The most valuable thing about the film, implied in the shared narration by Terrence Howard and director Martin Shore, is capturing these legends one more time before it’s too late.

Smith peoples the film with the same cast, including Kris Kristofferson as Hazel’s grandpa and Tom Nowicki as the aquarium’s benefactor. There just isn’t enough for them all to do. Freeman gets the few funny lines, which are all the same.

The Drop is a simmering thriller from the writer who gave us “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby Gone,” a tale heavy with the weight of violence we know is coming.

Skeleton Twins may not be a wholly fleshed-out character study, and nobody here takes a flying leap out of his or her comfort zone. But the timing of this tale of depression, suicide and how vulnerable we all are to our past, our demons and our shortcomings, is enough to recommend this engagingly melancholy comedy.

The thing that “Disappearance” does perfectly is, unfortunately, its most anti-cinematic trait. Grief and a romantic break-up have never been more deflatingly, depressingly captured.

“Eleven” turns out to be an overreach, with too many voices to be anything but superficial, too few (she skipped sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America) to be thorough.

The venerable acting firm of Smith-Kline & Scott Thomas make certain that this Paris trip is anything but a waste.

A stylish, moody and atmospheric tale contorted into a young adult horror story, it never works up a decent fright.

A musical mashup of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis biography and myth, The Identical plays like a failed faith-based “Inside Llewyn Davis.” And that’s the closest thing to a compliment it will get.

It’s too bad the script lacks the sight gags or one-liners that could have made this good looking picture more animated.

A historically interesting story is painted in broad, colorless strokes, alternating as it does between soap opera and slapstick.

Radice has delivered an engaging portrait of a loose cannon back when professional sports still produced such unfiltered creatures, a man who lived by his own rules, said what he thought and wore curlers to practice when he felt like it.

The considerable charms of Jason Bateman and Olivia Wilde get a considered workout in the lightly charming New York romance The Longest Week. It’s a droll comedy, with a droll narration.

Life of Crime is lesser-Leonard, an all-star kidnapping comedy that manages to “Be Cool” even if the filmmaker never quite finds the grim faced grins that the best Elmore noirs boast.

It’s more unpleasant than scary, and ever so slow in getting up to speed.

The entire affair feels malnourished, under-rehearsed and starved of energy.

A humorless, muddled, bloody and generally unpleasant thriller.

When the Game Stands Tall is a solid if unsurprising and uninspiring melodrama.

"A Dame to Kill For” isn’t the shock to the system “Sin City” was. But whatever its plot repetition and warmed-over tough talk cost it, this is still a movie like few others you’ve ever seen, a 3D slice of Nihilistic noir that will have you narrating your own guts and guns story on the drive home, chewing on a toothpick as you do.

Manipulative, contrived, melodramatic — all labels we slap on that most perfectly titled movie genre, “the weeper.” All fit If I Stay like original packaging.

As “found footage” horror movies go, The Possession of Michael King is more unpleasant than scary.

“Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner takes his act to the big screen with Are You Here, which turns out to be the most quotable Owen Wilson comedy since “Zoolander.”

The setting and various religious rifts are unfamiliar, if the domestic/romantic melodrama isn’t.

Antonio Banderas pretty much steals The Expendables 3. But at this stage in that winded franchise, that amounts to petty theft.

While The Giver scores points for being smarter and deeper than “The Hunger Games” or its inferior photo-copy (“Divergent”), coming after all those other versions of this plot does neither it, nor us, any favors. The Giver has nothing new to offer.

"What's the worst that could happen?" The answer to that is, you could end up in a summer comedy that's barely funny enough to warrant — ahem — release in the summer.

A leg up on the first “Trip,” an altogether more delightful vacation with two blokes who might wear us and each other out along the way. But then, that’s half the fun.

Here’s an eccentric tragicomedy, with music, built to play like gangbusters at Austin’s South by Southwest music-movie fanboy/fangirl festival.

This dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be.

The best that can be said for “Step V” is that it has some sparkling moments of choreography, clever gimmicks as themes for the dance-offs and lovely costumes.

As impressive as the effects can be, as effective as the blend of TV news helicopter POV shots, security camera footage, cell-phone video and storm chaser images mimicked here turn out, the human stories are given short shrift in this “spend our budget on effects” action picture.

The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not. But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a film that aims younger (save for the die-hards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull.

The culinary culture clash comedy The Hundred-Foot Journey dawdles, like a meal that drags on and on because the waiter is too busy texting to bother bringing you the check.

Kazan, as she proved in “Ruby Sparks,” has a whimsical, quirky girl-next-door appeal. Radcliffe, wearing post-Harry Potter stubble and delivering toothy, jaw-jutting grins, makes it easy for us to believe he cannot get her out of his head.

The Discoverers showcases Dunne in a part he was born to play.

Laugh-out-loud funny and production-designed to death, Guardians of the Galaxy pops off the screen.

Artistically, Get on Up rivals “Walk the Line,” with a lead performance on a par with the career-making turns of Angela Bassett (“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”) and Jamie Foxx (“Ray”). With this wonder of the summer, Boseman and Taylor deliver a piece of American cultural history every bit as important as the Jackie Robinson story, a story told with heart, humor, funk and soul.

Calvary is a compact and biting tale of a righteous man being tested by his faith, his peers and his predicament.

His comedy, whatever it was at an earlier age, is comfort food now.

McGarry, with this slick, invigorating film, whose action is set to a pulsating James Lavino musical score, has broadened a national debate that anti-healthcare reform folks have narrowed via the courts and political demonization.

There are moments when you wonder if this CNN-produced documentary is telling the whole story, if there was cherry picking in points of view chosen.

First-time director/co-writer Tim Garrick has little sense of timing and the movie mainly just lies there, never percolating to life, never living down to its lowdown and lewd promise.

For all the fun these folks could have had with Hercules maintaining the supernatural assistance facade, or denying it as his handlers gild his lily testifying that it’s true, the movie is content to just go through the motions.

Seeing these veteran players go through their paces, find their comic rhythms and probe for laughs where many a laugh has been found before is not a bad thing.

Besson’s script may let her (and Freeman) down in the third act, but the 89 minute long Lucy is so brisk it’ll give you whiplash. Even marginal thrillers benefit from a director and star who have a sense of urgency and are as hellbent as this on not overstaying their welcome.

“Magic” lacks too many things to rank among Allen’s better recent films — the come-uppance and zeitgeist currency of “Blue Jasmine,” the frivolity of that don’t-think-too-much-about-this lark “Midnight in Paris.” But the biggest shortcoming is right there in the title, a tease if ever there was one.

Hoffman is merely the first among equals in a stellar cast.

It’s preachier, more diverse in its casting. All of which make it more specific and limit it. Throw in generally lackluster performances and illogical plot twists and “Anarchy” is seriously crippled.

Sex Tape is not quite the train wreck its TV ads make it out to be.

A confused and confusing thriller.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is roughly twice as good as its predecessor, Planes, which was so story-and-laugh starved it would have given “direct-to-video” a bad name. Yes, there was nowhere to go but up.

It’s well-cast, but Tautou and Duris don’t set off the sparks and create the longing that would give this tragic romance some heft. Everybody else takes a back seat to the inspired visuals.

A true indie film roller-coaster ride, from moon-eyed romance to aching heartbreak, cerebral puzzle to incredibly moving, emotional resolution to that puzzle. In a season of the year where sci-fi is dumbed down and then dumbed some more for mass consumption, here’s a piece of speculative fiction that will stick with you long after the last Transformer’s battery has died.

If you liked “Scrubs,” and I did, for a few seasons, anyway, you’ll be happy Braff got to make his movie and happy that you got to see it.

Happy Christmas, which is set around Christmas, shares several plot and thematic points with “Neighbors,” but without the aggression or belly laughs.

It adds bubbles to the show, but doesn’t change the essentially deadpan, amusingly banal nature of this journey and the two charming old men who take it.

An action-packed epic, a moving sci-fi allegory rendered in broad, lush strokes by the latest state of the computer animator’s art.

"Way Down” veers towards cute and settles on “twee” far more often than it should.

Rage lets us see where all the money was spent — on Cage, and on a noisy, metal-rending car chase through scenic Mobile. It’s head-slappingly dumb, it’s dull and even the novelty of filming outside of the over-filmed Los Angeles adds nothing.

Some of the profane hip hop acts seem dated in the sea of upbeat soul, pop and alt-rock acts presented here. But Pearl Jam and Run-DMC, inspiring joyous sing-alongs to their hits, just seem timeless.

Call it a vanity project or bargain basement movie mythos, but no hard-boiled biker picture ever looked or sounded like Road to Paloma.

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an amazing achievement in telling an unremarkably remarkable life story.

What he’s doing, it turns out, is lowering the viewer’s standards of proof for a vigorous return to “2016″ territory, a hatchet job on Obama and Obamacare that tries to tie everything to a 1960s “radical” organizer who might have influenced the president.

Deliver Us from Evil takes a very long time to deliver us from dullness.

With villains cribbed from the generations of cheap thrillers that precede it and action scenes that have no novelty to them, Heatstroke starts looking like Adam Sandler’s “Blended” more by the minute — a movie the cast signed up for to get a free working African vacation out of it.

It’s more an instant cult film than a picture with any prayer of reaching millions.

Tammy, in the end, feels like a pulled punch. McCarthy promises a haymaker she never quite delivers.

An 'E.T.' knockoff that works.

“Obama’s America” flutters to the ground like so much GOP convention confetti, all assertions, few facts and little substance other than the conspiratorial right wing talking points that are how D’Souza’s makes his living.

Age of Extinction runs on and on, popcorn piffle without end.

Writer-director John Carney re-plays his greatest hit with Begin Again, a semi-successful attempt to recreate the magic of the Oscar-winning musical “Once” in New York with a big name cast.

Just stumbles on and on, introducing new theories and facts and then explaining, explaining explaining them, right up to the closing credits.

Poehler and Rudd riff and banter like old marrieds, and make even the cheesiest lines funny, make even the cliched dating montages set to syrupy pop music feel — if not fresh and new — at least funny enough to mock.

Mumford and O’Leary get beyond the cardboard character “types” and make these people more interesting and conflicted than they first seem. And the claustrophobic milieu, just two people staring at long range video, punching buttons, maneuvering their Reaper and trying to make snap decisions that won’t haunt them, serve the movie well.

The fact that Bulger, at long last, is rotting in jail, is little consolation. Perhaps only a Hollywood version of this story, one starring Johnny Depp, can give it a satisfying conclusion.

This generally mild-mannered comedy sinks or swims on Hart’s back. And as one scene makes clear, Little Man can’t swim.

As slight as Venus feels, it’s just titillating enough to matter, just twisted enough — Really, casting your wife and a guy who looks like you? — to suggest that even in his 70s, even with virtually no budget, Polanski can deliver a compelling walk on the kinky side.

Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the title of this writerly tale — Third Person — has to do with the sometimes illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to a resolution with each is not.

Late to the game, blandly cast and scripted with every Italian American cliche in the “How to Make Spaghetti” cookbook, it is Eastwood’s worst film as a director.

The one thing Coherence needs most is that word that gives it its title.

So even though Signal isn’t great sci-fi, you’d never know it to look at it and listen to it.

As violent and primal as “Animal Kingdom,” but not as brisk. The film grinds to a halt in between confrontations. And those shoot-outs are simple, direct and bloody, not “staged” in the Hollywood sense.

A cartoon with better animation and livelier action, if fewer jokes. If there’s one thing these sweet-message/great flying sequence movies don’t need is fewer jokes.

This comedy produces the biggest, loudest laughs of any movie this summer.

It’s not art. But The Human Race does manage to take a worn out formula and nonsense story and finds a few novel touches, a little humor and hints of pathos in between the exploding heads.

I like the way writer-director Kat Candler, expanding a short film she made a few years back, doesn’t give away the whole back-story — what killed the mother, who might have been to blame.

This terminal illness tale rises above the form, mainly thanks to a stellar cast and a refusal to drift into maudlin, a film that saves its big emotions for a wrenching finale that it earns.

Andrew Rossi’s documentary is a bit scatter shot in its approach.

Gleeson, Pinsent and Kitsch make this a diverting comic travelogue for anybody who misses “Northern Exposure” but has no intention of moving to Alaska, or in this case, Newfoundland.

An engaging take on a drifting character at an age when we’re all adrift.

It’s the best Almodovar movie Almodovar never made, a riotous, gory farce that might be the funniest movie of the summer, and surely is the coolest.

Sweet, cute to the point of cutesy.

Cruise and Blunt have only as much chemistry as the script allows.

Borgman is a chilling, cryptic film that commands your attention even as its writer-director devotes much of his attention to keeping you from figuring it out.

The younger sister of the formidable Vera Farmiga gives flat, rushed and unconvincing line readings, especially in her paragraph-long, exposition-packed monologues. Is that by design? Is this a clever teen “acting” to manipulate her memory detective? The actress should be better at masking that, if that’s the case. And if it isn’t, she should be just…better.

Collette always delivers fair value. Her Ellie is hard-drinking, high-mileage, slimmed down and flirting with Cougar-hood, a woman living in the trap of her world, her work and the love she lost.

Seth MacFarlane wants to be a movie star in the worst way. A Million Ways to Die in the West is result of this longing, a long/longer/longest comedy with long waits between jokes and longer waits between those that work. Thus, does his leading man career begin and end with a “worst way” Western.

Impressive. And violent. Just not a lot of fun.