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.