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.