For an ostensibly soul-deep movie like this to work, we need more than smirks and scowls.

When we last see a much older Moses en route to Canaan, we can at least be grateful that this film, unlike so many other movies these days, does not seem primed for a sequel.

It’s a strange movie – simultaneously rawly realistic and airbrushed.

Too much of Wild is broken up by flashbacks that tend to dissipate rather than enhance Strayed’s trek. At times she is swallowed up almost to the point of vanishing by the immensity of the vistas.

Frederick Wiseman’s documentary National Gallery is for art lovers, movie lovers – basically for anybody. Ostensibly a film about London’s famous museum, it’s really about the experience of art in all its manifestations.

This delicate, hand-drawn marvel is lyrical and heartbreaking in ways that most live-action movies never approach.

As it is, “Mockingjay,” a big bore, suffers from being the transitional event before the big showdown.

I must say I felt relieved that the film wasn’t a masterpiece. If it was, we’d have more reason to fear Stewart will leave "The Daily Show.”

The story is so powerfully observed that it does indeed become larger than itself – an American tragedy.

Highly uneven, but at least it doesn’t glamorize Hawking’s life or turn it into a paean to endurance.

Nolan tries to pair the cosmic esoterica with this father-daughter tussle, but the mix doesn't jell. Visionary movies require a bigger vision.

Jesse Moss’s documentary The Overnighters is being hailed as a modern-day “Grapes of Wrath,” which, up to a point, it is. But it’s far more complicated than that.

By turning the loner Louis into a nutcase – if he blinked at all during the movie, I missed it – the movie becomes a species of horror film.

Laggies itself isn’t exactly slow – its pace is pleasantly meandering – and it’s far from aimless, although what it’s aiming for isn’t always clear.

The larger point in Citizenfour is that dictatorships have always relied on the massive gathering of information in order to control their populations. In this brave new cyber world, it is all too easy for democracies to cross the line, too.

Force Majeure is ultimately about something not often explored in film: the consequences of male weakness in a world in which men are expected to be strong at all times.

Edet Belzberg’s documentary Watchers of the Sky, which was a decade in the making, reclaims the reputation of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Holocaust refugee who not only coined the term “genocide” but also invented the concept of categorizing mass murder as an international crime.

Since we all know that Paris wasn’t blown to smithereens, the tension here is not in the outcome but in how it was achieved. The meeting between these two men is largely fictional, but the stakes could not have been more real.

Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances as Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier, a tank commander with a passion for killing Nazis.

A movie with ambitions as high-flying as its superhero but a success rate decidedly lower to the ground.

Schmaltz this thick requires a director who can at least make us feel that our tears are not being shamelessly jerked. But St. Vincent is too clunky to hide its tear-slicked tracks. Maybe that’s a good thing. At least that’s more endearing than being worked over by a smooth operator who knows exactly which buttons to press.

I don’t get the enthusiasm for this movie, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, which is such a cooked-up piece of claptrap that I half expected Darth Vader to pick up the baton. We’re supposed to think that Terence’s tough love is more “honest” than the usual pussyfooting tutelage, but in any sane society this guy would have been brought up on charges long ago.

What hits home is Renner’s performance, which gives full weight both to Webb’s fierce, abiding love for journalism and his despair when his livelihood – his reason for being – is trashed. It’s a tragedy, doubly so since the core of Webb’s allegations remains unchallenged today.

There is nothing surprising about the way this overlong movie, written and directed by David Dobkin, plays itself out.

Himmler in one of his letters says that “in life, one must be always decent, courageous and kind-hearted,” and “decent” is apparently how he saw himself right up to the time he swallowed a cyanide capsule after he was captured by the British.

Since music is so much more than music between these two, their filmed sessions resemble not so much rehearsals as communions.

Amalric throws in flashbacks and flash-forwards between bedroom and courthouse (yes, there’s a murder), and I was reminded again why I prefer my noirs in the hardboiled American style rather than tricked up with all this faux Alain Resnais-style filigree.

A few of the supporting players, including Kim Dickens, as a suspicious local cop, and Carrie Coon, as Nick’s twin sister, move beyond the formulaic, which is more than can be said for the movie.

This is a kid’s fantasy of how to be bigger and badder than anybody else. As for Washington, no doubt he now has his very own franchise.

What we have here is a perhaps unanswerable enigma of the sort all too common in the annals of spying.

Myers, whose background is in documentaries involving Afghanistan and Iraq War vets, is good at capturing the revealing, offhand moments in this story, but Maggie’s conflicts about motherhood and the military needed a greater psychological scope than this film provides.

The material veers a bit too predictably from near farce to serioso dramatics but the trajectory here makes emotional sense.

Whatever the case, the film resounds with hyperbolic passion. Hot bubbling currents flow through this film’s constricted veins.

The film has a transcendent spookiness.

The implicit question overhanging the film: Is the political impetus to present only “positive” imagery of black people an injustice to the fullest range of their experience?

In the name of unblinking realism, Szász overdoes the allegory. There are no sacrificial gestures here, no heroism, no tears. He comes on as truth-teller, but he’s only telling half the truth.

Michael Winterbottom, who also directed “The Trip,” is known for his avant-garde cinematic ways, but with these films he wisely sets down the camera and for the most part lets the actors play out their improvs.

The living-apart scenario is contrived – there was no way for these men to share a space somewhere? – but the two actors are so good that it doesn’t much matter.

The trouble with pet projects is that too often they are unduly do-goody, and so it is here.

Cameron, tall and lanky, fitted himself into the podlike chamber and dropped seven miles to the ocean floor. Although he didn’t encounter anything other than barrenness, he did bring back to the surface 100 new species of microorganisms. I hope National Geographic appreciates the effort.

I wish the movie weren’t quite so sappy about the spiritually redemptive powers of fine cuisine. Sometimes a meal is just a meal.

Radcliffe and Kazan have a nice nerds-in-clover rapport. If only the movie wasn’t so satisfied with how cute it is.

There is no law requiring a biopic to make “nice” with its subject, but Get On Up, which presents Brown almost entirely unflatteringly except as a performer, makes you wonder why the filmmakers (including Mick Jagger, one of its producers) took the trouble.

I’ve never seen a better performance – or whatever you want to call it – from a two-year-old.

Gleeson is a wonderful actor and he keeps a lid on the blarney. He manages to convey a lot – fear, anger, compassion, rue – with only the slightest of squints and frowns. But he’s still the center of a cooked-up cavalcade of souls.

I know we’re supposed to think that Besson’s daffy cinematic calisthenics are entertaining because at least they are not boring. But I was bored. It didn’t help that Morgan Freeman shows up as a brainy scientist explaining everything to us in his deepest intonations. When was the last time Freeman, a great actor, really acted?

Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight is a “serious” movie attempting to be lighthearted. It deals with the same issues that Allen’s idol, Ingmar Bergman, often grappled with – namely, the battle zone of reason versus mysticism – but offhandedly.

Hoffman, bloated and flushed, does not look well in this film. But he is such a consummate actor that whatever infirmities he may have been fighting become a part of his performance. His portrayal, complete with a convincing German accent, is a fully rounded portrait of courage and dissolution.

As generic as its title.

This is a movie of high innocence, set at a time in life when romantic love is still a frolic and the seaside is a balm that quells all ills.

It’s the ultimate time-travel movie into the future, a “flowing time sculpture,” in Linklater’s own words.

I found it immensely touching that these women found it in themselves to keep plugging away. Despite everything, they ended their days with a measure of peace and happiness.

Brit Marling, who starred in and co-wrote Cahill’s debut feature, “Another Earth,” is very good as Ian’s lab assistant and eventual wife, and a young Indian girl named Kashish, a nonactress I would guess, is unforgettable.

Braff plays Aidan with easygoing exasperation and Hudson is better than I’ve seen her since “Almost Famous.” As a director, Braff touches on lots of Big Themes: mortality, marriage, fatherhood, the disillusion of dreams. Nothing quite comes to full boil, though.

The documentary includes peerless clips of Billie Holiday and Lester Young from a TV show Hentoff coproduced as well as snatches of an interview with a young Bob Dylan, a clip of Hentoff on William Buckley’s “Firing Line” TV show, and lots more worth your time.

Berlinger is after more than a true crime recounting here – the film attempts to explain, often lucidly, sometimes laboriously, how deeply entrenched Bulger was with the FBI and the police.

What’s striking about this new film is that it lays out the message-mongering in such a way that you can enjoy the movie equally well on a purely action level.

The film has a creepy allure but, as movies featuring full-bore sexual gamesmanship often do, it wears thin.

His greatest legacy, however, as this film documents, was his courage in the endgame of his life.

The still youthful-looking Sarandon playing a grandmother is a jolt, especially since she doesn’t resemble the doddering roustabout she’s supposed to be playing. Maybe that’s why the director Ben Falcone (McCarthy’s husband and, with her, the film’s co-writer) gives Sarandon a full head of gray hair.

Most of the music is by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, and it’s heartfelt without ever really touching the heart.

Who can really differentiate between these films anyway? In the end, they all devolve (evolve?) into clashing, clanging bots.

It’s a big movie, but in an emotional, not a historical, sense. Oftentimes it has the hushness of a chamber drama even when the world is its stage.

The sole bright spot is Christopher Walken playing a benevolent Mafia don.

Rossi investigates the increasing use of massive open online courses and other flexible programs and talks to such education experts as Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco.

“Séraphine” was haunting; Violette, for all its writhings, is familiar.

Cruise is better than he’s been in a while because he damps down his usual all-intensity-all-the-time MO. He’s best here when his character seems the most scared. And Emily Blunt as a commando legend is indomitable, a credit to her exoskeleton.

The ultimate feel-good movie about feeling bad. And within those limits, it succeeds all too well.

Night Moves may have a soft, almost dreamy feel, but at the core it’s crucially hard-headed. In its own quiet way, in how it pulls together our utopian ideals and home-grown fears, it’s the zeitgeist movie of the moment.

In more ways than one, MacFarlane is trying to outgross Mel Brooks.

Director Robert Stromberg, making his debut as a director after supervising the visual effects for movies like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Avatar,” lacks the transcendent touch.

One of the funniest and happiest movies I’ve ever seen about early adolescent girls and their wayward, fitful joyousness.

Words and Pictures is a minor effort from Schepisi, but minor Schepisi still trumps most of what’s out there.

It’s all third-rate “Pink Panther” stuff, and Brosnan, eager to play down his 007 bona fides, overcorrects.

The chemistry may be good, the movie isn’t.

I couldn’t follow many of the ins and outs of the time-travel scenario, and I’m not altogether sure that the filmmakers could, either. It doesn’t really matter. It’s enough that the movie is fun. We shouldn’t also expect it to make sense.

The Immigrant is reaching for the same thing that Fellini achieved in “La Strada” – the state of grace that arises between people who at first would seem to have nothing in common but desolation.

This movie is altogether too nice. I prefer sports movies with more sass and snap, like the films Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham”) used to make, or even parts of “Moneyball.”

Sometimes, oftentimes, trailers showcase only the good stuff. The actual movie is a pale substitute. Such is the case here.

Alarmist to an almost apocalyptic degree, the film is nevertheless packed with enough basic facts and figures to give any eater serious pause. Or at least any eater who indulges in sugar.

There’s a pretty good movie buried somewhere deep inside the ungainly pastry that is Chef.

It’s gross, all right, but rarely funny – unless jokes about alcohol-laced breast milk is your thing.

Some of the human-interest stories are compelling, but too much of this film is as dry as a high school classroom presentation.

What comes through so powerfully in this movie is a portrait of an entire generation making its way from death throes to new beginnings.

Overlong and repetitive as it is, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, at least delivers the goods.

He uses Vacth, a beauty who somewhat resembles the young Nastassja Kinski or Dominique Sanda, for her eerie, implacable hauteur. There is a mask behind her mask.

Because most movies about Holocaust saviors feature Jews as victims rather than as rescuers, Walking With the Enemy, by contrast, has a special cachet. But the film is as dramatically inert as its origins are inspirational.

Puenzo may have started out to make something more ambitious than an intelligent, real-world horror thriller, but what she did achieve is still commendable. The melodramatics in this movie may be cooked up, but the fears it conjures are very real.

Practically every gag in this movie, and there are scores of them, is milked dry. When the gags aren’t very good to begin to with, this is a prescription for disaster.

Moderately entertaining, periodically draggy, Transcendence is not as wacky-visionary as “The Matrix,” or nearly as lyrical as “Her.”

Firth is very good at playing racked men of high principle. He’s so well cast as Lomax that, at times, he’s almost too perfect in the role. He’s still the best thing about the movie.

Jim Jarmusch has made a vampire movie, but, as you might expect, not just any old vampire movie. “Twilight” fans will not be amused, but Jarmusch’s usual coterie of art-film followers will likely find the movie his best in years.

Although the cast, which also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christine Lahti in sharp cameos, is very good, Wiig’s performance is self-effacing to a fault. Like a lot of comic actors, she overcompensates in dramatic roles by wearing a very long face.

One of those stranger-than-fiction documentaries that just gets weirder and weirder as you’re watching it.

Although the movie goes way back into Rumsfeld’s career, it is the Iraq section that is the most noteworthy – and disappointing. Morris elicits virtually nothing revelatory from Rumsfeld.

It’s a flurry of good gags and bad. The good ones are worth sitting around for.

If we must endure yet another spring-summer cycle of comic book superheroes, this movie at least delivers the wham-bang goods (recycled though they may be).

Maier is a great artist who discounted adulation entirely. Her life was a masquerade; her genius, quite literally, was unexposed.