The movie even makes night-vision-goggle scares more irksome, a rare feat.

Riseborough once again transforms herself dramatically, expanding her role as best she can. But neither the hesitant script — adapted by Tom Bradby from his own novel — nor the sluggish tempo give her enough support.

Built on dry one-liners, off-kilter timing and self-conscious nostalgia, The Kings of Summer seems expressly designed to delight quirk-loving Sundance audiences.

As the cracklingly cool The East shows, they’re the real deal. It’s not easy to make a thriller where brains and guts are so clearly in cahoots.

For a while, Leterrier does manage to conjure up a little bit of magic between all these charming actors. And then, presto: Just like that, it’s gone.

Summer 2013 has its first bomb, and sadly, it’s landed right on Will Smith.

There probably is an interesting story in Van’s rags-to-riches tale. But all we get in this extended publicity stunt is clichéd filmmaking, stilted performances and a self-aggrandizing hero.

Plimpton recorded many of these adventures in books that are well worth seeking out. But if you don’t have enough time to do so, Bean and Poling have assembled a delightful cheat sheet.

The vastly divergent paths of Assange and Manning make up the most fascinating aspects of this relentlessly compelling film.

Even young would-be botanists will find this charmless animated adventure as exciting as watching grass grow.

Delpy and Hawke, who’ve invested this trilogy with the fine shadings of life lived, do extraordinary things with small moments.

“Let’s go for a little ride,” teases Vin Diesel as Dom Toretto at the start of Fast & Furious 6, an amusingly mild suggestion that’s also the only moment of understatement in two dizzyingly high-octane hours.

Galifianakis, though, is the key here. Able to smash a scene to smithereens with the simplest of lines, the hirsute comic is as unpredictable as ever, yet takes director Todd Phillips’ bait to up the stakes.

Aiming for lightness but landing with a thud, Frances Ha is a well-meaning blunder. Director Noah Baumbach’s ode to Brooklyn twentysomething life is a flibbertigibbet fable that, like a self-absorbed flirt you meet at a party, grates on the nerves despite being easy on the eyes.

There’s no explaining the presence of Guy Pearce in Pauline Chan’s sappy, atonal family drama. But it’s easy enough to understand why he looks so uncomfortable throughout.

Sokolinski, a French pop singer better known at home as Soko, is fully in tune with Winocour’s sharp vision. Her intense, almost accusatory turn feels like the opposing image of Keira Knightley’s intellectual neurosis in 2011’s similarly themed “A Dangerous Method.” Where that film found some lightness within the dark, this one drags an historic darkness into the light.

Most people can only watch the same movie so many times. But Philipp Stölzl is clearly hopeful that when you’re done with “Taken” (and “Taken 2”), you’ll want more of the same. Should that be the case, this undistinguished but decent knockoff is ready to satisfy.

Black Rock is as dingy and dirty as the genre thrillers it appears to want to one-up. All it does, though, is bring everyone down.

The result is a stunningly nervy sequel that vaporizes any worries that Abrams’ terrific 2009 reboot was a fluke.

It would be nice to say that Rourke, at least, offers a reason to see this junky thriller, about an American agent who gets involved in an Indonesian terrorist plot. But as entertaining as it is to watch him adopt a strange accent and swan around in sarongs as an eccentric jewel thief, it’s also a little depressing. The paycheck cannot possibly be worth it.

Directors Maiken Baird and Michelle Major may have begun this documentary with the intention of profiling two of the most successful siblings in sports. But any reality TV viewer knows that bad behavior is always more compelling than likability. So this movie’s title becomes, perhaps to the filmmakers’ own surprise, a little misleading.

Luke Evans, whose higher-profile work includes “Clash of the Titans,” this summer’s “Fast & Furious 6” and the next installments of “The Hobbit,” smolders embarrassingly. But he shouldn’t be embarrassed. In the shadows, that could be anyone.

A lot of Aftershock predictably involves screaming or shock cuts, and the movie features a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Selena Gomez.

Feiffer sometimes gets snagged on the look-at-me nature of her meta-performance, veering from pathological to pathetic, and not always in the best way.

This would-be satire earns an E for Effort for wanting to be to the advertising world what “Being There” was to television.

Director Tina Gordon Chism, who also wrote the screenplay, seems to have relied pretty strongly on Perry for guidance. In particular, she rejects any notions of subtlety, either in the comedy or the weirdly heavy-handed messages about masculinity.

The film is a mystery uncovered like a detective story, wrapped in a love letter.

Luhrmann piles on one shiny distraction after another. But amid all the seductively gaudy excess, DiCaprio finds both the heart and hurt buried within one of literature’s everlasting enigmas.