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.