Truth should have felt like a tragedy, a story about a monumental but fascinating failure of journalism, the flip side to the upcoming Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of sexual abuse within the Catholic church. Instead, Truth wants to make your blood boil. It succeeds — but not in the way the filmmakers intended.

The strained, strange relationship between father and son ultimately becomes the emotional center of The Clan, culminating with an astonishing closing shot guaranteed to induce startled gasps. It’s a great, jarring moment that is the work of a filmmaker clearly in love with his craft — and a flavor for the darker side of human nature.

Steve Jobs, which by many accounts plays loose with the facts, is at its weakest when it tries to humanize its protagonist.

Here is a crime drama that punches you in the gut, full on, and dares you not to blink.

The movie kicks off with a wonderful setpiece that shows off Spielberg’s ability to tell a story primarily through visuals — is there any other filmmaker working today better at this?

The sound never loses its urgency, its sense of immediate danger, straight through to the closing shot of the film.

This is a love letter to lunacy (and an unspoken tribute to the iconic towers) that lets you feel what it’s like to tread where only gods dare.

Yes, The Martian does look like it was shot on Mars, even though the film’s tone is suspiciously light and cheerful for Scott, who tends to thrive on a chillier, more dour habitat.

Breathe is empathetic and humane — the movie cares equally about both girls, each damaged in her own way — and it ends with a brusque, unexpected reminder that kindness and patience can easily curdle.

Depp isn’t doing anything different here than he did in "Dark Shadows" or "Alice in Wonderland" or the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. Once again, he’s unrecognizable under elaborate makeup and prosthetics, and he speaks with a peculiar voice (this time a thick South Boston accent).

What ultimately sinks The Visit is that Shyamalan, who had previously come up with new and ingenious ways to frighten us, resorts to familiar jump-scare tactics in which things suddenly pop into the frame, accompanied by loud sound effects. There’s no real sense of danger, no menace.

The movie is slight and, at 75 minutes without end credits, barely qualifies as a feature-length film. But Tomlin is a wonder.

Gerwig, not surprisingly, is a marvel: mercurial, thin-skinned, haughty, desperate, funny, warm, a magnetic presence who mesmerizes the audience in the same way she attracts Tracy.

Too much of the breezy humor that made the book a delight is stripped away, replaced with predictable jokes and broad slapstick, sitcom-quality encounters with women and bears and a pushy, grating sentimentality.

Despite moments of intense suspense and glints of bizarre horror, Tom at the Farm is ultimately a psychological thriller.

Borrowing its title from a mix tape Cobain compiled as a teenager, the film, made with the cooperation of his widow, family and former bandmates, remains compelling and moving no matter how familiar you already are with the singer’s story.

The movie isn’t a thriller, but it still generates a strange sort of emotional suspense - an incredibly intense drama that makes you hold your breath, and it builds toward a total knockout of a final scene in which the story is resolved with hardly a word.

Fantastic Four is so bereft of all the things we expect from a superhero movie — humor, excitement, adventure, awe — that it plays like a drawn-out pilot episode for an upcoming TV series no one would ever watch again.

This iconoclastic filmmaker seduces you with ridiculous laughs, then sends you home contemplating your mortality and your place in the world.

A wobbly enterprise saddled by stilted dialogue and convenient contrivances. But view it as a Woody Allen film, and the plot thickens.

The movie is better when it’s poking sly fun at Cruise’s superheroic screen persona (look at the expression on his face when Ethan realizes just how big the guy he must fight is) than when it asks you to buy into its far-fetched antics.

Ardor is never boring, but it’s never all that engaging, either. Here is a movie that ends with a can’t-miss scenario — a siege on a farmhouse in which the heroes are vastly outnumbered and outgunned — yet still fails to ever quicken your pulse.

Condon and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher reward your patience by bringing the threads together in a beautiful, stirring manner that celebrates the genius of the literary icon while also honoring the man McKellen is playing.

Despite its considerable faults, this bizarre, fascinating story is impossible to shake off, like the expression on the face of one of the brothers as he's talking about his father and begins getting choked up (instead of crying, he smiles convincingly, evidence of a life led having to learn to hide his emotions for fear of reprisal).

Well-acted and sincere, Testament of Youth is chastely romantic in its treatment of the relationship between Vera and Roland, but the film doesn’t hold back on showing the horror of trench warfare.

If Magic Mike XXL is bulging with anything, it’s inane conversation.

In the end The Overnight promises more than it can deliver: Some of the supposedly provocative material ends up being juvenile, and the movie ends just as the situation gets truly, weirdly interesting. It’s too tame a resolution to a film that suggested the capacity for more.

Even Greg’s tattooed and charismatic history teacher (Jon Bernthal) is more interesting than the self-absorbed kid we’re supposed to care about.

Saring, often funny comedy.

If Inside Out doesn’t stack up with the best Pixar movies (Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story), that’s because there’s less plot here than usual, and even at a lean 95 minutes, the movie starts to drag a bit just before it ends.

That’s one of the great accomplishments of Ascher’s film: Intercutting his interviews with fictional recreations of what the subjects are describing allows you to see a version of what they saw, and you don’t need to believe any of it for The Nightmare to give you a major case of the creeps.

As it is, Gemma Bovery is as dry as day-old bread: Not inedible, but why bother with it if you can find something fresher?

Jurassic World gives you exactly what Howard’s character promises at the beginning — More! Bigger! Faster! — but you know there’s something deeply wrong with a film that expects you to shed tears over digitally created prehistoric creatures and rubber brontosaurus heads instead of rooting for, you know, people.

Love & Mercy allows you to understand how the lifelong auditory hallucination that haunted Wilson also fueled his creativity. Sometimes, from madness, great art can emerge.

Yes, Aloha is a mess. But messes can be fascinating, and there’s a lot of tenderness and beauty and heartbreak here, too.

A flamboyant but hollow exercise in glitz and pizzazz.

This is pure Disaster 101 formula, although distilled to the minimum amount of dialogue and characters possible.

The main thing writer-director Michele Jouse, who was close to Shepard, wanted to do with her intimate documentary Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine was to give a voice to those who are still mourning him and allow them to share their stories.

Tomorrowland is a crazy, disjointed mess. But it’s the good sort of crazy, and it’s the sort of mess you want to lose yourself in.

With Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller delivers the sort of jumbo-sized entertainment that makes you spontaneously break out in appreciative laughter: The breadth of his imagination and showmanship makes you giddy.

The clownish humor is imbued with a great, genuine pain. Unfortunately, the twist proves too much for the filmmakers to handle. The second half of The D Train collapses into a series of plot curlicues and narrative dead-ends. The picture loses its nerve and opts for a pat, wan resolution.

The film never allows any of its characters to fall into stereotype; they are complex creatures, full of anger and disappointment and passion, and even the weakest among them is not bereft of honor.

A revealing and bluntly honest portrait of a previously unknown filmmaker.

Like "A Separation," which used the story of a dissolving marriage to illustrate the unexpected consequences of a rigid, inflexible society, About Elly turns what starts out as a breezy comedy into an engaging and substantial exploration of human nature and how sometimes, without intending to, we hurt the ones we love most — including ourselves.

Today, you can see it for yourself and bask in all its insane glory.

Whedon knows this is all nonsense, but it can be great fun, too. Age of Ultron is all rush and sensation with little substance. But what a feeling.

The Age of Adaline is a modern romantic fairy tale set in San Francisco, marred by bad narration and an unnecessary desire to overexplain random magic.

The fact that Garland manages to cram in speculative ideas about the perils of a society that relies too heavily on technology is a bonus. In Ex Machina, love hurts, big time, for man and machine alike.

The Salt of the Earth is a celebration of the power of art to change the world, as well as an exploration of the considerable toll gifted artists sometimes pay for their talents, and their courage to push forward regardless.

True Story marks the directorial debut of Rupert Goold, a respected British theater veteran who also co-wrote the script and knows how to engage the viewer with simple scenes of two people talking (with a few modifications, this could have easily been a play).

In the movie’s best scene, Bisset lays into Depardieu with the rage and anger of a woman who has tolerated bad behavior for too long (there’s a fiery spontaneity to their verbal sparring that makes you wonder if the scene was improvised).

While We’re Young starts off as an empathetic, funny look at middle age and winds up as profound and schematic as a Neil Simon play — or, for the younger set, an episode of "The New Girl."

White God is the rare sort of movie in the era of computer-generated special effects where you can’t believe your eyes, because what you’re looking at is real.

Merely adding an older generation of lovers to a love story does not make your romance one for the ages. Doesn’t even make it "The Notebook."

Eastern Boys explores whether these lost boys are damaged beyond repair or are still capable of being saved.

One thing nearly all the anecdotes in The Hunting Ground have in common is their resolution: A lack of justice.

This period piece, directed by Richard Laxton, is shot in such a grim and grainy fashion you long to turn on the lights — which is fitting, because you also wish the filmmakers had illuminated the characters a bit more clearly.

Here is a film in which nothing is at stake: Cars crash into each other head-on at high speeds, vehicles sail off cliffs and tumble down rocky mountainsides, people jump out of buildings and fall six stories to the ground, then characters just dust themselves off and continue as if nothing had happened. Even Wile E. Coyote wasn't this resilient.

The screenplay is fiendish, clever and airtight: Like a magician, Coimbra uses sleight-of-hand, but he never cheats, and the film is even more engaging on second viewing, when you really know what’s going on before your eyes.

The infectious dark comedy Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes) argues that payback is more satisfying when it’s doled out in fiery, bloody and outrageous doses.

A marketable counterpoint to last year’s "Boyhood."

Unfortunately, Insurgent can’t quite live up to its intriguing set up. Even if you’re curious about it, the movie is often plodding and frequently nonsensical, with action that never feels novel or exciting.

With a script co-written by Penn himself and based on a well-regarded novel by the late French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, this one has to have some meat to go along with the gunplay, right? Sadly, no.

Despite the lack of substance, Run All Night is far better than those clunky "Taken" movies with their timid PG-13 ratings. If you’re gonna cut Neeson loose against the mob, a bloody R is the way to go.

Blanchett manages to project the idea that there’s more to this woman than mere banal evil. Cinderella may well be the heroine of this story, but if you wanted someone to have a few drinks with, you’d pick her stepmother in a heartbeat.

You can’t shake the feeling the script is trying too hard to please, upping the drama despite the fact that what made the first film so enjoyable was its relative simplicity.

Maps to the Stars is haunted by ghosts, the way the film industry is haunted by its past, and Cronenberg gradually tapers down the dark humor and starts to amp up the ugliness of these blank, superficial lives.

Focus is a shiny, stylish shell game of a film that, much like its protagonists, relies on breezy chatter, a good sense of humor and a lot of misdirection to succeed.

Not all of the characters in the movie get just and fair send-offs, but Virzi’s stylish picture argues that’s the price we pay when a capitalist society trains us to place our own selfish interests above everything else. It’s a rat race that ultimately has no winners.

The movie is a furious, in-your-face whirlwind of emotions, but it’s never tiresome or bellicose, and its raucous, messy energy is invigorating.

Despite what you might fear, the movie is not torture. And even if it doesn’t inspire lust, you will breathe a warm sigh of relief, thinking: This could have been so much worse.

Sadly, Jupiter Ascending turns out to be the exact opposite: the worst movie the Wachowskis have ever made.

It’s a cry of despair and soul-shaking desperation, leavened with shades of Dostoyevskyan angst.

Abel is a man with ideals in a world that has no use for them: If he’s going to succeed, he’s going to have to use his wits instead of bullets, and although the odds against him are formidable, watching his struggle is riveting entertainment.

With Moore’s formidable, Oscar-bound performance, the picture transcends the usual cliches of the genre to become something far more moving and profound.

Cotillard, who earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance, plays the character as a woman hanging on by the barest of threads.

There are some who may lament Aniston’s choice to step out of her comfortable comedy shoes and little black dresses, but the decision was sound: The best reason to see Cake — the sort of film that makes your life look pretty good in comparison — is to watch her deliver her best dramatic performance to date.

The film is so gleefully ridiculous that you start to suspect the filmmakers were in on the joke and forgot to tell the actors.

Expertly shot and choreographed in Eastwood’s clean, unfussy style, the Iraq sequences are taut, harrowing and at times excruciatingly suspenseful, particularly a setpiece in which Kyle faces off against his Iraqi counterpart, a superb sniper who has made it his mission to take down the American sharpshooter.

Instead of a history lesson, Selma plays like suspenseful, absorbing drama.

The Imitation Game is vibrant and lively, engaging you on three levels: The fascinating way the Nazis managed to outwit the rest of the world until Turing came along, how his giant contraption (essentially the world’s first computer) will work, and what will happen to him and everyone he knows when the truth about him is finally revealed.

The new version uses addiction as a vehicle to tackle larger themes, eloquently explored by Monahan’s dialogue, which sings in a way uncommon to tough-guy crime-dramas.

Marshall, who established himself as a great movie musical director with 2002’s Oscar-winning Chicago, has done a masterful job of collaborating with Sondheim and Lapine to transform their 1987 Tony Award-winning, two-act musical into a film that flows seamlessly as it juggles its intertwining storylines.

The bigger problem is that neither Jolie nor the script bothers to flesh Louis out as a fully formed person with faults and fears and regrets, which keeps the film from ever capturing you emotionally.

Wild may sound like a film about redemption, but it’s more about learning to live with what you can’t control — and accepting what you can control, which is sometimes just as difficult.

Foxcatcher is too cold of a movie to love, but that chilliness is intentional and transfixing, a parable about the darkest corners of the minds of men that dares to whisper instead of shout.

This is a dark and shivery story about motherhood, a common subject for horror movies, but one that’s rarely treated with such intelligence or seriousness of intent.

The problem is that hardly anyone in the cast can sing or dance on a level that’s more than passable (Foxx is a fine exception). And that’s a problem when the movie is a musical.

OK, Mr. Jackson, you proved your point by landing the finish. Now please, no more Middle-earth, ever.

The first half of the movie, which alternates between hilariously vulgar, gross gags and some electric improvs and riffs by Rock and his cast of all-stars, has the crackle and pop of a live performance — it energizes you.

In Exodus: Gods and Kings, Scott settles for sticking (mostly) to the Book, skipping the boring parts in order to dish out the razzle-dazzle. This is spectacular entertainment, practically a theme park ride, that could have used more spirituality and soul.

The Homesman, director Tommy Lee Jones’ drama about the hardships of pioneer life in 1850s Nebraska, goes from deathly dull to shocking to intriguing to “Look, there’s Meryl Streep in a bonnet!”

Using a buzzy, unnerving score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Citizenfour makes you share the same sense of shock and paranoia as Snowden spews damning information that implicates the White House in transgressions that extend beyond our borders into other countries.

Like "The King’s Speech" or "Shakespeare in Love," The Theory of Everything sometimes feels a bit too polished and precise, leaving no room for ambiguity and always staying easy to digest, like elegant pap.

Dark, grim and exciting entertainment.

With a film this funny, exciting and visually stimulating, who cares if you know exactly what's going to happen next, and when.

This is Nolan’s unabashed tribute to "2001: A Space Odyssey," the first movie he ever saw at the age of 8 and the one that made him decide to be a filmmaker (there are homages to that earlier film everywhere).

The film’s true subject, though, is innate talent — for music, writing, painting, sculpture, plumbing — and the superhuman lengths we sometimes have to go to in order to wring it out of ourselves.