Central Intelligence is dumb in all the right ways, and also a bit smarter than you might expect.

Gray and listless, the Anthony Hopkins/Ray Liotta-starrer Blackway is a vengeance tale set in a cold, foggy Pacific Northwest logging town where clichés are as prevalent as trees.

A compendium of genre clichés — or, more charitably, “homages” — Queen of Spades offers little that fright fans haven’t seen before.

Writer-director James Bird took inspiration from real-life experiences, and the story is obviously heartfelt. But despite a stylized, edgy surface, Honeyglue doesn’t stray from the well-worn weepy narrative.

Remains intriguing despite its troublesome issues.

For a movie seemingly concerned with clarity and enlightenment, it’s woefully lacking in both.

The movie’s physicality is never pushed to suggest suffering. It’s like a constant meditation, something to absorb and exhale.

While the intended dramatic payoff proves a letdown, it doesn’t undo the allegorical power of the movie’s searing depiction of groupthink and its fallout.

Unfolding elliptically, the new film can feel abrupt and unsatisfying, but it’s filled with sharp commentary on class and servitude, and the actress delivers another extraordinary performance.

Despite an energetic set-up, the broad script fails to deliver the anticipated goods once the action relocates to Paris.

Although amusing and filled with many well-timed comic bits, especially by the deft Moretti, the movie loses some of its farcical steam en route and suffers from a diffused point of view.

Although he’s working with familiar tropes, writer-director Felix Thompson, in his feature debut, wisely keeps clear of big, dramatic moments, maintaining instead a palpable naturalism through dialogue that has an unmannered, improvised feel and acting that follows suit.

It’s a color-by-numbers thriller that’s flat.

Made by a first-time feature director working with a microscopic budget and a tiny, 11-year-old protagonist, it’s a 72-minute wonder, a self-assured, gently mysterious little film that is hypnotic in unexpected ways.

De Palma's biggest asset, not surprisingly, is the man himself. A formidable talker who is invariably smart, candid and acerbic, De Palma is a person of considerable self-confidence, and listening to him hold forth gives us an always-involving glimpse inside a singular cinematic mind.

As directed by Morgan Neville, "Strangers" turns out to be as concerned with emotion as with performance, spending much of its time investigating how so much joyous music was able to come out of exploration, disturbance, even pain.

If Genius is a failure — and by the generally unilluminating standards of most mainstream movies about the creative process, I’m not entirely sure that it is — it succeeds in being a noble, even charming one.

Wan has a gift for investing even the creakiest cliches with shivery élan.

There are stretches of tedium in this lumpy and derivative mythology, to be sure. But there are also immersive IMAX 3-D backdrops, striking ambiguities and irresistible moments of straight-faced lunacy. The line between hack work and labor of love may be perilously thin, but you can sense the difference in the way Jones earnestly, wholeheartedly embraces the magic that powers this realm.

The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.

It’s So Easy suffers from an approach that leans more on telling than showing, and we just have to take his word for it that his life’s events are that fascinating.

Showing an unobtrusive mastery of camera movement, Bi lends concrete form and rich dramatic life to the Buddhist notion that past, present and future are all equally untenable.

An involving, largely likable film with a sincere emotional core.

"How to Let Go” says all the right things about an unnerving peril, and the various ways some highly motivated people are trying to combat it.

Too much of the film prioritizes the DJ’s problematic personal life over what made him famous. AM’s fans should get a lot out of the doc, but casual music-lovers may wish Kerslake would just get back to the party.

For all the mysteries it chooses to leave off screen and on dry land, Chevalier speaks for itself: Scene by scene, it builds a vision of group dynamics as calm, violent and finally unyielding as the sea.

Italian writer-director Francesco Cinquemani, in his feature debut, has essentially done a cut-and-paste job, assembling a thoroughly uninvolving, tension-free futuristic sci-fi thriller.

Most of Time To Choose is concerned with demonstrating that, as more than one speaker says, every crisis is an opportunity. That for every human action that increases global warming there are already workable alternatives in place just waiting to be embraced by a wider constituency.