The dialogue is dull, the performances perfunctory and while it is novel to leave out “the explainer” character — that slim hope that a priest, an expert on the Occult or whoever, can give the characters answers — common to this genre, leaving that character out robs the film of pathos and urgency.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini motor mouth and the perma-sneering Ice Cube.

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.

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

Fiennes holds it all together by force of what he does show us about the man, his kindness tempered with cruelty, the charity he practiced and preached, the morality he could never live up to. It’s the visible great man who makes The Invisible Woman worth watching.

Gooding brings just enough streetwise credibility to make Brown work.

Many moments will make you avert your eyes.

The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in The Wait.

At times, with its stiff, charisma-impaired cast, its digital sets and slo-mo slaughter, The Legend of Hercules has a whiff of the Augean Stables about it — if you catch my drift.

Divorce Corp is a lot pointed outrage that damning as its seems, feels suspect.

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.

They waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.

As exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.

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.

It’s a movie of pointless scenes.

It’s perfectly passable holiday entertainment for people who dated during the “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” era. Just don’t expect this Grudge Match to be much of a challenge.

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.

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.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy The Wolf of Wall Street.

It’s a charming, whimsical and ever-so-slight film, a bit of an over-reach but pleasant enough, even when it falls short.

“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.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

Looming large above this “Long Walk” is Elba, in a mostly still performance, one of quietly compelling authority that dominates every moment.

Like the characters in this inter-connected world, you may feel the need to let go of The Past, only to realize, after the credits, the hold it still has on you.

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.

A lump of cinematic coal Perry’s shoving into America’s stockings this holiday season.

The disco decadence, the seedy era before Times Square became a theme park, the lowered expectations of an endless recession, everything that was then and is now makes up American Hustle. And that’s what makes this the best movie of this holiday season.

It barely has a fright in it on its own, this bloody, Mexican-made supernatural thriller set in the hill country near Tijuana. But open it with a hot “Blue is the Warmest Color” sex scene, toss in a few other hot and heavy moments and a generous helping of nudity and you can be sure, at least, of getting a Hollywood studio’s attention.

It was never going to be “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Reserve that honor for the film that inspired it. But Saving Mr. Banks is still one of the best pictures of the year.

Look for Jackson’s cameo in the opening, which sets the tone. Call it another visual triumph for New Zealand’s vision of Middle Earth.

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.

We’re taken back to a naive era, when the boundaries of “smut” were narrower, when even the images of an unlikely “adult” star (she never did sex films or “real” porn) seem now like good, clean fun.

An old fashioned romantic mystery that benefits from a wizened, much-honored cast and a still-exotic setting.

As colorful as it and its people are, Cooper lets the brawling and the bigger-than-big performances get the better of him, and his story. Out of the Furnace feels undercooked, as a result.

Walker has few “big” scenes, no memorable dialogue and plays up the exhaustion, which tamps down the emotions of his performance. So even an action packed finale can’t rescue this dramatically thin exercise in one-man showmanship.

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

Lee, in a sort of humorless send-up of Tarantino, substitutes kinky for mystery, explicit sex and violence for sex and violence with real shock value. When it comes to this remake, you plainly can’t teach an oldboy like Lee new tricks.

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

The Jason Statham vehicle Homefront is such a generic tough-guy-against-the-odds ’80s style actioner that you’d swear Sly Stallone starred in it. He did, back in the day. Or versions of it. This one, Stallone just scripted.

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.

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

So it’s no “Starbuck,” which most people won’t mind because Americans don’t read subtitles. But even in this form, Delivery Man and the guy who plays him still deliver where it counts.

Most credit goes to Coogan for the success of this odd coupling.

Deep thoughts about re-directing cynically manipulated celebrity, lump in the throat moments at people rising up against their oppressors, a couple of memorable deaths and attempts at sacrifice play as flat when there’s nothing around them to serve as contrast.

An amusing, well-acted and sharply-timed holiday comedy, old friends getting together to prove that careers, families and kids aside, they’ve still got their R-rated edge, just as they did in college.

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.

Try as she might, Collyer cannot help but judge these people, a not-quite-fatal flaw in a movie about the down and out.

The bad guys really stand out, with Mikkelsen pulling off something he never managed as a Bond villain. He’s genuinely frightening.

And Dern, a great character actor who made his mark opposite everyone from Redford and John Wayne to Jane Fonda, embraces the roll of a lifetime.

Dallas Buyers Club is one of the best pictures of the year.

So even though this isn’t the greatest of “Expectations” — David Lean’s black and white version in the ’40s will your heart — it’s still a pretty grand one.

The film stumbles into a cross-country odyssey that dominates its last third. That is fascinating, but not properly set up, much like the film itself. How I Live Now skips over the “How,” loses itself in the “I” and never lets the pathos of “Live Now” pay off.

The design is brighter and sharper, the jokes are broader and the villainy utterly generic in this by-the-(comic)-book adaptation.

Writer-director Ted Koland can be a little obvious. It’s not a deep movie. But everybody, especially Ramsey, is dealing with something. And Timlin (TV’s “Zero Hour”) gives heart to this wonderful, nuanced character.

Frozen, undercooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.

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.

Writer-director Jaco Van Dormael (“Toto the Hero”) spins flashbacks and time-lapse photography, stunning montages, whirling, circling cameras and stunning underwater, deep space and Martian landscape photography into a film that is as intentionally opaque as it is overlong.

A most romantic way to spend your time at the movies this fall, a “date picture” about do over dates that works, this time around.

The script here is pretty stale stuff, with an under-developed side story of the cop (Karen Mok) on Donako’s trail and dialogue (in English and Chinese) that is often banal.

It’s a film of limp police procedures — stake outs that aren’t really clandestine, generic prison scenes, interrogations by underlines that suggest the leading players weren’t available on set for the entire day.

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.

Watts masters Diana’s look — the way she carried her head and used those wide, coyly expressive eyes — but is only passable at impersonating the voice.

Sure, it’s good-looking, cautionary and clever enough. But there’s not much in this “Game” that you’d call thrilling or fun.

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.

As Jackass japes go, though, Bad Grandpa was better in concept and in its short, punchy TV commercials than it is as a feature.

Exarchopoulos is a revelation, wearing her neediness, vulnerability and arousal with every muscle in her face, her posture, even her hair. It’s an utterly naked performance, literally and figuratively.

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

This culture-clash/mother bonding story was never going to be “Frozen River,” but you do sense that a lot of potential was squandered in denying these mothers big moments of mourning, bigger confrontations with the fathers of their sons.

So yes, even if you know how this story goes, there are moments that work wickedly well in between the needlessly drawn out ones, by which I mean the entire, predictable third act.

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

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.

Mark Jarrett’s amiable road picture has a morbid whimsy and a coming-of-age hook.

The tempered violence, the nature of the villains, the easy bonhomie of our leads and a cast peppered with great supporting players make Escape Plan go down easier than the other “Rambo/Last Man Standing/Expendables” pictures that brought these two aged action stars back from the dead.

This solo ordeal won’t be to every taste, but All Is Lost is a grand vehicle for the actor and for that viewer ready to consider his or her own mortality, the problems, conflicts, strengths and shortcomings you’re sure you leave behind when you just sail away.

Needed more movie to go with its message.

The aloof, guarded Cumberbatch plays Assange as a mixture of brilliance, hucksterism, ego and naivete. He carries the baggage of an actor who plays “smart,” with a menacing edge.

McQueen and his stellar cast take us on a difficult journey, an odyssey that will make you want to avert your eyes. It is to their great credit that we don’t.

So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.

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.

The performances and Greengrass’s way with action immerse us and make Captain Phillips a tight, taut,edge of your seat thriller even if you remember the ending.

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.

A graphically violent, sexually explicit teen horror tale, it was close to being ahead of its time, in its time. Now, it plays like a quaint, fairly obvious period piece — from 2006.

Affleck? You never believe a word he says, not a gesture. This is the sort of acting he did in the sort of movies he made before he started writing and directing his own movies — bad.

Though it is funnier and out-charms “Tio Papi,” it lacks the whimsy, magical realism and kid-friendly sentiment of the sleeper hit, “Instructions Not Included.”

To fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two.

Parkland is a fascinating insider’s view of those fateful two days in November of 1963, when a president was murdered, his assassin was gunned down in custody and generations of conspiracies were born.

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

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

In Don Jon Gordon-Levitt hasn’t made a great movie. But he has made a fun one, short and sweet, with a third act punch that is so to-the-point it’ll take your breath away.

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.

A fine and fun film tribute to the milieu, the men, women and machines in a sport that was never deadlier or more glamorous than its Disco Decade incarnation.

By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out (at great, boring length), The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches and our patience.

The singer and tabloid darling Chris Brown more than holds his own with this crew, apparently not even needing a dance double.

Prisoners is never less than engrossing. It’ll keep you guessing. It’s just too bad that the last thirty minutes make us feel like the prisoners, here.

Apparently at Holofcener’s urging, Dreyfus just tends to overwhelm the movie with her regular, if charming, bag of tricks, as if that’s enough. And it isn’t.

Thanks for Sharing is a bit of a head-snapper in its tone changes, stumbling into flippancy. The light moments are appreciated, but they do tend to undercut the sobriety of it all.

Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, The Family has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.