The prolific Patrice Leconte takes a break from mythic, life-and-death scenarios with My Best Friend, a sitcom that threatens to take a rockier emotional path before swerving back into the comfy zone. It’s better when it’s threatening, but Leconte knows his audience.

This isn’t to say that the humans in The Commuter act anything like real people; the train is the most realistic performer here, but you could do a lot worse.

It’s a cheap-thrill movie, and on that score it mostly delivers.

There’s nothing close to the shock of seeing Blade Runner’s Tokyo-influenced futuristic dystopia — a dismal mix of high-tech and corrosion — for the first time. I thought it was okay.

Filled with expertly composed sequences undone by the protagonist’s relentless observations about the meaninglessness of existence, the movie feels like an attempt to highlight its own emptiness.

When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Devos is especially fine as a woman whose inner solitude carries depth charges.

Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.

Dicks: The Musical is never as outrageous as it clearly would like to be . . . But its determination to avoid any trace of self-importance or greater meaning is admirable in its own right — embracing the freedom to just be ridiculous.

It’s hard not to gather up these move complicated moments and wish for more of them — to think about how much better it would have been if she had gotten to play Garland as a flesh-and-blood person and not as the saint of suffering for showbiz.

Although the script is based on Gauguin’s own writing, the film presents him as such a gloomy Gus that he might have swapped souls with his onetime pal Van Gogh.

The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.

The mournful comedy To Dust has a sicko premise, but scrupulously sicko.

First Steps certainly has a few potentially provocative ideas rattling around in its tulip-chair-and-tiki-bar brain, but it’s too afraid to explore them in any depth.

The movie’s most exciting moment comes when Weldon realizes that she has been played — that in helping turn the tribes against the Dawes Act, she has won the battle and lost the war, since the U.S. would now have cause to attack. That’s the moment when Woman Walks Ahead should get really good but turns, instead, into a weeper.

Talk to Her affects some people very deeply, while others, like me, find it high-grade kitsch.

For all its indirection, Meek's Cutoff is an utterly conventional film. But it's worth asking whether Reichardt's drowsy rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage add up to something illuminating. And here's where she earns at least some of those plaudits she's been getting.

Part of the film is a crackerjack courtroom drama. What’s dull is the trajectory. The Insult is so schematic that it shrinks to the level of a painfully scrupulous newspaper editorial. Which is fine — for a newspaper editorial.

Fanning’s controlled presence is ideal for a tale of Victorian repression. But as the film becomes one of quiet liberation, it needs more than her cool reserve. It needs passion — even if it’s of the slow-boiling kind — and I’m not sure that’s there.

Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starts off with a rich, surreal premise, and for much of its running time, it mixes playful, cringe-comic energy with an undercurrent of existential anxiety. But it eventually manages to undo much of what made it so tantalizing by turning metaphor and subtext into a more narrow-minded satire.

In the movie's best moment, an American sniper takes out a bad guy by a pier while a pair of hands reaches out of the water to grab the body so it doesn't make a splash and alert the other baddies.

It's a sinuous, bittersweet odyssey, and although the filmmaking lacks finesse, the actors, especially Mandvi, with his bright, sorrowful beauty, and the great Om Puri, who plays Ganesh's father-in-law with an infernal crankiness, are always worth watching.

You’re either someone who didn't like American Idol at all or you’re someone who loved it and and believe the concept could only be improved upon with the addition of talking cartoon animals.

It’s a pageant, as they say — a bunch of cameos and funny situations all sort of held together with a bare bones plot and some nods to the Christmas spirit.

The movie should be seen with a large, responsive audience--the better to live with it in the moment instead of worrying about where it’s going.

The whole movie is a good try.

Mistress America is hit-and-miss. It’s not as burdened by blame as other Baumbach films — Gerwig leavens him. But it’s labored.

The battle scenes are loud and jangly and dissonant enough to unnerve you — they work. But I’d like to see a congressional committee grill Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan about what’s going on half the time.

In the hands of "Iris" and "Notes on a Scandal" director Richard Eyre, McEwan’s story is stagy and austere, taking place in gleaming flats and spotless courtrooms, like a Nancy Meyers movie with more court wigs. It’s a wan, sapped atmosphere, making the life, faith, and literal blood of a 17-year-old boy all the more stark a line to run through it.

A sentimental, feel-good look at a family in mourning, but Jake Gyllenhaal rises above the clichéd script with a brilliantly creative performance.

The plot-engine joke — that Schumer’s character Renee hits her head and wakes up convinced she’s gorgeous — is nothing if not well-intentioned, but veers into cheap and easy enough times to be misinterpreted. When it’s good, though, and when Schumer’s fully locked into her take-no-prisoners charm assault, it’s pretty undeniably delightful stuff.

The cast makes Late Night With the Devil more than watchable, but they also raise our hopes for something better. While the talk-show approach makes perfect structural and narrative sense, it also drains the film of suspense, as we pretty much know where everything is going.

After a while, the film feels more like a cute conceit that hasn’t really been developed further. It’s intriguing, and very well-acted, but empty.

The combination of childlike glee and grown-up precision is a wonder. The movie actually earns the right to exist, which is no mean feat.

It’s a performance that suggests the most interesting stretch of Affleck’s career as an actor is still to come.

The pretty good thriller Lockout peaks with its first shot...When the camera moves and the plot kicks in - as it must - the movie loses its witty economy. Things get cluttered.

Please Stand By is thoughtful in how it dramatizes the consequences of autism. The movie is a little stiff, though.

Everything unfolds elegantly, understatedly. The movie is a Grisham in Le Carre clothing.

Hunter Killer won’t win any awards for originality, but it may win a couple for the brazenness with which it stacks clichés upon clichés. Basically, it’s "Crimson Tide" meets "Lone Survivor" meets "Under Siege" meets a Russian variation on "Olympus Has Fallen," with a bit of "Geostorm" thrown in. At least three of those movies are pretty good, so the overall math works in the film’s favor.

Crowd-pleasing cliché wins the day at the buzzer. But it’s not a blowout; the more singular side of the film keeps it close enough.

Fortunately, most of the malarkey in this movie seems intentional in the same Sunday-afternoon-serial way as the Indiana Jones movies (some of which Johnston worked on).

The problem with Joe Bell isn’t that it’s telling Joe’s story; that’s an important (and tragic) tale that should be told. The problem is that it fails to also tell Jadin’s story — even after it makes the point that Jadin’s journey is inextricable from Joe’s.

The Beekeeper takes a Mad Libs approach to moviemaking.

The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps.

The Highwaymen never quite manages to conjure a changing world, and as a result its more interesting ideas are left blowing in the wind. But as an excuse to spend some time with Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson doing what Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson do, it’ll do just fine.

Sam Rockwell plays Barris with a hipster’s shimmy that’s creepily effective -- The problem with making a movie about a hollow man is that, when things start to get heavy, you’re stuck with nothingness at the core.

It’s a subdued, at times even intimate, old-guy action flick. And that streamlined, bare-bones quality serves the film well. Mostly.

If you can forget what it’s saying, Divergent is fairly entertaining.

Horizon feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently rolling into place, carefully delineating characters and offering telltale glimpses into their lives. It’s rich in period detail and filled with majestic vistas that seem to match the expanse of its story. But this can be a curse, too, at least while the film only exists as this one installment.

Its lead protagonists and their endless reserve of raw, bittersweet chemistry are Kahiu’s greatest asset.

The Kings of Summer is far from original, but it’s also far stranger than it seems, in ways both good and bad.

The best scene is when Hellboy and Abe get drunk and sing out raucously, which after "Hancock" suggests a trend toward superhero alcoholism.

As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.

It would be easy to dismiss as 100 percent ersatz if it didn't rekindle at least some of the old excitement - and if the magic of Spielberg's older movies didn't filter through, like light from a distant galaxy.

Woody Allen’s philosophical thriller Irrational Man is irrationally entertaining. It shouldn’t work. It’s laughably plotted and sketchily written. Intellectually, it’s jejune — or at least high in jejunosity. But if you can manage to keep your eye-rolling in check, you might find yourself getting into it.

The best parts of What Happens Later are when it lets its characters just be people who still want to find love and find some of its warmth in the embers of this long-ago relationship. It’s too bad there aren’t more of those moments.

Though worth seeing, should be better than it is.

This time around, Harry Potter has more to worry about than the Dark Arts -- though parts of The Chamber of Secrets are spellbinding, he seems to be suffering from a bit of sequelitis.

It’s no lost masterpiece but it is funny and showcases a side of Brando we didn’t get to see often: slapstick funnyman.

Bello is an excellent actress and makes Sophie’s anguish credible, although she can’t rise above the material.

Ant-Man isn’t much more than pleasant (Peyton Reed directs limply), but anything Marvel that doesn’t feel Marvel-ish makes me smile.

It’s the worst movie McQueen’s made, which by wider standards means that it’s still not bad. But Blitz’s admirable intentions consistently outstrip its execution, which is clunky and full of narrative artifices required to keep its angel-faced lead on the run from danger and from the authorities who intend to send him back to the train station.

It’s absorbing for a long while, at least half its two-hour running time — an evocatively photographed soap opera with actors who are impossibly gorgeous and yet human-looking — but it goes on and on, piling on twists, adding devices so clunky they’d have embarrassed most nineteenth-century problem-dramatists, refusing to jell despite the actors’ prodigious suffering.

Despite its exuberant perversities, Waters’s take on erotomania is almost quaint.

The new 9/11 movies aim to rekindle feelings that most of us have, by necessity, moved beyond. But there’s more than one way to move beyond, as suggested by the spottily affecting ensemble psycho-comedy The Great New Wonderful.

As a director, Coen commits comedy’s most cardinal sin: He gets between us and the performers.

There is absolutely nothing original in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which just goes to show that you don’t need originality to be effective.

Leconte films in an austere yet invigorated style; the action never settles into stiff tableaux.

The first Allen picture since "Sweet and Lowdown" that doesn't leave a bad odor in its wake.

What Primate lacks in terms of narrative complication, it makes up for with cinematic smarts, as director Roberts ably uses form to build suspense, conveying plot points via images instead of dialogue and refreshingly avoiding the usual jump-scare clichés.

The problem is that the film gets too wrapped up in the myth to tell an effective behind-the-scenes tale.

Fry's saving grace is his love of actors. The younger and less familiar performers are more than adequate, but it's the older guard that shines. Broadbent is marvelously rummy.

Now it feels almost quaint, like a throwback. You watch it and, despite all the au courant techno geekery on display, you feel like you’ve stepped into a time capsule. It’s a nice feeling at first. If only the movie were better.

Just like the families of the victims in the film who feel nauseous at the prospect of making a celebrity out of Breivik and spreading his toxic ideology, I feel a little queasy at the chilling, captivating portrayal of him by Anders Danielsen Lie. I feel uneasy being “captivated” by any of this, period.

A frightening, infuriating, yet profoundly compassionate documentary about the indoctrination of children by the Evangelical right.

Two biographical documentaries in, and it still feels like we’re in need of a Houston film that digs into her music first, and the hows and whys of its enduring power.

Its beats are familiar, its outrage muted, its story diffuse. But then, in its final moments, it springs one brilliant, devastating sucker punch that’s so hard to shake it nearly saves the mostly humdrum movie that preceded it.

Writer-director Billy Ray is so eager to be fair-minded about everything and everyone that you can't help thinking he's a patsy, too. If he directed a movie of Othello, he'd probably try to make us feel warm and fuzzy about poor, misunderstood Iago.

Shyamalan wants to be the metaphysical poet of movies, but he's dangerously close to becoming its O. Henry. The best surprise ending he could give us in his next movie would be no surprise ending at all.

The jumping around is as deft as a hippo in a tutu, and the director, Gavin Hood, never finds a rhythm.

Frances Ha is an irritant when it lingers. When Baumbach’s touch is more glancing — when he cuts before the humiliation — it sings.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s haunting, a sort of one-stop shop for a range of cultural anxieties — plague, environmental catastrophe, big government threatening the sanctity of home and family.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol throws around a lot of intriguing ideas in this film, and even though his ambitions are more expansive than his talent, he's managed to come up with something that credibly resembles the shape of things to come, Hollywood-style.

Watching Spike Lee’s decent but unmemorable remake of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture "Oldboy," I kept trying to figure out why he’d done it.

Pretty much the whole movie is a series of poses, static and uninvolving, except for cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s lighting, which makes everything look convincingly Vermeer-ish. I’d like to see what he could do with Rembrandt.

It's an entertainingly cynical small movie. Aaron Sorkin's dialogue tumbles out so fast it's as if the characters want their brains to keep pace with their processors; they talk like they keyboard, like Fincher directs, with no time for niceties.

Violet wants to sing. Does Violet want to be a pop star? This is posed as the the driving question of the film, but nothing about Fanning’s performance suggests a desire for much of anything.

The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean nightmares, and Aster is very ambitious and very blurry.

As a result, Jarhead is utterly predictable (boys endure tough training; boys encounter another culture and are baffled), studded with first-rate performances.

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.

You can believe this man (Jones) left his family because he felt born into the wrong tribe. Now if only he had picked the right movie . . .

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

The tasteless bombardment that is Les Misérables would, under most circumstances, send audiences screaming from the theater, but the film is going to be a monster hit and award winner, and not entirely unjustly.

The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.

Last Rites comes from Michael Chaves, the same director as that last film, but returns the series to what it does best, which is dealing with a supernaturally infested home.

There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.

The best new addition to the corp is Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler.

A scantily clad revenge memoir.