboot.

It’s the powerful, raw, energized performance by Chadwick Boseman that makes this film worth seeing.

It’s filled with a kind of giddy energy that leaps off the screen. It’s corny, it’s dopey, it’s sincere, it’s romantic, it’s thrilling and it leaves one anticipating the next adventure of these heroic goofballs.

The reader of a pulp crime thriller might be satisfied simply with the prurient descriptions, and certainly this film visualizes those and has as its victims Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, who embody paperback covers, but the dominant presence in the film is Lou Ford, and there just doesn’t seem to be anybody at home.

Happy Christmas expertly captures the rhythms of a young couple’s life and how it changes enormously when a baby arrives.

The film ends up feeling more like a very long music video.

Cahill has not only made a thoughtful and compelling movie about science, but he’s also given us an intriguing story that delves into the age-old debate of faith vs. hard proof involving the possibility of a higher spiritual power.

And So It Goes is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. The pleasure comes from experiencing the fine performances and semi-frequent smile-inducing dialogue, bolstered in no small fashion by the wonderful comedic timing of Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton.

A Most Wanted Man works as a crowd-pleaser and as a believable reflection of how these fictional events might well play out in the real world.

Firth and Stone, appealing as they are as actors, are so disconnected as potential romantic leads it sometimes appears as if they’re barely in the same scene together.

Besson has always demonstrated the ability to chuckle at the madness of his own material, and he provides some solid laughs from time to time. But these winks do nothing to erase the reality of a plot that becomes unintentionally hilarious.

It’s meant to be a soufflé-light charmer, but the bland, predictable French comedy Le Chef basically falls flat.

In the introspective The Last Sentence Swedish director Jan Troell invokes ’50’s and ’60’s Swedish cinema: masterly black-and-white cinematography, philosophical angst, a lifeless marriage and loved ones visiting from the afterlife.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is a good improvement over “Planes,” which Disney released last year. The story is stronger, there are some wonderful additions to the voice talent and the 3D cinematography is well-utilized.

In The Purge: Anarchy, unfortunately, grim and brutal is pretty much all we get.

Once in a great while I see a movie I know I’ll be listing as one of my all-time favorites for the rest of my days. So it is with this remarkable, unforgettable, elegant epic that is about one family — and millions of families. It’s a pinpoint-specific and yet universal story.

Sex Tape feels like the halves of two different movies. There is a fun, believable comedy about family life... that is upended by the overly broad, barely funny attempts at reclaiming the sex tape.

Director/co-writer/actor Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here is a precious and condescending exercise in self-indulgent pandering, featuring one of the whiniest lead characters in recent memory.

The Perfect Wave is aimed at a certain audience that will appreciate its message and let slide its deficiencies.

A disquieting film about testing faith.

This is an “Apes” for the ages.

Bong, above all, is a world-class visual stylist, and he proves that again here with a few dazzling flourishes, despite Snowpiercer’s dismal gray palette and train-bound claustrophobia.

Hoogendijk is a guest with more tact than curiosity about why a three-year plan went so over schedule.

When the songs work well, as a few of them do, much can be forgiven.

The saving grace for this film is the group of young actors.

Director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer, Paul Harris Boardman, deliver a routine procedural with unremarkable frights.

When you’re balancing ridiculous slapstick right out of a live-action cartoon with well-written, well-acted scenes that feel completely of this world, that’s a tough balancing act, and “Tammy” isn’t quite up to the task on a consistent basis.

[An] unabashedly derivative but nonetheless entertaining, pitch-black Norwegian crime comedy.

Instead of venturing outside Outpost Restrepo, we hear what the soldiers feel about their 15-month deployment.

Wonderful as it is to watch great actors delve deeply into their roles, it’s a shame that the material they are delivering is just so damn confusing.

This is a film that left me marveling at Swartz’s beautiful mind, and shaking my head at the insanity of the system he knew was badly fractured.

Thanks to a smart screenplay, direction that perfectly captures the tone of modern rom-coms and two of the most engaging comedic leads working in movies and TV today, “They Came Together” is more entertaining and (in its own insane way) more endearing than two-thirds of the legitimate romantic comedies I’ve seen over the last two decades.

Age of Extinction is just another warmed-over, cynical, ATM machine of a movie. It’s soulless eye candy.

The Rover does have a central nervous system that crackles and pops with suspense, but in the end it’s not enough to jump-start the lack of narrative. Too much story is missing, and that is simply distracting.

The film is well acted all around and the excellent art direction brings the ’60s to colorful life. But Bandele struggles to balance an epic story of civil war and death against the equally epic story of sisters whose lives are forever changed by circumstances they can’t control.

For one of the few times in Eastwood’s career as a director, he seems indecisive about what kind of movie he wanted to make.

The problem — and it’s an insurmountable, deadly, comedy-killing, consistent problem throughout — is a tired, uninspired, derivative screenplay that brings everyone to Vegas for a wedding and incorporates nearly every weekend-in-Vegas cliche explored in dozens of previous films.

While it’s hard to make sense of the narrative developments in The Signal, it must be said that it’s always visually compelling. And that some of the standout sequences (including, yes, the Mind-Blowing Twist Ending) suggest that Eubank could have a terrific future as a director. As a screenwriter, though, maybe not so much.

Supermensch sells the impression that its subject is a genuinely good guy.