It’s hard to imagine anyone seeing this film and not feeling the weight of the heartbreak when a young girl’s life is destroyed by bullying, and outrage that even with all the awareness and all the campaigning, bullying remains an epidemic in schools everywhere.

Al Pacino sells the heck out of his performance as Danny Collins.

Lawrence, obviously a talented actress, is monumentally bad here. There’s no nuance to her performance as Serena, no gradual descent for the character. She’s a conniving, criminal nutball, and Lawrence overplays her as if she’s a villainess in a mediocre silent film.

From its juvenile double entendre title to its fascination with prison rape and homophobic humor, “Get Hard” practically announces itself as an offensive, tired and unimaginative comedy in nearly every scene. And yet I didn’t hate it because Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart had such terrific comedic chemistry.

The problem is, the story lacks originality and zest.

The remarkable if unorthodox life and art of the classically trained pianist Seymour Bernstein is explored with acute feeling and quiet tenderness in Ethan Hawke’s terrific biographical portrait, Seymour: An Introduction.

[Kirby Dick's] new documentary enrages, yet makes its case in an even-tempered manner.

The mood is somber, ominous and increasingly suspenseful throughout (despite an awkwardly handled final showdown), goosed along by an intense John Carpenter-esque electronic music score.

Even with my misgivings about some of Randi’s methods, anyone who can challenges faith healers, psychics and mediums who claim a special bond with the dead — and often wins those challenges — deserves a standing ovation. An Honest Liar is an honest portrait of just that man.

The Gunman veers dangerously close to camp in the final scenes. If you make it that far without walking out.

For those looking for non-stop action, pretty dazzling special effects and solid acting by the young protagonists, Insurgent will not disappoint.

The problem is, the plot wavers from nearly indecipherable to semi-ridiculous to … I stopped caring.

Frame by frame, ’71 is one of those intense war thrillers where you know it’s fiction, you know it’s not a documentary, and yet every performance and every conflict feels true to the history and the events of the time.

The Cobbler goes from bad to you-have-to-be-kidding in that final act, when we’re given a big reveal that makes no sense, even in the context of a bat-bleep crazy fable.

Even though it feels as if we’ve seen this movie before, Run All Night is a stylish and kinetic thriller, with Neeson at his gritty, world-weary best, some of the coolest camera moves in recent memory and a Hall of Fame villain in the great Ed Harris.

The world didn’t need yet another Cinderella story, but the one we got is one of the best versions ever put on film.

Is it a hard-R road trip comedy that makes no apologies for politically incorrect humor — or a sweet family film with a message about tolerance and acceptance? It’s both, I suppose. And neither element is particularly convincing or particularly funny.

This is a well-meaning film with a good idea that unfortunately stumbles on its way to its less-than-satisfying end.

I found Road Hard to be a low-key gem, a consistently funny albeit conventional story about a guy who’s almost always the funniest person in the room, and is almost always his own worst enemy.

It’s well-made and well-acted, but it’s also a grotesque, self-indulgent and ultimately tiresome satire that leaves behind an unpleasant stench.

The true story of Freddy Heineken’s kidnapping is fascinating, but Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

Edmands avoids the in-your-face emotional punch that most filmmakers would employ (police, lawsuits, confrontation) and instead opts for a more delicate, observational pacing, creating a set of vignettes that give a stark glimpse into these disrupted lives.

If everyone behaved the way the characters in Wild Tales behave, civilization would crumble. But the real take-away lesson here is how easy it might be for any of us, swept up in a moment of bloodlust, to consider pure raging hostility a fair trade.

The Lazarus Effect is nothing but a cheap horror film cloaked in scientific mumbo-jumbo.

What We Do in the Shadows is a bracing reminder of how the right burst of energy and style breathes fresh ideas into a genre threatened with creative exhaustion.

This is just sheer, escapist entertainment from start to finish.

While both have Broadway-level pipes, neither has a particularly distinctive, knock-it-out-of-the park voice. It doesn’t help that the songs, while solid, become repetitive in melody. And there’s not a home run in the bunch. I walked out humming … nothing from this movie.

This is a well-intentioned and sometimes quite sharp high school movie that falls just short of the mark due to a few way-off-the-mark scenes and too much heavy-handed preaching.