The story doesn’t feel dramatized. It feels pitched.

Fruitvale Station will rock your world — and, if the life of Oscar Grant means anything, compel you to work to change it.

Despicable Me 2 does have plenty of what made the first film so entertaining — its wedding of James Bond–like gadgetry and visual invention with goofy slapstick, and the dizzying fun had with shrink rays, piranha guns, elaborate evil spaceships, and the like.

Appalling in ways that you could never have anticipated. The movie mixes mismatched-buddy high jinks with scenes of carnage.

In Redemption, too, Statham brings real conviction to the part of a broken man who winds up breaking himself even more. Look beyond the generic shell, and this wildly imperfect movie appears to have a rare soul lurking inside it.

Of all the dumb megabudget "Die Hard"–like action pictures of the last few years (including that other White House Goes Boom movie, "Olympus Has Fallen"), this is both the most entertaining and the most inviting of viewers' input.

The Heat is kind of a mess, but it’s a funny mess.

It could easily have veered into opportunistic melodrama. But the director’s focused restraint and Suliman’s wonderfully understated performance keep us grounded.

Without a character, he’s (Pitt) back to that soft, appraising, Robert Redford Jr. stare, his mouth half open as if he’s about to speak but plainly with nothing on his mind apart from, “This is what a movie star looks like without any lines.” The ghouls are having deeper thoughts.

Perhaps only Pixar could give us such a rare beast: a delightful disappointment.

It’s an unshowy, quietly intense drama with grace notes in every scene — and a hellish punch.

The movie is gorgeous, mesmerizing, poetic; the lyricism actually heightened by harsh jets of gore.

There are no bad guys, and no real violence. Horror fiends looking for cheap thrills may be disappointed. But those with a flair for the offbeat might find themselves unnerved and riveted.

Vehicle 19 sets up a fascinating conceit for itself, and then loses interest in delivering on it. It just wants to get to the cool car chase, but by the time it does, we’ve stopped caring.

Some of that fun is infectious. For a while. Maybe 45 minutes. But when actors look as if they’re having a better time than you are, the buzz wears off fast. You turn into a wallflower at an especially obnoxious party.

The movie isn’t dead on arrival, like Snyder’s over-reverent "Watchmen." But it’s pleasure-free.

Apart from scenes with Leslie Mann as a mother who propagates the wisdom of The Secret (she’d be too heavy-handed for a Disney Channel sitcom), The Bling Ring is enjoyable. And it’s always easy on the eyes.

You gasp at the ecstatic convergence of lung power and spirit.

Were Shyamalan and Smith deliberately invoking the terror — now omnipresent in urban African-American communities — of lethal asthma attacks in children? I’m not sure how I feel about something so real and so wrenching in the context of a Grade D (unfit for human habitation) sci-fi picture like After Earth.

The magnetic Alexander Skarsgard is the leader, Benji, a soft-spoken dreamboat, ever-direct but with a haunted quality, with something in reserve. Ellen Page gives a Lili Taylor–worthy performance (high praise) as a suspicious, abrasive young woman.

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

Leterrier’s film is the kind that doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny: The more you know about it, the more befuddled you’ll be.

The driving in the film is a thing of beauty.

For all its attempts at wonder and spectacle and play, Epic is mostly a slog.

Downey found a way to channel his working-class audience’s anger against liberal shibboleths and not incidentally take down both his dad and his surrogate dad — Teddy ­Kennedy. It’s a ­riveting Oedipal tragedy.

The movie’s singular acting triumph is Nathan Fillion’s Constable Dogberry, one of Shakespeare’s simpler buffoons made poetic by understatement. Fillion speaks softly, with ­uninflected sincerity, a brilliant departure from the standard gregarious-­hambone Dogberry. It’s his insularity — his imperviousness to the interjections of more observant people — that makes him such a touchingly credible clown.

Turgid, unfunny catastrophe.

By the time this twisty, probing, altogether enthralling movie hits its final notes, the crimes against the Constitution and humanity have been upstaged by personal demons. Which is our woe as well.