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

Is the movie good? It’s hard to be objective. The plotting is clunky and nonsensical, but Abrams and crew bombarded me into happiness. More than that, they made me feel so special for getting the in-jokes.

If all this sounds outrageous, and extreme … don’t worry, it’s not. Provocation coupled with ineptitude doesn’t reveal the ugliness of humanity; it simply reveals the ugliness of the filmmakers themselves.

Pleasant, if inane – helped along by a likable cast that’s clearly having fun.

You can find fault with virtually every scene in Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby — and yet in spite of all the wrong notes, Fitzgerald (and the excess he was writing about and living) comes through. The Deco extravagance of the big party scenes is enthralling. Luhrmann throws money at the screen in a way that is positively Gatsby-like, walloping you intentionally and un- with the theme of prodigal waste.

The problem might actually be (gasp) Michael Shannon himself — shocking, because he’s one of our greatest actors — who is only half-right for this film’s portrait of Kuklinski.

So Polley has gone meta — exuberantly, entertainingly, with all her heart.

The film is wrenching all the same, and subtle enough in its portrait of the four major grown-up characters to qualify as Jamesian.

At least this time "Goopy" Paltrow gets to perform a few superheroics herself, along with enduring some heavy-duty torture that’s bound to please her haters — for whom the sight of the top of her face being peeled off in "Contagion" was like Christmas in July.

The Big Wedding isn’t terrible. De Niro is actually pretty good here — the script gives him plenty of raunchy one-liners, and, while they’re mostly lame, he delivers with conviction, which counts for something nowadays.

Pain & Gain gives you a rush while at the same time making you queasy about how you’re getting off.

Oblivion is like that movie-within-a-movie: Everything in it feels 100 percent inauthentic. That vibe, as it happens, turns out to be intentional. But when the humans arrive, it’s still a narcotic.

The Lords of Salem is gloomy, lacks variety, and is not without its flat patches. Heidi is an increasingly dullish heroine, and in the first 15 minutes you’ll know what’s going to happen in the next 80.

It’s hard to believe Nichols thinks he can get away with all this and harder still to believe he does. It’s the quality of the attention that he brings — his focus — that makes his work so engrossing.

Helgeland’s epic about Jackie Robinson’s first year in Major League Baseball is uneven — often exciting, and just as often shallow and ham-handed — but if there’s one thing to which it remains true, it's that the almighty American greenback and the all-American athlete are the great destroyers of bigotry.

To the Wonder feels like generalized woo-woo—and self-parody.

The Angels’ Share is a rare upbeat Ken Loach comedy — and a wee dram of bliss. Set in Scotland, it has a blessedly funny overture.

As a piece of suspense, it ain’t exactly "North by Northwest," or even "Three Days of the Condor"; the awkward attempts at chase scenes make it clear that Redford the actor, who has always given off a slightly lugubrious air, has lost a step or two physically.

The passing of the torch from Raimi to Alvarez is not a momentous occasion. In the end, who really cares? Five years from now, will you want to watch this bloody $14 million extravaganza or Raimi’s shoestring original, which was Amateur Hour elevated to pop art?

As amusing as the movie is, I think in the end that Ascher misses the labyrinth for the trees.

To like Trance as much as I did, you have to revel in the senseless showmanship — in watching Boyle indulge his taste for cinematic flight, in this case teasing you with the old “Is this real or a dream?” number so artfully that you don’t care that much about the answer.

I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything.

That G.I. Joe silliness the first film embraced has been steamrolled into tentpole flatness this time around. It’s not stoopid anymore, but just plain stupid.

The Croods isn’t particularly smart, but it has just enough wit to keep us engaged and just enough speed to keep us from feeling restless.

Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.

The segments are essentially monodramas, so sketchily written that the big moments feel less like recognizable human behavior than recognizable screenwriter overreaching.

Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine’s calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney’s direction.

That first half of Admission is a lot for an actress to overcome. It’s not just very bad, it’s very fast, as if someone had overwound the metronome. Fairly naturalistic lines are delivered at the pace of screwball zingers — which stubbornly refuse to zing.