Jauja is a rapturously bizarre movie that resists knowledge. That’s its secret, intoxicating power; the less you understand, the more mesmerized you are.

It’s something of a catastrophe.

While there is some gore late in the film, what makes Backcountry special is the care and patience it invests in its characters and the quiet, haunting tension of its story line.

The Gunman passes the time, but it never quite reconciles its conflicted nature. It’s not smart enough to be a paranoid thriller, nor fun enough to be a blood-soaked action flick.

Insurgent is not a very good movie, but it’s better than it needs to be.

Throughout The Cobbler, Sandler himself seems more invested than he’s been for a long time. But the rest of this ghastly movie lets him down.

This is a deceptively weird movie. There’s always been an immediacy to Jacquot’s visual style; he likes to follow his characters closely, and he gets performances that are energetic but quiet.

Whatever his foibles, An Honest Liar depicts a great American original — a man who has taught a generation of scientists, magicians, and even certain film critics that our senses must be trained to detect the smell of bullshit.

Buoyed by Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, and more, Seymour: An Introduction is lyrical without getting fancy, its director plainly rapt.

The Salvation is visually beautiful, morally down and dirty, and simplistic. But it’s marked by two haunted, quiet performances from stars Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green, who make this otherwise predictable slog worthwhile.

Sort of a Flatliners for the sensitive indie-actor set, The Lazarus Effect is a grimy, dopey, confused thriller that wastes a very likable cast.

Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.

Please don’t bore me by complaining that the characters are “unlikable.” The defense admits that the movie is indefensible. Just breathe in the aroma of decay and howl like a banshee.

The surprise is that, given the number of female college presidents, professors, and students, victims are still so reliably blamed, punishments so reliably weak, and serial offenders (responsible for 91 percent of all sexual assaults) so reliably undisturbed.

With this cast, and such a vivid sense of play, Results manages, in its own subtle, unassuming way, to reinvent the rom-com. It’s enchanting.

It tries to repeat everything the original did, and winds up leaving you stone-faced and depressed. I think there were more laughs in Schindler’s List.

It comes by its emotions honestly and wins you over.

Whatever the style, the point is blunt, reductive: Civilized humans can transform, in an instant, into blindingly destructive forces of nature. Not exactly an original thesis, but as a source of movie fodder, it’s scarily entertaining.

Wit and charm matter, and The DUFF has a good deal of both. The cast will be stars, the gags will be immortal, and you’ll still be watching this movie years from now.

It’s a genre-bending mash-up, a non-vampire vampire movie about class, race, love, and cruelty. It consciously seeks to marry its diverse influences in an attempt to present something between schlock and art house, between passionate gore and urbane chill. It contains multitudes, and not always all that well.

Clement and Waititi are intimate with the conventions of vampire movies and reality TV and must have had a crazy-great time blending the unblendable in the best SCTV tradition. But it’s the absence of camp that I keep coming back to. They scale it down and play it real. They’re undeadpan.

Kingsman is full of elaborately orchestrated violence and acrobatic stunt work, shot in fast, sinewy, CGI-enhanced long takes that push and pull our perspective this way and that. It’s all very silly and not really meant to be taken seriously, but as the story gets more and more brutal, something strange happens: We start to care for these cartoonish characters and this absurd scenario.

The camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano.

The brilliance of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is that, without a shift in tone, the film begins to seem like a tragedy populated by clowns, its males clinging to ancient laws to compensate for feebleness of character.

Fifty Shades of Grey is nowhere near as laughable as you might have feared (or perversely hoped for): It’s elegantly made, and Dakota Johnson is so good at navigating the heroine’s emotional zigs and zags that you want to buy into the whole cobwebbed premise.

This film really doesn’t know what to do with itself, except to show us the difference between Jerry’s happy world and his dark world as if it’s some kind of revelation; it’s the one move the film has, and it does it over and over again.

Seventh Son not only offers no new spin on its bland, by-the-numbers story, it also fails to deliver any generic pleasures; I’m not sure this movie could even keep a young child engaged.

Gibney’s a bit like a kid in an exposé-candy store here, and you can sense him trying to cram as much as he can into the film. Good for him: Going Clear is jaw-dropping. You wouldn’t really want it any other way.

[A] haunting, beautiful movie.

On the whole, this is a good B-movie that hits it modest marks.

The descent into a tepid thriller of sexual jealousy slowly negates the abstract, almost metaphorical quality of this film — and it ultimately undoes the spell cast by that mesmerizing first half.

If Timbuktu has a “takeaway,” it’s a deeply humanist one and so, in this context, political: that there’s no such thing as a monolithic Muslim culture; that the threat is nowhere near as great to Westerners as to the people of Mali, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc.; that ideology is deaf and blind and anti-life; and that cinema (and all art) can blow it to what I’d once have called Timbuktu.

Dope isn’t perfect — it’s got a couple too many endings, and it loses the romantic subplot for a distressingly long time. But it moves with amazing energy, the dialogue and soundtrack and imagery a constant stream of pop-culture references, in-jokes, and digressions.

Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.

The problem with Strange Magic isn’t so much its derivative story as it is the odd, half-complete way it unfolds. You can sense the weird mixture of tones, influences, ideas — as if the whole thing were still in its planning stages.

Actually, the whole movie is grim — drearily so.

In the end, we must lay the badness of Mortdecai at the feet of its star. I envy Depp’s capacity for self-amusement, but it’s a pity he’s so rich and enbubbled that no one dares say to say to him, “Er, Johnny ... this is, er, really very bad.”

Captain Jean-Luc Picard would be enough for one lifetime, but given that Sir Patrick is now living out an exuberant second adolescence as a Brooklyn hipster and throwing himself into parts like these, it’s time to proclaim him another reason to love New York.

Pacino in low doses can be fulsome, and this is 10,000 cc’s of super-concentrated Al and his patented air of electrified stuporousness — which means it’s always on the border between thrilling and insufferable.

Paddington is decidedly, proudly unhip. It’s a lovely, endearing chocolate-box of a movie.

A mostly disposable, occasionally quite funny bromance distinguished at times by its earnestness.

Good enough to make you wish it were better.

If time-travel is your thing, you learn to shrug off inconsistencies. You debate chicken-egg questions over drinks or dope and mull over all the permutations. You graph it. You wish like hell you had a time machine. You savor every discombobulating, ludicrous, thrilling second of Predestination.

Taken 3 is bad enough that it may just end it.

As Li’l Quinquin seesaws between the horrific and the ridiculous, between the playful and profound, between control and chaos, we may find ourselves both frustrated and riveted. Something tells me Bruno Dumont wouldn’t want it any other way.

It’s a dour, drab, dark movie, enlivened by some moderately effective chills in the first half but ultimately undone by its downbeat aimlessness.

I like — as always — what Chandor attempts: not just to denounce capitalism but to explain in detail how people go wrong. But the overcomposed, sedate A Most Violent Year lacks the one thing it most needs: violence.

Adams is lovely and tremulous, but Big Eyes would be even better if Waltz was in the same key.

Wahlberg grows into the part. He may not be right as a precocious, self-loathing intellectual, but he's very much at home playing a dickhead who's gotten in too deep. And as The Gambler becomes less about its protagonist’s dashed intellectualism and more about the gathering danger of his predicament, the film gains power.

If Amy Pascal loses her job over this, it will be an outrage. The only thing about which we disagree is The Interview. She hated it; I think it’s a blast.

As the spiritual subtext took over, I couldn’t help but feel that something essential had been lost. The state overwhelms the individual; so, too, by the end, does this beautiful, strange movie.

Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done. If the narrative is finally unsatisfying, it’s because the last vital chapter — the way in which Zamperini was able to have a life after years of unspeakable cruelty and the dashing of his Olympic hopes — is signaled in a couple of title cards before the closing credits. Unbroken proves that Zamperini could take it and make it — but make what of it?

It’s sensational in the open air and subtle in smaller, enclosed spaces. It has sweep and intimacy. And, yes, we need this movie now.

It’s a cracker­jack piece of filmmaking, a declaration that he’s (Eastwood) not yet ready to be classified as an Old Master, that he can out-Bigelow Kathryn Bigelow. Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In more ways than one, the Iraq occupation is seen through the sight of a high-powered rifle. The movie is scandalously blinkered.

Playing Teddy Roosevelt in these films was nowhere near a highpoint for Williams, but it did speak to his fondness for these CGI-infused kids’ spectacles. His final farewell here is gentle, reflectively and almost unbearably moving. It lends the the film a retroactive grace.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

Romantic comedies involving people moving on after divorce are a dime a dozen, but rarely are they as generous, sharply observed, and humane as Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That.

I’m only half-kidding when I suggest that you see the movie but leave (especially if you have kids) at what’s obviously the end of the first act. You’ll still get the dissonances, ambiguities, and portents of doom, along with much that is pure enchantment. And you won’t leave thinking the movie had been made by the Big Bad Wolf.

Perhaps the most awesome thing in Mr. Turner is how Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope hint at Turner’s paintings in their landscapes — not to make the film look painterly but to suggest what Turner saw before transmuting reality into art.

The new Annie musical starring Jamie Foxx and Quvenzhané Wallis is pretty bad, but let’s be honest: Despite some decent show tunes, the show was pretty bad to begin with, so it’s not worth getting all righteous about the dumb changes.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies feels thoroughly inconsequential — a bloated, portentous mess that, in a just world, should not exist.

As uneven as Ridley Scott’s career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out; the bad news is all the awkward storytelling and botched character interactions we have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Once we do, though, Exodus is a hoot.

The soundtrack is extraordinary. Songs from the Shangri-Las, Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Portishead, and many others drift in and out, sometimes taken up by Strayed as she heads into the scrubby landscape toward a mountain a long way away. The fragmentation is remarkably fluid. The pieces are all of a piece.

This is Kent’s first feature — an astonishing debut. Not perfect, though.

All Penguins of Madagascar wants to do is make you laugh at its silliness. It succeeds.

It puts the same characters into a vaguely familiar situation, with diminishing, tepid returns. They should have just called it 2.

Even with all its elisions and distortions it tells a cracking good story. Turing is played with captivating strangeness by Benedict Cumberbatch.

A truly strange, wondrous beast. It has the playful humor and charm of a children’s movie, but its design is dark and unsettling.

It’s wonderfully inventive filmmaking: Amirpour’s striking compositions borrow from the iconography of both the Western and the horror film — wide, evocative vistas are intercut with dark, tense city streets where shadowy figures follow one another.

A part with this much sobbing, hand-wringing, and mournful gazing into the middle distance could be, in the wrong hands, a laugh riot, but Lawrence’s instincts are so smart that she never goes even a shade overboard. She’s a hell of an actress.

For much of its running time, The Homesman doesn’t quite seem to know where it’s going. But once it actually gets there, it attains a hardscrabble nobility.

Gabe Polsky's ingenious, touching documentary Red Army looks at the other side of this myth, the seemingly faceless, allegedly robotic players who made up the Soviet team. There, Polsky finds a story even more epic and powerful than the Miracle on Ice.

Before I go into the grinding awfulness of Dumb and Dumber To, let’s get one damn thing straight: The original Dumb and Dumber is a clasick.

Beyond the Lights is a deft, gorgeous movie. For all its honesty, it’s never slow, and for all its criticism of the music industry, it’s never finger-wagging.

The movie’s take at times is fascinating. But it’s basically one long, sick joke played at half speed. It’s a ponderous, sick joke.

One of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

It’s a strange spectacle: a horror film that spends as much time dismantling suspense as it does building it.

Therein lies part of the dissonance with this often-wonderful, deceptively strange movie. You could get emotional whiplash watching it.

If The Theory of Everything cut as deeply as Redmayne's performance, it might be on the level of "My Left Foot." But there are so damn many problems, easy to ignore at first in the elation of watching Redmayne and the gossamer Felicity Jones as his future wife, Jane, but impossible to shake off in the last third.

In his florid sci-fi opera Interstellar, Christopher Nolan aims for the stars, and the upshot is an infinite hoot — its dumbness o’erleaps dimensional space. It’s hugely entertaining, though.

After a few minutes you know everything about Louis you’re going to know; the only surprise in Nightcrawler is the level of grotesqueness it achieves. There’s more insight (and entertainment) in an average sketch from the old SCTV series; I kept imagining Joe Flaherty’s horror host Count Floyd climbing out of his coffin and chanting, “Oooh, that Louis, he’s veh-ry skerrrr-y, kiddies — ahwoooooooo!”

I’ve now seen Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film twice, and I think I might be one more viewing away from finally being able to say what the hell it’s about. That sounds like a condemnation, but a film you need to see again should be a film you want to see again, and the oblique beauty of Goodbye to Language, shot in 3-D, has a tractor-beam-like pull.

We basically know where Laggies is headed; the film is a soft, straight, easy pitch down the middle, story-wise. And it’s a light movie: You won’t get a particularly profound look at adults who act like kids from it.

There aren’t too many ingenious new concepts in today’s horror and fantasy films, but I’ll be damned if Horns doesn’t come close, at least at first.

Evocative, gorgeous, occasionally maddening film.

Being a puckish Swedish, the writer-director Ruben Ostland slips into a tone that makes Force Majeure almost seem like a deadpan — frozen — comedy.

Ouija is confident, meat-and-potatoes horror, and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.

John Wick is a violent, violent, violent film, but its artful splatter is miles away from the brutality of "Taken" or the gleeful gore of "The Equalizer." It’s a beautiful coffee-table action movie.

The hotel scenes go on a tad long, but what holds us is that we’re right in the room as history is being made — with the guy, the actual guy, soon to be notorious all over the world.

This is a film full of unremarkable compromises — the kind that result in a bland film rather than a bad one.

The film is called Dear White People, but it might as well be called Dear Everybody. It’s hilarious, and just about everyone will wince with recognition at some point in the film.

Watching Ali and Cole (and, of course, Stewart and Maadi), we find ourselves wishing that they would genuinely get the chance to better understand each other. Do they, by the end? We’re not sure. On that score, Camp X-Ray remains admirably open-ended.

In The Best of Me, the melodrama feels so hurried and half-baked that the end result isn’t just disappointing. It’s borderline infuriating.

A central figure who’s all bad is even more boring than one who’s all good. He has no dramatic stature. He’s a case study. The audience should be paid to listen up.

It’s a potentially grisly setup, but the actual movie makes death look downright fun.

Magical and melancholy, The Tale of Princess Kaguya comes from the other mad genius of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, who co-founded the beloved Japanese animation company alongside the great Hayao Miyazaki back in 1985.

The revulsion that Steven Spielberg maintained to the end of "Saving Private Ryan" is nowhere in sight — Ayer betrays his own values with a climax that’s like a hack gamer’s recreation of Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch." The final encounter between Ellison and a German soldier is meant to offer humanist balance, but in context it’s ludicrous. You can’t believe Ayer thought he could get away with it.

Birdman is the very definition of a tour de force, and Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the (enjoyable) overacting—the performers know this is a theatrical exercise and obviously relish the chance to Do It Big. But what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not so fresh.