Deneuve suggests the self-absorption of the beautiful, coping with the petty insults of age, making Bettie a bundle of nerves wrestling with a complicated past and an increasingly frazzled present. See it for her performance, and a lovely slice of French scenery.

Potter’s film is at is most artful in the painterly ways she composes the wordless scenes of the girls testing cigarettes, hitchhiking with the wrong boys and Rosa exploring heavy petting with another boy, showing off for Ginger.

Hemingway wins us over and, in the end, comes off as earnest in her desire to use her celebrity to help shine a light on the maladies that have shattered her family, time and again.

Beyond the Lights is another pain-behind-the-music romance. But it’s so well written, cast and played that we lose ourselves in the comfort food familiarity of it all.

First-time writer/director Peter Sattler finds a few surprises to throw at us in this somewhat conventional “Stockholm Syndrome” story.

Reeves animates the action and the filmmakers surround him with wonderful co-stars; the quietly menacing McShane, the chop shop operator (John Leguizamo), the dapper “cleaner” (David Patrick Kelly of “The Warriors”) and the spitting, hissing Nyqvist.

Rock is more a genial presence here than an actor playing an addict tested by a bad day. He never lets us see the strain that could make him fall off the wagon. He scores laughs, but generously leaves the outrageous stuff to his legion of supporting players.

There’s not much new here, but at least Byzantium has well-acted, compelling characters telling its time-worn tale with style. That’s the best we can hope for, these days, from this genre that will not die.

That doesn’t make Oblivion a bad movie, just a familiar one — generic.

There’s nothing much new here, but the performances and the milieu make Filly Brown an entertaining, honorable installment in a story that is the American Dream incarnate, and has been ever since the first wannabe showed up on Tin Pan Alley at the beginning of the last century.

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.

Better than any animated film released in the doldrums of January has a right to be.

Modestly entertaining and uplifting version of a “greatest story” that has proven as malleable as it is timeless.

The movie is so “interior,” it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens.

Melissa K. Stack’s script has snap and crackle to go with the pop, making this female wish-fulfillment fantasy an “Eat, Pray, Revenge” that delivers the punches that two “Sex and the City” movies never could.

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

A bloody, violent and yet grimly comic tale.

A big, broad dysfunctional family comedy, sort of a “Parenthood” pushed into R-rated “Adulthood” territory.

For all Singer’s expertise at making the fantastic real, all we’re left with here is an expensive-looking bauble – worth looking over, but not really anything to treasure.

Concussion deserves more of an audience than just the film festival circuit. And it’s not just an introduction to a writer-director with talent, but to a slew of under-employed and superb actresses, and the hunky Tchaikovsky.

The film captures the magic and manic energy of the performances, the inventive choreography and spine-tingling tunes.

Get Santa is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce.

It’s OK for April, in other words, but not up to the higher standards of a Marvel summer blockbuster.

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.

There’s wit and whimsy in this 53rd Disney cartoon, a distant cousin of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale, “The Snow Queen.”

Among the players, the wild-haired Bardem stands out, and a vampy Diaz sets the stage for uninhibited future in villain roles, or deadly-sexy car sales.

Reichardt hangs her film on Eisenberg, who subtly suggests a loner whose primary gift for the cause is he whole in his soul where a longing or human contact should be. It’s a terrific performance and it holds the movie together even as Night Moves stumbles toward its foregone, and rather poorly handled, conclusion.

Spinning Plates is a surprisingly affecting juggling act, with each story having its compelling third act revelations of the extreme obstacles each eatery and its owners have faced and will face.

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.

No matter how great her ambitions, no matter how little she was able to accomplish, thanks to the strictures of her time, here was a woman history remembers simply through the force of her personality and the simple courage it took to be ahead of her time.

It’s too short to do justice to its subject, but in an era when young women build careers and get rich off “secret” sex tapes that somehow make their way onto the Internet, maybe that’s all this subject deserves. Lovelace was but an aberration, an amusing, then quaintly grim footnote on our way to a Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian future.

It’s the best film of this trilogy, but truthfully, none of the “Hobbit” thirds have been any better than middling “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” installments. Considering the vaunted reputation J.R.R.Tolkien enjoys, this overdone “There and Back Again” never quite got us there.

Gooding brings just enough streetwise credibility to make Brown work.

Writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins has lots of fun with this surreal set up, and only really loses the thread when reality intrudes.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.

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

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.

Even with all this sparkle, the film staggers through its third act. By then, the script has rubbed the rough edges off the villains and made whatever point it was going to make several times over.

Since the movie’s street side dream doesn’t add much more than a gimmicky “interpretation” of their sound, you’re left with a deafening dirge –well-played, but really, no improvement on your basic concert film.

An 'E.T.' knockoff that works.

Last Vegas isn’t “out there” in a “Hangover” sense. It’s comical comfort food, with actors doing the sorts of things they’ve done for decades. But even if this is the safest Vegas romp of them all, this cast never lets us forget that we’re in very good hands.

The patchwork story and pacing robs The Butler of the wit and heart that might have made it a companion piece to the far simpler and more powerful “The Help.” Daniels settles for a soapy, preachy American history version of “Downton Abbey.”

A nasty, elemental thriller, basically a four-character play with blood and guts and sex and drugs and dares

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

Unlike “The Passion of the Christ,” there’s no Aramaic with English subtitles, a lot less blood and no anti-Semitism. No character feels like a caricature... But it’s also dramatically flat, with few actors making much of an impression as they play saints and sinners.

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.

For all its sure-handed sense of place, its occasional grace notes of loss, grief and misery, This is Where We Live fails to seize and break our hearts, keeping its glum characters at arm’s length and doling out “hope” in tiny, cloying teaspoon-size servings.

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

What we have here is a gripping story rather dryly told, a somewhat frustrating essay on Scandinavian passivity without the pathos of the similarly themed Oscar winning Danish film “In a Better World.” It’s the helplessness that gets to you.

Cranston takes small bites of this Beef Jerky Tartar script and chews, chews chews — savoring every corny fake-Russian line like the voice actor he was before “Breaking Bad” made him a star.

What keeps us around until the closing credits, where Hart and Hall bust each other up, is the electrical charge between those two. They’re the Wimbledon Finals of sexy, sassy, drunken comic banter — two pros, evenly matched enough to put on a great show, even if they make us forget about the rest of the movie around them as they do.

It’s a bit of a muddle and a touch too soap operatic. But Newton, Rose and Ejiofor give their characters and this story just enough pathos to make the history lessons sink in.

Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain.

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory, something more than Radcliffe’s Ig explaining his protrusions to one and all with “They’re horns. It’s a crazy story.”

Workman’s film feels exploitative, and the filmmaker cannot help but make Carbee look a little creepy and a bit pathetic. The only thing that eases your conscience watching Magical Universe is the difficulty in deciding, “Who was using whom here?”

Manages to pop the hairs on the back of your neck more than most repetitive, predictable and gory Hollywood horror films these days.

That miss-or-hit collection of horror shorts, “The ABCs of Death” becomes more hit or miss with its sequel, ABCs of Death 2.

Anderson loses his way, failing to thin out the novel and its overload of characters, piling scene upon scene that neither amusingly complicates the plot, nor advances it. Phoenix, however, is never less than fun.

It’s just romantic enough and barely funny enough to qualify as a romantic comedy. But it works, despite never being graceful or unstuck enough to take flight.

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

A rough and rough around the edges tale of children growing up on the mean streets of the wrong side of Brooklyn. It’s a coming of age story of a self-absorbed, downtrodden punk with a dream who learns about the love that comes with responsibility.

Twice Born fails to tug at the heartstrings or wring tears from us. Hirsch plays exuberant and callow well, Cruz is tragic and earthy as ever. But the two of them never really click — sex scenes included.

It’s a lovely film, a sentimental parable that carefully recreates a post-war Japan obsessed with obliterating its past.

It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher.

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.

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.

Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

More interesting as history, re-written, than as the moral parable this true story became.

Like “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” it’s about human connections in a technologically warped world rendered lonely and unlivable by the lack of those connections.

As our old friend Ricardo Montalban said thirty years ago in “The Wrath of Khan,” still the best of the “Star Treks” — “It is veeery coooooold in space.” “Into Darkness,” for all its dense textures and epic scale, left me cold.

Jonathan "50/50" Levine has turned Isaac Marion's teen romance novel into an often amusing tongue-in-cheek romantic comedy - tongue in cheek, and brains in teeth. Chewy, tasty brains.

None of it adds up to much more than a chuckle or two, a smile or three and a lot of slow, poetically drawn-out moments of mild anguish or the simple delight of walking through Greenwich Village in the spring.

The characters are only superficially sketched in, but we still fear for them, understand their code and above all else, appreciate the dirty, bloody, high-risk work these professionals do. That they go through all this and risk everything, by choice, is something Berg, to his credit, never lets us forget.

The singing is nice, the peripheral characters interesting. But a love that others don’t approve of, that may get in the way of a big concert debut? That makes Gabrielle a bit too Lifetime Original Movie for its own good.

Osage County does offer up one almost-heartbreaking moment. But it’s so icky that, like the rest of the film, you kind of want to wash it out of your mouth — with supermarket Merlot — rather than savor it.

Beyond Outrage reaches above and beyond most Hollywood underworld movies to deliver a tale of righteous revenge doled out only after showing us how much it is deserved.

Clooney, for the first time in his directing career (“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”) never finds the sweet spot, and never quite wrestled the script into a shape entertaining enough to make the liberties he and Heslov took with the facts worth it.

Like many such films, the subject seems more fascinating than the Far Out Isn’t Far Enough’s treatment of him.

A regal, majestic and downright arty take on this teacher, champion and philosopher whose life spanned much of the twentieth century.

It works, after a fashion — a romance that isn’t a romantic comedy. But Bier, a wonderful director, proves that “Love” isn’t all you need to make us swoon. You need a lighter touch.

While small children may be enchanted by this little gastropod that could, adults will be more sorely tested. For all the horsepower Turbo boasts about, the movie tends toward the sluggish — as in slow as a slug.

The reason to fall into Blue Jasmine is Blanchett’s cagey, broken turn.

The Brass Teapot stumbles into tedium, a parable that never quite resolves itself into the moral lesson it so desperately wants to convey.

The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy “In Living Color,” button down this judge and find ways to break formula and make him hilarious.

The buffoonery goes epic in this sillier than silly sequel, a broad, down and dirty comedy overfilled with funny people trying to one-up one another on the set in the classic “best line wins” school of comic improvisation.

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.

Branagh & Co. keep up appearances with a thriller that works mainly because all of its parts — locations, fights and plot twists — are well worn from all the thrillers they’ve been in before.

“Walking” takes care to ID each new dinosaur species introduced, including factoids about what they ate and any special skills they might have had. It’s downright educational. Just don’t tell your kids that.

This Wolverine gets our hopes up, and falls short.

The fun is supposed to build from the elaborate plots the marrieds and the bros engage in to foil each other. Only, it doesn’t.

A romantic melodrama that’s so well-cast and acted and made with such loving care that you could almost forgive how long it takes to get to its obvious conclusion, how melodramatic the whole “sordid” affair is.

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.

A handsome production, its few settings (indoors and outdoors) painterly and period-perfect. It’s entirely too long for a filmed chamber drama of such limited stakes. But Ullmann’s adaptation reminds us that the gap between “those people,” now called “the one percent,” and the rest of the world will always be ripe for conflict, drama and tension, no matter how much we evolve.

Garlin doesn’t discover anything new about this well-documented phenomenon. But rounding up his (under-employed) comic pals and turning them loose on Little League is funny enough by itself.

A movie comedy that is funnier in performance than it ever was as a script.

A mildly entertaining sermon about American “Cowboy Capitalism” as it rubs up against “The French Way.”

Before it trips over its own overly complex plot, before the comic leads have exhausted their modestly amusing repertoires, this odd stoner/sci fi creature feature blows out of the gate and threatens - for about thirty minutes - to blow your mind. Then it doesn't.

Drift is utterly conventional in so many ways. But the relatively unknown cast, the rough hewn setting and startling cinematography — footage that rivals many a surf documentary’s best shots — give it a boost.