It is highly likely you’ll forget the movie by the time you go to bed.

It does a marvelous job at giving us an impressionistic taste of horrific circumstances without using them to beat us into submission.

The most frightening thing about the franchise at this point is that it just keeps on going, undaunted by the characteristics by which the first film made its name. Family is still family and a brand is still a brand, but the blade… well, it’s only grown dull.

Its ultimate merits may be few, but if nothing else, it stands on its own sweaty terms.

Struck by Lightning may appeal to fans of Colfer’s work on “Glee,” but as a film it’s utterly lacking in scope, depth or meaning beyond an immediate chuckle or two.

Zero Dark Thirty is precise, definitive filmmaking, yet Bigelow refuses to hand over easy answers. Some people call that evasion. I call it the ultimate despair.

The violence is so indifferently presented that it has no kick; it’s not grim or graphic enough to shock, but it doesn’t rev us up, either. The picture’s various shoot-’em-up sequences are so generically conceived and shot that each one is indistinguishable from the next – by the movie’s end, they may as well all collapse into an exhausted heap.

A Haunted House, its despicable bigotry aside, is also a not-very-good comedy.

The bloodshed speaks volumes enough, though, even if it takes some time getting to the mayhem proper.

Mama is one of those pictures that holds you aloft on its vaporous mood of dread – the occasional silliness of the plot mechanics don’t matter so much.

If Broken City – the first film to be directed solo by Allen Hughes, one-half of the Hughes Brothers directing team – is a little flawed and cracked itself, it still squeaks by as a reasonably thoughtful piece of big-screen entertainment.

LUV is partly a story about drugs, guns and street crime, the legacies we pass on to our children despite our efforts to do otherwise. But it’s also about the things we pass on to our children with love: How to tie a necktie, hold a steering wheel, shake another person’s hand. And it’s about the hope that those things will win out in the end.

John Dies at the End is easily funnier than it is scary, and much like the drug at the center of the story, it offers one hell of a trip.

Park allows this macabre coming-of-age tale to be defined by mood and style above all else.

An epically miserable viewing experience, go ahead and skip this one unless you’re seeking to answer the riddle of what happens when people don’t try at their jobs.

Sometimes in life, simple pleasures can be rewarding, and that’s certainly the case here. Parker is not a particularly innovative film, but it’s no less effective for the blemish.

Before Midnight manages to be an emotionally astute and tremendously enjoyable conclusion to this rather improbable trilogy.

As willfully oblique as his first film was densely foreboding, a rumination on the perils and pleasures of interpersonal connection that would seem to refuse any easy connection with even the most curious of audiences.

Faxon and Rush’s screenplay doesn’t deviate too far from formula, but their sturdy direction, bolstered by handsome production values, evokes a wistful sense of carefree summers and conjures up a potent amount of simmering teenage angst beneath the frequent chuckles.

That Nichols is able to orchestrate this entire journey with steady tension and lyrical imagery is a testament to his storytelling capabilities.

We’re given fairly straightforward talking-head accounts complemented with an increasing amount of archival material as the narrative progresses further towards the present, all coated in a VH1-suited slickness that belies the reported funk of the studio itself. Fortunately, that slickness is in service of tales from some substantial musicians.

There are many films that rail against the inherent injustices of any given power structure. Much rarer are the documentaries like The Gatekeepers which expose that the faithful stewards of a certain foreign policy no longer believe in said policy. This is an important film, showing the constant reaction and counter-reaction of each side.

A mostly mundane single-father drama.

Levine – whose last picture was the intriguing, if only partly effective, cancer comedy “50/50” — is going for something more here, exploring what makes us human by contrasting it with a character who has lost all the basics and is desperate to get them back.

Unfortunately the bulk of the picture is cut together like a beer commercial on poorly lit cheap video without much panache. Unless primary colors with a gauzy halo is panache.

To the film’s credit, it doesn’t waste much time in doling out shadowy figures and fake-outs for the gullible and easily goosed, and the cast as a whole dutifully delivers its panicked looks and cries in the night.

At 76 minutes, Caesar Must Die is more of an art piece than a thick steak of a feature film, but it maintains a fascinating hum from start to finish.

Lore is a rare, wonderful film that works not just as surface entertainment, but has deeper historical meaning, as well as an even grander, more universal statement.