Movies about doubles are, almost by definition, creepy, but Villeneuve, not to be outdone, piles on the weirdness. He’s big on spider imagery, but the web is flimsy.

The enchanting French-Belgian animated feature Ernest & Celestine is so liltingly sweet and graceful that, a day or two after I saw it, it seemed almost as if I had dreamed it.

Bad Words does to spelling bees what “Bad Santa” did to Santa Claus.

Particle Fever doesn’t prompt us to say: “Gee, these superbrains are just like us, except for the brains.” The film allows for our awe. It also demonstrates that science is the most human of activities, with all that that implies.

Gustave’s protégé, the “lobby boy” Zero Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori and as an adult by F. Murray Abraham), is as much an enigma as Gustave.

The movie doesn’t delve especially deeply into the psychology of double-agentry, and the shifting viewpoints between Israelis and Palestinians flattens the drama instead of broadening it.

I’m not sure that anybody coming to this film to witness her for the first time would necessarily pledge eternal allegiance. Still, she’s sui generis, and in the theatre world, as in life (yes, there is an overlap), that counts for a lot.

The Lunchbox, the debut feature from Indian director Ritesh Batra, has such a sweet premise that I sincerely hope it doesn’t get remade with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

The film works best as a straightforward melodrama set in an anything but straightforward world.

It’s all fairly entertaining and eminently disposable.

A lousy title for a marvelous movie.

It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.

There is no need for Murmelstein to break down here. In The Last of the Unjust, it’s as if the whole world is weeping.

If only there was less mush and more meat in this stew.

It’s like an over-the-hill gang variant on “The Dirty Dozen,” except not as much fun as that sounds.

It’s to Nathan’s credit that he doesn’t negate the allure of dirt-bike riding as an escape hatch from inner-city woes.

We see him (Brolin) whip up a first-class chili, but his specialty is peach pie, which we watch him prepare so lovingly that I was surprised Reitman didn’t include the recipe in the end credits.

Gloria is a starting-over story that never quite picks up a head of steam. Lelio paces the action as a series of sketches, and the hit-or-miss quality of the material makes for a bumpy ride.

I’ve never been able to figure out if Reggio is an artist or a con artist. Perhaps, in some ways, he’s both. He has claimed in interviews that he intended to make a movie about “the wonders of the universe.” Whatever he’s made, for better or worse, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Despite the film’s emphasis on Ryota’s transformation, the most piercing moment for me came in the scene in which his wife anguishes over her guilt in not realizing right away, as a mother, that Keita was not her birth son.

The Invisible Woman at its best does justice to the complicatedness of its characters – just as Dickens did as a writer.

The emotional stakes are large-scale, and Farhadi honors them by delving into their intricacies.

It’s a universal story that is also, by virtue of its very particular time and place, a singular experience.

Not much depth or political examination here. The film works best as a survivalist’s manual.

Streep’s performance has been criticized for being too theatrical, but that’s off the mark: The character she’s playing is supposed to be theatrical. She’s a woman playing a part – the ravaged matriarch.

The film is almost three hours long and precious little of it feels new – not from Scorsese or from anybody else.

The wistfulness in this movie is large-souled. Theodore may worry that his love for Samantha makes him a freak, but Amy knows that “anybody who loves is a freak.” All this may sound touchy-feely in the worst way, but Jonze is trying to get at how we seek romantic connection in this brave (or not so brave) new world. Like Theodore, he risks looking foolish.

The most inventive aspect of the film, aside from a lovely, daffy romantic duet between hypernerds played by Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig, are the promotional tie-ins with which we’ve been inundated -- Ron hawking Dodge Durango trucks, accepting journalism school awards, etc.

Interviewed in the film, Juárez journalist Sandra Rodriguez offers up this grim summation: “That these people represent the ideal of success, impunity, and limitless power is symptomatic of how defeated we are as a society.”

Thompson is very good at playing imperious, and she even manages an unexpected trace of flirtiness in a few offhanded moments with Hanks.

The film suffers from late-stage Scorsese-itis – wacky, low-slung, high-octane melodrama with lots of yelling and overacting.

Most middle movies in a trilogy simply mark time. Not this one.

What Tim’s Vermeer is really about is two geniuses, of very different sorts, communing across time and space.

In top form, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up feel-bad experiences that, like fine blues medleys, make you feel good (although with an acidulous aftertaste). Inside Llewyn Davis is one of their best. So many movies are emblazoned with happy faces; this one wears its sadness, and its snarl, proudly.

This is fire-breathing melodrama masquerading as social commentary.

Lee is very good at creating a sense of free-floating dread, but he, and his screenwriter Mark Protosevich, don’t have a real flair for pulp.

The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy.

At times the filmmakers seem to be taking potshots at Philomena for her placidity; other times Martin is made to seem crass and unfeeling – insufficiently spiritual. Life lessons are imparted, although the players never budge very much from their initial attitudes.

As teencentric franchises go, I much prefer The Hunger Games to the blessedly expired “Twilight” films. For one thing, they employ much better actors. My favorite: Amanda Plummer, one of the best and most underused actresses in America, as one of the Quell contestants.

Director Wladyslaw Pasikowski has made the mistake of going about his business as if he were fashioning a horror film.

It’s a filmmaker’s conceit. These filmmakers may come from Nebraska, but, from the looks of things, they don’t want to be spending much time there.

It’s respectable, safe, intelligent – and a bit dull.

The fierce, questing intelligence of these students and educators is a perfect match for Wiseman’s own.

His movie is visually as beautiful as anything he’s ever done. Conceptually, it’s muddled. The collision between poetic fancifulness and grim reality, between peace and war, never falls into focus. Miyazaki has seized on a great theme only to soft-pedal it.

My favorite moment in the movie: Astrophysicist Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) insisting on wearing only his underwear because he says he thinks better that way. Hey, whatever works.

By the film’s end, the main protagonists have become more philosophical, if no less ardent, about the future of Egypt. “We are not looking for a leader,” Hassan declares. “We are looking for a conscience.” He has only to look in the mirror.

There’s a creepy subtext to all this, especially when Tim uses his time-travel gifts to woo an American girl without her assent.

It’s still a bit early in the long careers of these actors, especially Kline, to be playing creaky codgers. It’s bad enough when Hollywood casts women over the age of 30 as grandmothers-in-waiting. Now we have to endure an onslaught of famous veteran actors complaining about their hips.

The real halo here belongs to McConaughey. He does justice to Ron’s story and to his own quicksilver talent.

Often remarkable and often exasperating.

Director and co-writer John Krokidas doesn’t have a very fluent gift for period re-creation – everything seems stagy – and most of the actors, playing divas of various stripes, overact.

Despite the film’s intentions, Idris and Seun can’t really stand in for anybody but themselves. What they go through, as middle-class kids in a privileged school system, seems far less race-based than the filmmakers would have us believe.

The omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange, stringy white-gray hair flowing, and Daniel Brühl is Domscheit-Berg. Condon and his screenwriter Josh Singer don’t quite know what to make of this duo, perhaps because the men didn’t quite know what to make of each other, either.

If one buys into the whole grace under pressure thing, All Is Lost – the title is its own spoiler alert – is first-rate.

I wish the truly searing moments in this film were not continually counterbalanced by an overall historical-reenactment stiffness in the presentation.

Peirce is gifted, but she lacks the ability of directors like DePalma to transform schlock into something deeply personal.

Hailee Steinfeld’s Juliet is rather lovely and rather bland; Douglas Booth’s Romeo might have stepped out of a special Renaissance Faire edition of GQ.

Greengrass is an expert hijacker, too. He hijacks our good sense.

It’s an only-in-America success story worth recounting.

I wish the film had probed more deeply into why anybody would face those odds. George Mallory’s “Because it’s there” has never quite cut it for me.

I almost wish Cuarón had cast nonactors, or unknown actors, in the lead roles. It’s jarring having movie stars work up their Hollywood histrionics against such a glorious backdrop. None of these arguments should dissuade you from seeing Gravity, if only because what’s good about it is so much better than what’s bad. Visually, if not imaginatively, it sends you soaring.

It’s unseemly, I know, to praise a movie like this for the stand-up-comic affability of its host. But Reich’s engagingness also gives credence to the seriousness of his message. He’s all about fairness, and, in his demeanor, as well as in his presentation, he embodies that ideal.

The cinematography by Bradford Young is rich-toned and lustrous, and the film, until it bogs down in melodramatics, has a sensual ease. We are not looking at these people from the outside. Dosunmu pulls us deep inside.

True love beckons in the guise of a dingbat played by Julianne Moore and all is right with the world. As Jon’s father, a man whose lifeblood is yelling, Tony Danza is very funny. He makes you understand what his son is escaping from.

I kept expecting Sacha Baron Cohen to traipse onto the scene. Alas, he doesn’t.

Rush isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s like a standard-issue male action programmer that somehow crept in from an earlier era.

It’s a major performance (Ruffalo) in a minor movie.

For all its pretensions and intermittent power, is essentially high-grade claptrap.

You get a strong whiff of what it must have been like to be Johnny Cash, or his exasperated manager, from this film. It would make a good companion piece to “Walk the Line.”

It’s a truism, reinforced here, that actors often are the last to comprehend how they do what they do. No matter. What they give us is all that counts.

By turns fascinating and infuriating.

We get to see film of daughter Tricia’s wedding (her father is a surprisingly agile ballroom dancer) and other oddities. We also hear more of the famous audiotapes than usual. You’ll be interested to know that Nixon, not in praise, referred to Henry Kissinger as a “swinger.”

The film’s title is derived from a magical black stone of Persian lore that reputedly absorbs the burdens of those who speak to it until it crumbles – freeing the speaker of her troubles.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man, the real-life kung fu innovator who most famously trained Bruce Lee. His life takes in the upheavals in China from the 1930s through the ’50s, including the Japanese occupation.

Ungainly and overly ambitious, The Butler tries to encompass too much history within too narrow a framework.

Thematically at least, it’s like a John Ford movie with pickup trucks. But everything plays out with a sodden deliberateness, as if something mythic were going on. No such luck.

Their 40-year marriage seems like more of a trial than this overweening, lightly likable movie acknowledges.

Blomkamp overdoes even his best effects. (I would have welcomed more vistas of Elysium to break up the grungefest.) If Elysium is an example of how recession-era Hollywood intends to dramatize the rift between the haves and the have-nots, let’s hope the studios don’t also bring back Smell-O-Rama.

The blue humor in We’re the Millers is just bland. And yes, Aniston performs a (modified) striptease. That’s pretty bland, too.

It’s essentially a buddy-cop romp with the usual assortment pack of graphic gruesomeness.

James Ponsoldt, who directed from a script by Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, is a bit too glib to do justice to this material, but the young actors, especially Woodley, are quite fine.

It’s a miniature art history lesson that is also a rapt communion between two people who, at least in this moment, are joined in the ecstasy of creation.

Mangold front-loads the action, but near the end there’s a first-rate fight atop a bullet train between Wolverine/Logan and some especially pesky ninjas. It puts the train fights in the recent “The Lone Ranger” to shame.

Allen is content to have Jasmine, babbling to herself, waft into a psychoneurotic, Antonioni-esque haze that seems preordained by her class and her predicament. Her cry for help, if you wipe away all the artifice, resembles nothing so much as a plea for her charge cards to be reinstated.

The effect is intended to be ghastly – which it certainly is – but I was equally repelled by this film’s conceit. Oppenheimer allows murderous thugs free rein to preen their atrocities, and then fobs it all off as some kind of exalted art thing. This is more than an aesthetic crime; it’s a moral crime.

I kept wishing that Still Mine had jettisoned the film’s true-story trappings and moved more deeply into the Craig-Irene duet unencumbered by bad-news bulletins from the building inspectors. Easily the best parts of the film are those in which husband and wife quietly summon up in often the barest of glances and touches a near-lifetime together.

One glaring question the film doesn’t raise: Why, given his history, is Tilikum still entertaining in sea parks?

The whole enterprise comes across like a first draft.

It’s nice to see oldsters cavorting in kaboom movies, but a little of this stuff goes a long way.

The subject matter, already troubling, is made even more so by Vinterberg’s almost sadomasochistic penchant for propping up Lucas’s martyrdom. He’s gunning for prey, too.

The Kaijus make zombies look like wusses, so at least the fights in this film are battles royal. But overload sets in early, and it all turns into battle boring.

The only character in the film who seems to have the requisite gravity is Oscar’s mother, Wanda (the marvelous Octavia Spencer), whose scene with her son in San Quentin is as hard-bitten as the rest of the film isn’t.

Hammer plays the Lone Ranger as a clueless, stolid square, and the resulting contrast with Depp’s cartoonishness isn’t odd-couple funny, just blah.

As this film demonstrates in so many ways, the intractability of the Arab-Israeli political situation is, to put it mildly, not easily resolved, least of all onscreen.

This farce set mostly aboard a transatlantic flight stuck in midair never launches.

Tatum muscles his way through the role with panache, while Foxx never gets a chance to break loose.

It’s not really such a great achievement to have women cops in the movies acting as boorish and rowdy as their male counterparts, especially since the movie seems designed for a sequel. But then again, what movie these days – or at least this summer – isn’t?

His (Lindholm) steadfast, unvarying gaze has its own authenticity. He’s made a thriller that thrills while also respecting our intelligence.