Homefront is done in by uninspired action scenes in which Statham’s athletic prowess is rendered unwatchable by hyper-editing, a shameful reliance on child-in-peril cliches to move the story forward, and so many loose ends that you wonder if 20 minutes were accidentally cut out from the movie.

Gibney even convinced Armstrong to sit down for one final interview in May. In it, he comes off as somewhat contrite but also victimized, as if he were being single out for something everyone does.

Narco Cultura isn’t a documentary about runaway crime: Its actual subject is far stranger.

Catching Fire is a work of thoughtful, emotionally engaging sci-fi — everything that its predecessor The Hunger Games was not.

Sunlight Jr. is what is often described as a slice-of-life drama, but this one is more of a tiny sliver, and it doesn’t leave you with much to chew on.

This is a straight-up portrait of a man who figured out a way to cling to life longer than anyone expected and, in the process, learned to let the world in.

Kill Your Darlings is more coming-of-age story than murder mystery, but its characters are so well drawn and complex the emotional weight carries a suspense all its own.

Unlike most pictures about people living on the fringe, The Motel Life is never drab or depressing.

All is Lost is more fun to think about than it is to actually watch: It’s a testament to a great actor, an experimental piece of cinema and a bit of a bore.

The sexual content may be excessive (the movie could have gotten by with just one scene instead of three) and the running time a bit indulgent, but Blue is the Warmest Color grows in power and intensity.

There’s a fleet and funny comic-book movie nestled inside Thor: The Dark World. You catch glimpses of it here and there.

Paradise: Hope plays better if you’ve seen the previous two movies, so you can savor the reach and scope of Seidl’s trilogy. But the film stands alone as a tender portrait of adolescence at its most vulnerable and how we manage to survive it, even when surrounded by predators and wolves.

Curtis pulls off some amusing moments, and he has a secret weapon: Nighy, who is so jolly and funny you wish he’d had more screen time.

One of the best things about 12 Years a Slave is that McQueen renders all the characters with the same depth and complexity as his protagonist.

What you don’t expect is camp. The Counselor is more "Wild Things" than "No Country for Old Men", with which it shares a border town setting. But at least "Wild Things" knew what it was. The Counselor treats its material seriously and seems to have no idea it’s a joke that can’t even muster up a bit of smarty-pants Tarantino cleverness or energy.

Bad Milo! directly envokes a number of earlier pictures Vaughan clearly adores, including "Basket Case," "It’s Alive" and even the workplace satire "Office Space." But the movie fails to ground its promising (if preposterous) scenario in any kind of recognizable reality.

This Carrie becomes less involving as it goes along, ceding its emotional power to special effects and unconvincing gore, and culminating with a closing shot so lame and uninspired, it’s as if the filmmakers just gave up and called it a day.

Assange is a compelling figure that merited a better effort.

Escape from Tomorrow is more of an experimental film than a traditional narrative, but intrepid viewers — or anyone who has ever visited a Disney park — will enjoy getting lost in this dark house of happy horrors.

Carlei’s film is not particularly imaginative in terms of context, but it offers proof that this material never tarnishes, that with the right sort of movie magic, even a traditional telling can be thrilling.

In Captain Phillips, director Paul Greengrass pulls off the same remarkable feat he accomplished with "United 93": He takes a true story in which the outcome is already known and transforms it into a gripping, wrenching, devastating thriller.

The combination of youthful irreverence and military indoctrination is jarring.

Parkland is wildly uneven, although compulsively watchable.

In its early moments, the movie evokes everything from "The Social Network" to "Casino." By the end, the film has become as exciting as a game of Old Maid. R-rated thrillers are hardly ever this dull and listless, but this movie manages to eradicate all of Timberlake’s charisma and makes you flash back to Affleck’s "Paycheck"/"Gigli" era. How does this even happen?

Gravity is a celebration of the primal pleasure of movies: It shows you things you’ve never seen before, transports you out of the theater and out of your head, tricks you into believing what’s happening on the screen is happening to you.

Blue Caprice only spends a few minutes reenacting their crime — the movie shows us exactly how they did it in just a couple of scenes — because the facts of the case aren’t the movie’s focus. Instead, this lyrical, frightening film is a portrait of a man consumed by self-hatred who decided to take it out on the world.

This remarkable documentary argues that art can also be the glue that binds disparate souls.

If only more romantic comedies played out as charmingly and perceptively as this one.

Rush is the kind of Hollywood studio production that has sadly become all too rare — a smart, exciting, R-rated entertainment for grown-ups that quickens your pulse and puts on a great show without ever insulting your intelligence.

Don Jon is nominally a love triangle between a woman, a man and his laptop, but the movie is much more thoughtful and substantial than that, and it takes a compassionate and humane approach to all of its characters, even when they’re at their most despicable.

Director Stuart Blumberg’s movie, which features a surprisingly starry cast, comes off as superficial and trite.

Only genuinely talented people can make pictures this bad and misguided. “This whole thing is unacceptable,” Lil remarks at one point. That goes for the movie, too.

The wonderfully sad, exhilarating ending proves this filmmaker knew exactly where he was headed the entire time.

Too bad, then, that after two hours of such relentless tension, Prisoners starts revealing its secrets to progressively hokier effect.

The Family is the rare breed of pitch-black comedy that effectively uses violence for laughs or gasps, depending on the situation.

All the actors are strong, but Wilde is particularly good as the impetuous Kate, who doesn’t realize how incredibly selfish she has become. The actress’ great beauty could have been a distraction, but her performance is so complex and alive that she blends right into this world of ordinary, working-class people with modest aspirations who are trying to find happiness but often go about it in all the wrong ways.

What Passion ultimately lacks most, ironically, is passion, the artistic fervor that distinguished all his best pictures. This one feels like a throwaway by a gifted filmmaker who has run out of ideas.

The entire movie bears the whiff of a vanity project — a modestly budgeted bone Universal Pictures threw at Diesel so he would keep starring in Fast and Furious pictures. Those movies are bank; Riddick is rank.

Getaway makes the Transformers movies seem like they were shot in slow motion. You see all these vehicles smashing into each other, but the movie is never thrilling.

The Grandmaster sets aside traditional story structure in its last 15 minutes and becomes one of the filmmaker’s free-form visual poems, suffused with melancholy and compassion.

Although there are several stretches in the movie in which Seidl seems to be repeating himself, the director is carefully building toward a knock-out final scene in which the inscrutable, often annoying Anna becomes beautifully, poignantly human in front of our eyes, like magic.

There are a few flashes of wit in the romantic comedy Austenland, but for the most part, the humor lands not with Dear Jane’s grace and style but with all the subtlety of a cholera outbreak.

Lowery has a lyrical style of storytelling that is delicate and subtle yet suffused with emotion and atmosphere. It’s gentle and pointed at the same time. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints wafts over you like a dream, leaving behind a lovely, melancholy trace that hurts.

It’s filmed with a sharp eye and filled with good performances.

Its flimsy plot can’t quite support all the characters stuffed into the script, and the movie plays out in a weirdly static way that makes it feel improvised and uneven, leaving a few too much time during which nothing funny is happening.

The performances by Teller and Woodley are so strong that when the tone starts to darken and the characters make some radical discoveries, all the usual trappings of adolescent angst melt away: You feel like you’re watching two real, complicated people.

Molloy occasionally goes overboard with her realistic approach to storytelling (there’s a sex scene that is way more graphic than it needed to be), but mostly Una noche thrums with the vibrant energy of restless youth taking their fates into their own hands, for better or worse.

You’re Next is built on such an enormous pile of guff, it’s practically insulting.

The World’s End builds to an unexpectedly witty, funny climax that flies in the face of most films of its genre, and although its humor is not for all tastes, no one can say this crazy picture doesn’t have the guts to live up to its title.

Start with a heaping helping of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Throw in some "Percy Jackson," a dash of "Twilight," a spoonful of "The Vampire Diaries" and a sprinkling of "Harry Potter," and you end up with The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer pulls off the impossible: He confronts great, incomprehensible evil and puts a human face on it.

Jobs works much better as a history of Apple than it does as a portrait of the genius who dreamed it up.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is creaky and sentimental and schmaltzy. The movie lacks any of the unhinged qualities of Daniels’ previous films (The Paperboy, Precious, Shadowboxer).

What seemed edgy and brash in Kick-Ass is now routine and old-hat. The first movie was a brash satire on formulaic comic-book movies — exactly the sort of picture the sequel turns out to be.

Paranoia has a promising foundation — betrayal, danger and corporate espionage are solid building blocks of suspense. But the movie turns out to be more exasperating than exciting.

Blue Jasmine, which is easily Allen’s best and most powerful movie since 2005’s "Match Point", is filled with terrific performances, including Hawkins as the sweet-natured Ginger.

Lovelace is a timid gloss over on a hardcore subject — a movie that takes a wild true story and shoehorns it into a formulaic mold.

Elysium, the second movie from writer-director Neill Blomkamp, isn’t quite as inventive or fresh as his knockout debut, 2009’s "District 9." But the new picture is cut from the same cloth — furiously exciting sci-fi, carefully considered and loaded with allegories and social commentary.

In Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, choosing the dumbest character is a colossal task.

Today, 54 percent of Sea World’s whales have Tilikum’s genes, which is a terrifying thought.

The phrase “casting is everything” has never felt truer than it does with 2 Guns, an unremarkable, standard-issue shoot-em-up that rests entirely on the charisma of its two stars.

The post-conversion 3D is more distracting than anything else, but the rest of this surprisingly fun entertainment is as sharp as the hero’s claws.

The movie shouldn’t be dismissed outright, either. It’s a creepy experiment that stays with you.

The To Do List is a funny movie, but only if you’re not easily offended.

Coogler occasionally overplays his hand: The scene in which Oscar says goodbye to his daughter for what we know will be the last time is prolonged to the point of overkill.

The coming-of-age tale The Way, Way Back is sweet, heartfelt and utterly trite and predictable from beginning to end.

The movie does miraculously end up making good use of a couple of running jokes, and the cast soldiers on, though the laughs are meager. But mostly, Girl Most Likely is a case of good actors in serious need of worthwhile material.

The times have caught up with Almodóvar, who is now 63: He thinks he’s still pushing the envelope, but he comes off as old-fashioned and outdated.

The movie contains little in terms of traditional action, and Refn never uses it in a rousing or exciting manner, either. That would break the nightmarish spell this strange, beautiful film casts on the viewer. A mother’s love has never been this ruinous.

An uncommonly intense and frightening experience, The Conjuring is the first genuinely scary release in ages by a major studio that features practically no violence and spills only a bit of blood.

It’s bad enough to make you look askance at Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, and Maya Rudolph, all of whom deserve a chance to do something funny other than pose as wives exuding various degrees of sexiness.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a kid playing with his toys and smashing action figures together, except del Toro does it with more grace and imagination than most. There are long sequences in this movie that merit that most overused of terms, “awesome.”

Unfinished Song is full of predictably poignant moments; you’d be lucky to survive the film dry-eyed.

There’s a rollicking Wild West adventure buried deep inside The Lone Ranger, a bloated, mega-budget revival of the story of the iconic gunslinger and his Native American sidekick Tonto.

A Hijacking is not quite as exciting as it should be, but its realistic examination of grit and folly are still more intriguing than swaggering action movie heroics.

This is getting old.

The movie has a profound understanding of the back-and-forth nature of the bond between boys, and it ends on a silent note of forgiving looks and instant reconciliation that is the privilege of the young, whose lives aren’t yet complicated enough to put resentment before friendship

Monsters University feels half-hearted and lazy, like they weren’t even trying. At least show a little effort, guys.

Although there are some initial feints at using zombies as a metaphor for third-world issues and cultural differences, the picture forgets all that stuff by the final reel. World War Z opens with an undeniable bang. But if this is the way the world ends, we’re going out with a whimper.

What went wrong with Man of Steel? The early teasers promised Terrence Malick. The finished film is more Michael Bay.

This Is the End is a marvelously sustained, high-wire goof – a movie so nutty and daring, so crazy and out-there, that it feels like a low-budget independent except with big stars and a sizable budget.

The film is far from a downer. If anything, more than any of the films in the trilogy, this one may be the most hopeful - and the most affecting.

The Purge isn’t just stupid; it’s also pretentious and often makes no sense.

A decent thriller made better by good performances and an intriguing setting.

The picture is perfectly watchable but rarely compelling, because the filmmakers are too timid to take any chances.

Love Is All You Need works despite its occasional preposterous developments.

There’s nothing more to this movie than the set-up. Even though Cypher is slowly bleeding to death, and Kitai is running out of oxygen capsules that allow him to breathe in the toxic air, there’s no sense of urgency, either. At least Shyamalan, sensing the thinness of the material, doesn’t stretch things out.

Playful, effervescent comedy.

There’s exactly one good scene in all of The Hangover Part III, a hilarious bit of business halfway during the end credits that reminds you what made the original film so good.

At Any Price teaches you a lot about the business of corn seeds and genetic manipulation (the stuff is actually fascinating) but what interests director Ramin Bahrani most are the dynamics of this deeply dysfunctional family.

The directors complied and made some trims, which helps explain why the film works better as a thrilling but superficial celebration of two incredible athletes instead of a personal portrait of two world-famous women who continue to make sports history.

The movie fares less well when the plot and Simon’s neuroses come to the surface, but there is some tremendous suspense in the movie’s final scene.

Star Trek Into Darkness gives you an exhilarating, tingle-inducing rush — that rare feeling that comes when a gigantic entertainment is firing on all fronts, exceeding your expectations.

In the House seems to be building toward a cathartic and unexpected finale. Instead, you get a baffling fizzle — an inexcusably limp and unimaginative conclusion that doesn’t bring a single plot strand to a satisfying end.

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a failure that should have at least been a magnificent mistake, a risky endeavor that showed a daring intent even if its brash vision didn’t quite succeed. Instead, the movie leaves you cold and weary and vaguely disgusted.

The movie is intentionally elusive, like a memory you can’t quite fully recall, but the result has all the depth and weight of a greeting card.

Marvel Studios will only be able to draw from this well only so many times, though, before fatigue sets in.

You come away from Mud fondly remembering those two boys, especially Ellis, who has taken his first steps toward adulthood and discovers it suits him just fine.