Simien focuses too much on the character played by his star, Williams, which seems a mistake. Scenes are underscored with classical music chestnuts, a trite way of suggesting “academia.” And the ending is an eye-roller.

The script and Simmons, known for TV’s “The Closer” and as tantrum-tossing editor J. Jonah Jameson in “Spider-Man,” make Fletcher a monster, and then look for ways of explaining him.

It’s just competent, light entertainment.

Murray and writer-director Theodore Melfi play us like a music box, manipulating and charming our socks off even as the Vincent for whom the film is named curses, gambles, drinks and cheats — all in front of an impressionable 10-year old.

Charles Dance is the Nosferatu-garbed monster in the cave, a balding, toothy villain in the great tradition of British vampires — Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale among them. The moment he shows up, all shadowy menace and prophecy, “Dracula” gets interesting.

A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.”

A slick, upbeat Church of Latter Day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.”

You’re Not You fails to bring us the fear or the tears that this story warrants. It sticks in the mind no longer than it takes you to change shirts after that ice bucket dunking.

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.

Catch Hell has physical torture and sexually explicit mind games. It has a star who seems resigned to his fate and willing to give up and savage bumpkins straight out of “Deliverance” ready to take out their hatred of Hollywood and Hollywood values on him. That description gives this simple, ferociously feral thriller more depth than it deserves.

Renner’s performance — beginning with bluster and descending into twitchy paranoia — sells it and makes us fret for every “messenger” suddenly the target of the spotlight himself.

It’s inoffensive, unless you take umbrage at the idea that the only people who know not to steal are True Believers and all that keeps society from an instant meltdown are the Faithful.

Color City is thin gruel, even by recent, weaker Pixar standards.

Here’s the sort of scruffy action comedy that suits the post-box office-draw careers of one-time hipster John Cusack and fading action star Thomas Jane. It covers the costs of a fun few weeks of working vacation in Australia and provides a few on-screen laughs along the way.

Rambles a bit and telegraphs its ending. But its earnestness in reminding us of this story and just what America represents to the world’s rising tide of refugees, and why, makes it a winner, a valuable history lesson wrapped in a feel-good bow.

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.

It’s good, but we’ve come to expect more from the guy who gave us “Fight Club” and “The Social Network.” This is more on a par with “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The calculated shocks feel like a movie we’ve seen before, though at least in this case, that’s not true.

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

The Liberator may be a Cliff Notes version of South American history, but Ramirez breathes life into it and makes us care.

Hector might have been better off staying at home and reading a book, which also pretty much applies to the audience, in this case.

Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.

Through it all, Washington’s stillness is emphasized, so much so that the film slows down just to make sure we appreciate the presence and the talent behind it.

Start to finish, it’s a delight.

It’s a sentimental, sometimes moving affair... It is also at times a reminder of how hard it is to manage a decent Civil War movie on a limited budget, and how hard it is, even today, to tell a Civil War tale untainted by revisionism.

There’s no humor and no pathos. The Cuckoo-Clock Heart, pretty as it is, lacks any heart at all.

The Notebook makes for a grim but utterly fascinating parable.

Maybe Jimi: All is By My Side is as good a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic as we’ll ever get, at least so long as there are legal entanglements strangling the late guitar god’s legacy.

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