The performers are more competent than compelling, a common failing of faith-based films. Blame the edge-free, freshly-scrubbed characters that they play. Sadly, even as a safe-for-seniors saga ready-made for The Hallmark Channel, this is pretty thin gruel.

Blue Caprice is a chilling portrait of motive, manipulation and mass murder.

Like Vin Diesel, it has bulk, lumbering clumsily along as it repeats Diesel’s greatest hits — the ones that don’t require him to drive a fast and furious car.

If it weren’t for the well-intentioned moments of pathos — a tear or two, hear and there — Tio Papi would be a complete waste of time.

As edgy female wish-fulfillment fantasy, showing that fantasy’s consequences, Adore engrosses and engages, never titillates and never betrays even the tiniest hint of revulsion.

It’s never more than a theme park that isn’t worth the price of admission.

Maybe they all took a gander at that random, ridiculous scenario and hoped that the car would be cool enough to bail them out. It isn’t.

DePalma flirts with the lurid and tosses in some interesting third act surprises, but never finds his way back to the sexually charged tone and shocks of his earlier thrillers.

It’s disappointing that Spurlock didn’t have the access, the footage or the spine to depict any of the cynicism behind such creations.

Blame it on the weak chemistry of the stars, blame it on the way the script refuses to let them develop chemistry and the perfunctory way the story is dispensed with, but the sparks aren’t there.

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

This is a movie that floats by on dazzlingly silly banter and well-slung slang.

In Spanish with English subtitles, has a lovely, big budget sheen (Shlomo Godder was the cinematographer) and a cast that plays this as documentary real.

The frights are passable, the foreshadowing (extreme close-ups of nails being pounded through boards, etc.) telling and the humor — sick as it is — quite funny.

If you love exposition and shapely if bland young actors in leather, skinny jeans, knee boots, Goth cocktail dresses and heavy eye makeup, this may be the movie for you.

Cage, without having to play a ghostly motorcyclist or hot rod driver from Hell or sorcerer or sci-fi hero or kinky cop, reminds us that he used to know subtlety. So even if Frozen Ground breaks little new ground in the serial killer thriller genre, there’s hope Cage will leave the ham behind before Alaska freezes over.

Savannah gets by on touches of grace and spirited performances, especially by Caviezel. After being so serious for so very long, it’s great fun to see him take on a “genuine character” with all the boozing, brawling and shooting that entails.

It is as slow, slick and superficial as the director of “21″ and “Killers” can make it.

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.”

That makes Kick Ass 2 more sour than sweet, a movie that jokes about comic book fanboys but stops short of mocking them the way the first film did.

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

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints feels like a fresh and poetic treatment of a prosaic story that should be utterly worn out by now.

Planes looks, sounds and feels like a direct-to-video project, which in an earlier age when people still bought DVDs it would have been. In theaters, it’s nothing more than a laughless 90 minute commercial for toys available at a retailer near you.

The quest, which takes our heroes to the Sea of Monsters, aka The Bermuda Triangle, is generic in the extreme. The fights/escapes all lack any sense of urgency and peril.

Appreciate Elysium for what it is, sci-fi that’s smarter, more topical and more invigorating than most of what passes through that genre these days, and another sign that its director is the most promising chap to enter the field since the inception of Christopher Nolan.

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 a “Waiting for Godot” set in the solitary work and lives of two highway line-painters.

It aims for that “Hangover” blend of the sick and the sentimental. And it doesn’t work.

We knew Livingston, Kendrick and Johnson (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) would work in this setting. But Wilde adds to the growing repertoire she showed off in “Deadfall” and “Butter,” films no one saw but which revealed that she’s a lot more than a pretty face.

Witty, warm and wistful and in just the right proportions, Spectacular is the best-acted film of the summer.

You’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly.

Filled with Smurf wholesomeness, Smurf puns and posi-Smurf messages about never giving up “on family,” The Smurfs 2 still sucks Smurfberries.

It’s engrossing, violent, frightening and funny in the ways it captures the way kids speak with no adults around, and the way kids act when society’s rules take a back seat in time of war.

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.

This Wolverine gets our hopes up, and falls short.

So many “lose my virginity over the summer” comedies, from “American Pie” to “Superbad,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” to “Girl Next Door.” But aside from the hilarious “Twilight Saga,” how many have told that torrid tale from the girl’s point of view? The To Do List is a summer romantic comedy dedicated to rectifying that imbalance in a single stroke.

Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be.

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

The worst comic book adaptation since “Jonah Hex.”

Red 2 goes down easily, from Marvin’s demented moments of relationship advice to Dame Helen’s tender and amusing “Hitchcock” reunion with Sir Anthony. There’s a knowing twinkle in their eyes, and in everybody else’s. “Yeah, we could’ve done a Bond film,” they seem to wink. “And it would’ve been a bloody fun one, at that.”

The Conjuring is like a prequel to 40 years of demonic possession thrillers.

Whatever their other gifts, they cannot find the fizz here and can never get Wiig to commit to the sort of film that she, even when she was making it, must have realized was beneath her in her post-”Bridesmaids” glory.

There is absolutely nothing new in this variation on the time-honored creature-feature tropes. But the fun just builds and builds as our heroes and our Irish island come to a solution that seems — on the surface — awfully Irish in its logic.

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.

This is as thorough a take-down of a business and its practices as you’re likely to ever see.

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.

It’s another pointless romp through Sandlerland — where the women are buxom, the kids have catch-phrases and the jokes are below average.

Del Toro’s robots have weight and mass, and their epic, Hong Kong-smashing fights with the four and six-legged, clawed and horned monsters are visually coherent, unlike the messy blur of the “Transformers” movies. There’s a light, humorous feel to “Pacific Rim” because the science is silly and logic takes a flying leap.

Hot Flashes don’t generate much heat — comical or otherwise. A pity, since that rare menopause comedy is a terrible thing to waste.

A darker-than-dark British comedy.

It’s a pretty conventional “Lifetime Original Movie” sort of story. But co-writer/director Thomas Vinterberg (“Dear Wendy”) makes it work by building a sense of frustrating unease into it all.

It’s coherent enough, but entirely too long and unpleasant when it could have been one brutishly edgy hoot after another.

In Let Me Explain, you’re never NOT aware that you’re watching a gifted, rubber-faced/rubber voiced performer (his “Laugh at My Pain” concert film was a surprising hit in 2011) work too hard to make inferior material go over.

Gore Verbinski’s film is an overlong array of noisy, digitally-assisted chases, shootouts, crashes and explosions with the occasional flash of homage to the “real” Lone Ranger that suggests a better movie than the pricey, jumbled compromise Verbinski delivered.

The funniest kids’ cartoon of the summer.

It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

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 performances and the ready supply of one-liners make this an amusing look at a new generation getting lost down memory lane.

Give it up for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. You’ll never see them work harder at a comedy than in The Heat, a stumbling, aggressively loud and profane cop buddy picture where they struggle to wring “funny” out of a script that isn’t.

White House Down is a corker, real competition for “Fast & Furious 6″ as the dumbest fun you’ll have at the movies this summer.

Director Sebastian Cordero — he did the John Leguizamo journalism thriller “Chronicles” — serves up chilling and all-too-real ways to die in space and maintains tension even if suspense is in short supply in a tale told in flashback.

Fill the Void’s greatest virtue is in the ways her characters take us beyond stereotypes even as she herself questions the value system of a culture that is so focused on religion, marriage and procreation that it holds few attractions to those not born into it.

The more correct title would have been “Retribution,” which could work for any number of Statham vehicles over the years. But Redemption is just different enough to make us remember “The Bank Job” or “Killer Elite” or that he’s about to give those fun-but-silly “Fast & Furious” movies a proper villain.

Manages a tear or two, and enough laughs to get by, even if from first scene to last the strain to stop just short of cloying shows.

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.

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.

The first 25 minutes or so of this “Contagion” meets “28 Days Later” thriller will leave you breathless. And the rest of it serves up novel and often entertaining solutions to the various “zombie problems” that this over-exposed genre presents.

Monsters University is a prequel that is far more conventional, not nearly as witty or clever as that original.

Doueiri has brilliantly and simply put a compassionate human face on a part of the world where ethnicity still trumps education, class and achievement, where even the successful face, at best, second-class citizenship in their own country.

Robert Stone directed the wonderful environmental movement history documentary “Earth Days,” and that earns him the benefit of the doubt for his latest, Pandora’s Promise. He needs that benefit, because what he sets out to do in 87 minutes is upend 50 years of green movement anti-nuclear power dogma.

If every generation gets the Superman it deserves, Man of Steel suggests we’ve earned one utterly without wit or charm.

An often hilarious/generally irreverent comedy.

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

As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows.

This is a good cast, but it’s all played at a rather shrill pitch that must work better on the stage. The intimacy of the screen makes it all uncomfortably in our face.

It’s still a welcome, entertaining and overdue delivery of credit where credit was and is due.

There are interesting story elements and locations. But the claustrophobia of the car works against it.

The performances are pretty sharp... But the situations feel contrived, the romantic pairings a bit arbitrary. Strip away the narration, and this would be more cinematic. Take away the setting and this is fairly routine stuff.

Interns Wilson and Vaughn swap lines like veteran jazz musicians who still have a sense of play about them — an endless supply of nicknames, high-and-low fives, dated slang and goodwill — theirs for each other, and ours for them.

If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.

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.

Mostly, it’s just a clumsy lecture about who we’re becoming, haves vs have-nots, with the haves armed to the teeth.

The best of them you could certainly see as full length features, chilling little tastes of a complete vision — story, characters, horrific situations and visual aesthetic. The worst? Simply generic.

Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

A winking comedy with dark underpinnings and some of Shakespeare’s most wicked wordplay.

For all its showmanship, Now You See Me has a lot less up its sleeve than it lets on.

An undemanding, childish adventure picture.

A summer movie that staggers down that fine line between sentimental and snarky, a tale of nature and nurture and first love that manages to charm more than any R-rated movie about horny teens has a right to.

Owen and Riseborough play their characters awfully close to the vest, not investing in anything that would allow this story to take the romantic or melodramatic turns we expect. But truthfully, that hamstrings the movie.

It’s too much a movie of “types,” and loses track of story elements that would seem important enough to warrant further exploration. The whole Christian conservative law-and-order mantle feels like a fuzzy afterthought on Jane, forgotten far too soon.

Epic isn’t epic, but it isn’t half bad, either. It’s just that as high as the bar has been raised on this sort of animation, this is more evidence that a strong story is worth more than any next generation software.

Bad movies are rarely as much fun as these “Fast and the Furious” pictures. And make no mistake about it — they’re bad.

As "Hangovers" go, Part III isn't challenging or unpleasant, just instantly forgettable. It won't take much to sleep this one off.

The players utterly inhabit their banal characters, but Hartigan only delivers a couple of scenes that merit all this attention to detail.

The line between “cute” and “cutesy” is violated, repeatedly, in the sometimes funny, often cloying comedy The English Teacher.

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.

Rock is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.

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.