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.

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.

There are a TV season’s worth of soap opera betrayals, melodramatic traumas and blundering efforts to learn from and escape this media miasma.

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.

Yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth.

It’s the sort of movie whose finale leaves you wondering, “Why do they always leave out what happens next?”

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.

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.

“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.

There’s nothing surprising about this late ’60s tale, including its connection to the modern ghost stories told in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Conjuring.” But what it lacks in originality it makes up with in hair-raising execution. You will scream like a teenage girl.

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.

“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.”

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

Hollywood will be hard pressed to top this lean Canadian indie picture that knows it’s just another dumb werewolf movie, but has fun with that knowledge.

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.

Paris-Manhattan is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen.

The sylvan setting and short bursts of dramatic interplay are more interesting than coherent in this brief, undeveloped adaptation.

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.

Film buffs will see Goodbye World as a sort of “Trigger Effect” meets “Return of the Secaucus Seven” — growing up, learning to look at the world through more jaded adult eyes as the world ends.

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

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

It’s over familiar, a movie that plays like recycled, R-rated outtakes from “Rules of Engagement” or “How I Met Your Mother.”

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.

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.

Truth be told, I was never a fan of the first “Dumber,” but the stars made it endurable and convincingly stupid. Here, they’re sometimes funny, and sometimes just sad. They’re better than this, no matter how good they are at hiding the fact that they know it.

Bloody, brutal and melodramatic.

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.

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.