Amid this conundrum of a movie, the actors provide what the facile screenplay cannot: a human pulse, shrewdly underscored by composer Alexandre Desplat’s time-traveling musical landscape.

This Little Women adaptation is faithful to a fault, which results in a very strange world where this group of five present-day women depends on men for their social lives and careers — basically anything that gets them out of their cozy house of feminine fantasy.

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

The actors aren’t the problem with Night School; the material is.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

The documentary Love, Gilda works different ways for different viewers. For older fans, it’s a welcome excuse to reminisce. For newcomers it’s an entertaining primer on Radner’s life, times, demons and famous inventions.

Despite all the rich elements — the fantastic cast, the wonderfully detailed production and costume design, an oddball family story of black sheep finding each other — there's something missing from The House with a Clock in Its Walls. It's weightless, hop-skipping over necessary story-building, glossing over Lewis' warlock training as well as the personal histories of his guardians.

An emotional and intellectual roller coaster. Moore swings for the fences, as he usually does. But the film, done in Moore's traditionalist maximalist style, is overblown and overstuffed with editorial indulgences. It's clear that stylistically and structurally, less should be more for Moore.

Hunt gives it as all as the tortured Louis, but Patterson is the heart and soul of the film, giving a far more interesting performance as his long-suffering wife.

The consciously campy A Simple Favor is as bright and bracing as an ice cold gin martini with a lemon twist, and just as satisfying.

Director Yann Demange's film White Boy Rick balances these details, both outlandish and intimate, carefully.

The dialogue they deliver is crisp, witty and occasionally biting. Levin's script has the style and rhythms of the kind of romantic comedies of the '40s and '50s when actors like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn used verbal banter like boxing gloves.

While it's fun to watch Garner return to her action roots, the brute force haymaker that is Peppermint is a far cry from the sophisticated thrills of "Alias."

The surface may be ominous, richly textured and morbidly fascinating, but storywise, it remains shallow.

It's just a devastatingly sad and terrible story about two brothers who make bad choices, suffer the consequences and lose the last shreds of family they have left. No amount of 11th hour twists, reveals or bigger ideas can shake that inescapable feeling of dread and sorrow.

The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find.

Minding the Gap is an exceptionally reflective examination of the 29-year-old filmmaker’s life, and surroundings, and it works because the movie concerns so much more.

Unfortunately, Operation Finale feels a bit behind the ball when it comes to the dramatic true story.

An unusually good adaptation of an unusually good novel.

Hunnam’s reliably charismatic in suffering and in joy, but with most of the political and wartime context shaved off the story, once again, we’re left with the basics.

The perfect bait-and-switch of a film. Its light, sweetly frisky exterior and easygoing pace camouflages what a subtle and brilliant piece of bracing social commentary it is; a deft portrait of sisterhood existing under the thumb of capitalistic patriarchy.

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

Freed from the respectful restraints of non-fiction, Berg goes completely hog-wild, cinematically, and it doesn't exactly work. The film is a riot of nearly incomprehensible editing, a violent melee of intertwining scenes, shots, characters, formats and timelines, straining the limits of coherence and cogency.

It's sweet, really, to imagine the kind of devotion Alpha might inspire, a film that's very simple, kind of strange, but will melt any dog-lover's heart.

Birke's script is plainly straightforward, a simple supernatural chase story. It doesn't plumb the depths of what might make Slender Man scary, so Slender Man isn't scary at all.

Dog Days is in some ways a very strange movie, in the way it straddles the worlds of weirdo comedy and family-friendly fare. But ultimately, it's the pooches who steal the show.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.