It's not a difficult picture to watch. All you want from A Walk in the Woods, honestly, is a chance to enjoy a couple of veteran actors. But the book's comic tone hasn't found a comfortable equivalent for the screen.

Joseph's direction offers up an energetic take on the material, incorporating text visualization, quick-cutting montages, and creative uses of animation to bring the thumping electronic music to cinematic life.

It's very slight, and very short (barely 75 minutes minus the end credits), but the material is just effective and affecting enough to make up for its own schematic quality. It's a matter of watching a series of actors, led by Tomlin, tag off on their respective scenes.

I wish Learning to Drive imagined a fuller, more dimensional inner life for Wendy, but Clarkson develops a push-pull rapport with Kingsley that fills in the blanks — or, rather, mitigates the script's on-the-nose tendencies.

Unfortunately, No Escape can't stay 10 steps ahead of its misguided politics and overly dramatic storytelling and crumbles under its own preposterous climactic denouement.

The actors save it, periodically, from itself, simply by setting a natural tone and finding some truth in an extended sketch.

Mainly it's about fast and brittle talk, a lot of it peachy. The dialogue has one ear on the screwball '30s, the other on the way people actually speak when their minds are racing faster than their lives can carry them.

When the songs themselves take center stage the movie works. What remains in the wings constitutes another, fuller story.

Movies concerned with the life, the mind, the body and the dawning self-respect of a 15-year-old girl running every sort of risk — these are rare. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of them, and it's terrific.

Painful and unforgettable — a serious and honorable form, perhaps the highest, of "gotcha" journalism imaginable.

How is that Vikander, who played the robot in the recent (and worthwhile) "Ex Machina," was twice as lively and five times as human in that picture than in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

All three leading performers are scarily convincing on the film's own tight, clammy terms.

The actor (Segel) creates a dreamy, solemn but subtly vibrant version of Wallace that works for him and for the material.

Why does this film, with so many first-rate artists in its corner, not quite work? Partly it's a matter of style, but mostly it's because the script is made of tin.

From Miles Teller to Kate Mara to Reg E. Cathey, everyone on screen in Fantastic Four speaks in a flat, earnest monotone with a determinedly low-keyed air bordering on openly not giving a rip.

The cast is full of strong actors, among them Tahar Rahim (riveting in "A Prophet") as Samba's allegedly Brazilian friend and confidant. It's easy to enjoy what the cast does on screen; it's harder to buy the nutty mood swings.

It never should've been OK'd in the first place and never should've gotten past the first day. This has a mixed effect on the movie itself, which inevitably fights against its own sense of dulled outrage and methodical role-playing. But it's pretty gripping all the same.

The most assured and satisfying of the five so far.

If any of this was surprising or cleverly timed, you'd laugh and then cringe. In Vacation you cringe first and ask questions later.

Irrational Man is full of holes. Abe's supposed to be a disillusioned activist, yet that side of him is so half-assedly developed, it's as if Allen himself didn't believe it.

Does it succeed? Sort of. It helps if you don't mind your boxing movies made up of massive granite chunks of previous boxing movies.

The central relationship in Unexpected ebbs and flows, and even when you sense the edges smoothed over to the point of blandness, the actors keep it on track.

Q's adventure is a passionate and creative retelling of a time-honored tale, and one that will appeal to audiences both old and new to the genre. Hughes would approve.

Pixels is a blast of energetic fun.

Trainwreck is all kinds of funny, and like any talent showcase worth its salt, the tone of the humor adjusts to suit the talents on screen.

The plot's the same old thing. Mad, mad, mad, mad science; imminent apocalypse; parent/child issues; blah blah blaggidy blah. The tone of Ant-Man, however, is relatively light and predominantly comic.

Self/less hews closely enough to the premise of the 1966 John Frankenheimer thriller "Seconds" to qualify as an unofficial remake. Then again, anyone who remembers that one is not in the target audience for this one.

Amy stays above the tabloid fray, up to a point. Kapadia hasn't made a groundbreaking documentary; it's more like a classy, high-end edition of "Behind the Music."

Lofing and Cluff certainly know the found-footage ropes, and the tropes; we'll see if their next project reveals a little more imagination.

Everything's at stake yet nothing comes to much in Terminator Genisys.

It retains the original's sunny, democratic vibe and refreshing lack of meanness, as well as Soderbergh's interest (if not his precision) in keeping several of the ensemble members in frame, interacting, without a lot of routine close-ups.

I like it up to a point — not a specific story point, but to a certain degree throughout. It's engaging but thin, and I couldn't buy screenwriter Brice's idea of Charlotte's antidote for her 10-year itch.

The Coens' film is a wisenheimer, a mordant black comedy. Eden is utterly different, more muted and humane in tone. It won't be enough for some audiences.

It's worth seeing, on balance, simply for what Mark Ruffalo does in a hundred different, discrete, telling ways as he creates a character who was a capital-A Character, outlandish one minute, scarily unpredictable the next.

I laughed three or four times, mostly at verbal byplay since director MacFarlane struggles when it comes to timing, filming and cutting sight gags.

Heaven Knows What, will not appeal to the majority of casual moviegoers. Likewise, I have no doubts regarding the film's remarkable achievement.

The tone of Dope is very interesting — funny, but rarely stupid-funny.

The life of Riley is not exotic; her troubles are not unique. But they are rendered with serious imagination by Docter and company.

Vera, as written and as acted, remains a sympathetic and watchful conduit, a peg, rather than a vividly realized engine. We see everything she endures, and all she sacrifices. Yet we are not left with lingering impressions beyond the facts of a fascinating life.

Some may find Results a little light on plot (it is). But with the Smulders character, we're treated to a refreshingly dimensional female lead. Kat isn't one of those aggravating Type A Katherine Heigl cliches. Nor is she a mere attractive doormat. She's prickly, a little lost, but running her own show, and on the road to something better.

This is straight-up commercial comedy, low-keyed diversion, and while it can't hold a candle to recent, dark-comic Israeli achievements such as Joseph Cedar's "Footnote," the actors more than save it.

The chief limitation of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is an old story: However touching, Cooke's Rachel is there mainly to prop up the sweetly messed-up young male lead, and then to quietly guide him toward adulthood.

Bailed out by a few good jolts, Jurassic World gets by, barely, as a marauding-dinosaurs narrative designed for a more jaded audience than the one "Jurassic Park" conquered back in 1993.

It's the best musical biopic in decades.

The fun of Spy comes in watching the right actors mess with their own images, blithely.

Piven's performance basically made the series, and to the degree the new film works, which is a little, he makes that too.

Despite a blue-chip cast, Aloha is just frustrating. It can barely tell its story straight, and Crowe's attempt to get back to the days of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" is bittersweet in ways unrelated to the narrative's seriocomic vein.

I enjoyed large chunks of San Andreas, largely because the actors give it a full load of sincerity, and there's some bizarrely effective comic relief thanks to Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson as Brits who picked the wrong week to visit the Bay Area.

It's a relief — even though the movie isn't much — to see Danner in a leading role on screen again.

At times Tomorrowland plays like such a throwback to those sweetly naive, low-rent, live-action Disney matinees of the '60s and '70s, George Clooney is like a Fred MacMurray with gravitas, gruff and grizzle, predictably warming up to a young dreamer (a terrific Britt Robertson) of cheer and vision.

It's a two-hour lesson in how to act like a frenemy to your alleged friends. And it's not funny enough.

The creator of the original "Mad Max" trilogy has whipped up a gargantuan grunge symphony of vehicular mayhem that makes "Furious 7" look like "Curious George."

The movie is small, but the actors make it seem larger, like binoculars turned around the right way.

Uncommonly good ensemble storytelling.

I can't help but wish this new Far From the Madding Crowd came with the thrill of interpretive discovery, the way Jane Campion gave Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" a good shaking-up or, more conventionally, the way James Ivory mainstreamed E.M. Forester in "A Room With a View" and "Howards End."

Entertaining as much of Avengers 2 is, especially when it's just hanging out with the gang in between scuffles (the "Guardians of the Galaxy" lesson, learned), Whedon’s picture meets expectations without exceeding them.

The film, a sleek and oddly moving study in the cost of debauchery, has its gleeful excesses.

Director Monteverde, whose previous feature, "Bella," came out nine years ago, clearly meant his film to lift up everyone and condescend to no one, least of all Pepper and Hashimoto. But Little Boy comes off as a picture-postcard fake.

Crowe's feature directorial debut, The Water Diviner, stems from an honest impulse to dramatize ordinary people who honor their dead. Yet the results are narratively dishonest and emotionally a little cheap.

The relative success or failure of Adult Beginners, directed with a steady, nonjudgmental hand by Ross Katz, depends on how funny you find Kroll. I find him funny-ish.

Even though the film shows very little of the rough stuff, it's still fairly traumatizing. By the end you may feel like seeing a documentary about a more fair-minded and evenhanded treatment of a society's citizens.

By design, the dialogue from the (fictional) play comments directly on the central, shifting power relationship in the film, sometimes elegantly, sometimes a little awkwardly.

Alas, the movie cannot resolve its story in any sort of surprising or truly fresh way. Where's a good old-fashioned deus ex machina capper when you need it? It's worth seeing nonetheless.

True Story is a case of a well-crafted film, made by a first-time feature director with an impressive theatrical pedigree, that nonetheless struggles to locate the reasons for telling its story.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

Even when Eastwood and Robertson, pleasant enough company, threaten to float off the screen, The Longest Ride glides along and delivers its reheated comfort food by the ton.

Is what we see grief porn or an epic, careerlong study in the best and worst we can find on Earth? See the film and decide for yourself.

As Cornelia's revered documentary filmmaker father, a crusty truth-teller in the Frederick Wiseman mold, Charles Grodin provides a master class in minimalism.

There's really no other word for what Helen Mirren is doing in certain reaction shots, out of subtle interpretive desperation: mugging. She's mugging. She is a sublimely talented performer, and this is material with fascinating implications, and I doubt there's a moviegoer in the world who doesn't like Helen Mirren. But even the best actors need a director to tell them to tone it down.

It's roughly as realistic as Georges Melies' "A Trip to the Moon," of course. But revisiting our old pals (one of whom is played by an actor who is no longer with us) and watching them survive one unsurvivable collision or plunge after another, continues against the odds to have a walloping charm all its own.

There's a delayed-secret hitch in the narrative that hijacks the movie, for better or worse. You don't have to believe any of it to enjoy a lot of it, however.

It's a mystery why two bona fide comic stars, working very, very hard to keep this thing from tanking, couldn't pressure their collaborators for another rewrite or three.

The movie is pretty droll, and it agitates for cross-species friendship; its aggressively packaged heart-tugging elements come with an interplanetary friendly resolution. Followed by a dance party.

Engrossing and weirdly funny.

From its first moments, the new documentary The Hunting Ground instills a sense of dread that is very, very tough to shake.

The actors are more or less saving this franchise's bacon. Insurgent is a tick or two livelier than the first one.

Director Morel brings some style and speed to the proceedings, though I found The Gunman increasingly numbing in the carnage department. Compared with someone like Neeson, Penn's avenging angel is a less relatable fellow.

Swift and exciting, with no taste for the usual war movie heroics, first-time feature film director Yann Demange's film belongs on a short list of immersive, rattling, authentic fictions right next door to the fact of survival inside a war zone.

Directed, frantically, by Jaume Collet-Serra, written by Brad Ingelsby, Run All Night promises a sprint punctuated by a lot of gunfire, and bleeding, and bodies. Mission accomplished.

Branagh's regular composer, Patrick Doyle, delivers a persistent dribbling stream of forgettable mood music, and that's too bad; most of the scenes are acted so well, you don't want anything competing with them.

It's a strange, fascinating exercise in what Joel Coen once described as "tone management," job No. 1 for any director.

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

The movie's smooth to the point of blandness, but its faces really do tell a story. And having Gere's silverly mane share the same film with Strathairn's is almost too much fabulous hair for one diversion.

Screen chemistry between two individuals isn't really a pass/fail proposition. There are degrees involved. But let's pretend otherwise and say yes, Smith and Robbie pass, barely, with less than flying colors and in a pretty dull movie.

Betzer's title suggests a hardy spirit and the resilience of childhood; the story, which unfolds in elliptical but often intriguing chapters, indicates the healing might be a little more complicated and difficult.

Like the great, bittersweet Thomas Dyja account of Chicago's 20th century, "The Third Coast," Hogtown is hip to both the glories and the disgraces any great city can claim.

A small, shrewd movie about large, messy emotions and regrets. It is a grown-up work about people who grow up the hard way, leaving one heart in disrepair and the other in reckless forward motion. It's a sad piece, but not maudlin.

Whitman's a wily cross between Janeane Garofalo and Ellen Page and in her scenes with her motivational-speaker single mother (Allison Janney), you sense a better movie lurking in the shadows.

It's nice to see a movie that is, well, nice. Nice but not dumb. It's also a comfortable fit for Costner.

Silly, sadistic and finally a little galling, Kingsman: The Secret Service answers the question: What would Colin Firth have been like if he'd played James Bond?

The surprise, if there is a surprise here, is that the film has found a slyly humorous tone for much of the running time.

The movie doesn't really work, but the jet boots would be the envy of Iron Man, and they allow our hero, unwisely named Caine Wise, to speedskate through the air, leaving pretty little trails of light over downtown Chicago.

It's passable.

See it; see those three performers go to town.

Still Life is a very different story, small and quiet and, unfortunately, airless.

Many will forgive all the contrivances and a muted ending that doesn't quite come off. It is, after all, a submarine picture.

Black or White may not be racist, exactly, but it patronizes its African-American characters up, down and sideways, and audiences of every ethnicity, background, hue and predilection can find something to dislike.

I wish the movie were messier, more surprising. But as with most of what we see, made on small budgets and large: The performances are not the problem.