Smartphone apps don’t particularly lend themselves well to political allegory or satire. But that’s precisely what the makers of this fitfully amusing animated adaptation of the once-popular game seem to be fruitlessly attempting.

Director Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”) is masterful with arresting imagery set in a dystopian spin on the ’70s; less so with a compelling narrative.

I tried squinting. Didn’t work. I turned my head slightly to the side. Uh-uh. No matter what I tried, I could not, cannot and never will be able to see Ewan McGregor as Jesus Christ.

Cross “Dog Day Afternoon’’ with “The Big Short’’ and throw in a dash of “Network’’ and you’ve got Money Monster, a clever financial thriller with comic overtones that’s a solid investment of your time thanks to stellar work by George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

A so-so heist movie whose dirty-cop character’s personality must have been described in the screenplay as “Nicolas Cage-esque.” Fortunately, Cage was available.

It is engrossing, even funny at times, but it is a bit too jagged in execution to properly build to its tragic climax.

Davies’ quiet, painterly film largely eschews musical cues that would heighten its emotional impact, but as it is, Sunset Song is captivating in its sincerity.

Loaded with dazzling ideas that don’t ultimately pull together.

The sharpest, least sentimental and possibly the best version of Austen yet.

Those People also suffers, perhaps, from a lack of timing; Kuhn’s group of one-percenter millennials harkens back to early Whit Stillman or, more recently, “Gossip Girl.”

Good intentions aside, it fails to resonate, though there is a certain voyeuristic intrigue to attempting to figure out how much of this toxic stuff is drawn from the real Reiners.

Elstree 1976 is an amazing experience. I’m shocked that a documentary revisiting the making of “Star Wars” could be this boring.

The remarkable performances from the central trio are what carries the film.

It’s only a matter of time before someone turns Louise Osmond’s crowd-pleasing documentary, about people in a working-class Welsh mining village invading the snobbish “sport of kings,” gets turned into “The Full Monty” on four hooves.

After the first two “Captain America” entries, the finest comic-book movies of the last five years, this one is disappointing. The story doesn’t make sense.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino draws terrific performances from his four stars.

Small fry will learn an important lesson taking in the recycled storylines of Ratchet & Clank: Like nearly all recycling, it’s garbage.

A funny, shambling buddy comedy that mostly serves as a vehicle for our two stars to do what they do best, which is riff on race and pop culture.

Patel has his most rewarding role since “Slumdog.’’

Blair has a colorless, weirdly teenage delivery that doesn’t convey Hesse’s vivid, brilliant personality. It is odd to watch a documentary where the subject becomes more interesting when she is discussed by other people.

The cinematic equivalent of a paper plate with macaroni and glitter haphazardly glued onto it, Mother’s Day is a film only its creators could love (and even they must be having some misgivings).

Yet merely “playing with concepts” doesn’t quite add up to a film, and The Family Fang, adapted from Kevin Wilson’s novel, feels like an extended therapy session.

To describe this as a movie about a mediocre businessman biding his time before an appointment probably makes it sound more exciting than it is.

The whole endeavor seems like a bad idea badly executed, and one can only imagine that Simone, a fierce advocate of black pride and empowerment, would be aghast at this cheesy rendition of the later years of her life.

Elvis & Nixon is the funniest Nixon movie since 1999’s forgotten “Dick.” That comedy was a Watergate-era fantasy, but as incredible as it seems, this one is based more or less directly on fact. A photograph of the meeting is the most requested image at the National Archives.

Sarandon gets great support from a cast that includes J.K. Simmons as a laid-back retired cop who pursues Minnie, and Jason Ritter as the ex-boyfriend whom Minnie desperately plots to reunite with her daughter.

An English-language film from Italy, Tale of Tales toys with the ogres, princesses and crones of classic fairy tales to almost no dramatic effect, albeit with lots of sex and gore. Imagine the Brothers Grimm’s cousins Tyler and Jake writing for a late-night slot on Cinemax and you’ll get the idea.

The movie was always going to be a record of another unique New York institution, making way for another glass box.

This incoherent screenplay seems to have been written by a roomful of the gorilla-like trolls who show up in the movie at one point.

An Eye for Beauty star Éric Bruneau proves to be a haircut in search of a man, which makes him ideal for this vapid adultery drama that delivers the character depth of your average spread in Architectural Digest.

Probably no studio mulls its “brands” as obsessively as Disney does, and The Jungle Book is very much a careful, calculated brand extension, not a reinvention. But that’s just fine: What better lesson to teach kids than respect for what came before you?

Carney’s film (unlike his disappointing previous effort “Begin Again”) is mad, irrepressible youth incarnate, by turns as exuberant as “The Commitments” and (nearly) as heartfelt as “Once.”

French director Stéphane Brizé films in lingering takes, with Lindon in almost every shot, and the actor is wonderful, able to convey Thierry’s conflict even when his back is to the camera.

A well worn trope that’s tough to elevate beyond eye-roll level.

Turn off your frontal lobe, and you just might enjoy it.

Patrick Stewart has a blast playing against type as a soft-spoken white supremacist holding a punk rock band as his temporary prisoners in Jeremy Saulnier’s nicely crafted, low-budget comedy-thriller.

A cut above the season’s other belated sequels like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2’’ and “Zoolander 2.’’

McCarthy shines when loosely riffing, but the plot tightens around her like a vise.

Christopher Walken is in top form as Paul Lombard, an aging romantic crooner.

It’s breathtaking. It’s dazzling. It’s world-altering, is what it is. For the first time ever, a movie has actually done it. Hardcore Henry has precisely replicated the experience of watching someone else play a video game.

The film works to rescue Arendt and her phrase “the banality of evil” from years of cliché, and largely succeeds.

The journey to this foregone conclusion features several dance-offs mashing up contemporary and classical styles, which director Michael Damian (“Love By Design”) shoots with gusto. Sure, this is all a familiar tune — but it’s still catchy.

Directed with great sensitivity by Norway’s Joachim Trier, the film is superbly, subtly acted.

This sort of violent comedy — think “True Lies’’ meets “Grosse Pointe Blank’’ — is tough to pull off, but Spanish director Paco Cabezas and screenwriter Max Landis (“American Ultra’’) nail a screwball fantasy vibe that stops just inches short of downright silliness.

Demolition, written by Bryan Sipe is, like director Jean-Marc Vallée’s previous films “Wild” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” a tale of interior repair sought through obsessive and near-penitential acts, but it’s stranger and at times more interesting than those other two.

Too Late is a good-looking gimmick of a movie, one that will only be shown in theaters on 35mm film. Old-school advocate Quentin Tarantino would be proud — as he should be, since this noir starring John Hawkes feels like a big old valentine to him.

Be advised: The film opens with a warning about “flashing lights and hallucinatory images,” and, while effectively unsettling, these do eventually get a little hard on the eyes.

A comedy as black as vinyl, Kill Your Friends is a music-industry tell-all set at a decadent London record label in 1997.

Don Cheadle gives one of the best performances of his career as jazz legend Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, even if his debut as a director ends up being an unfocused disappointment.

Most of the film, while handsome to look at, doesn’t rise above this level of obviousness.

In the end, the movie (executive produced by the late Wes Craven) degenerates into a routine, though ably constructed, horror flick.

A fulsomely, aggressively modest no-star picture, it’s a plotless, pointless two-hour hangout.

Some things, like ouzo and flaming cheese, are best left at single servings.

Jane Wants a Boyfriend loses momentum careening between Dushku’s Bianca and Krause’s Jane — the latter of whom is far more interesting.

Only Bryan Cranston, as Teller’s downsized dad, emerges with his dignity fully intact from Get a Job, whose scattershot direction is credited to Dylan Kidd (“Roger Dodger”).

I Saw the Light is as vital as a two-hour shrug.

In Born To Be Blue, Ethan Hawke plays the heroin-addicted jazz trumpeter Chet Baker as a kind of guy version of Marilyn Monroe — breathy, fragile, a country naif struggling to stay anchored in this world instead of drifting off into the next.

While “300" maestro Snyder puts together some very striking scenes — which may be enough for many fanboys — they never really cohere into a whole. He literally throws in the kitchen sink in a film that frantically introduces characters and concepts while never clearly establishing the rules of the DC Comics universe.

Swift, confident, and exceptionally nasty, this Argentine film bears roughly the same relationship to the Martin Scorsese of “Goodfellas” that Brian De Palma does to, well, all of Hitchcock.

It’s basically a narrative spin on Alex Gibney’s 2013 documentary “The Armstrong Lie,” only with less cycling footage. This is a plus for those of us easily bored by such things (so many interchangeable mountain passes and neon jerseys!), but there isn’t a ton of new material here.

Farhadi brings keen discernment to this unraveling marriage, and a third-act revelation packs a wallop.

Toby is so un-self-aware that his journey seems like mere obtuseness; what the film has to say about youthful degeneracy is less than zero.

By the time David gets someone to unleash the gas, I was wishing he could simply erase all memories of the sorry “Divergent’’ franchise.

Lovable misanthropes can be a lot of fun, but someone forgot to put in the lovable.

Desplechin draws uniformly superb performances from his young cast, making the coming-of-age genre seem fresh and vital.

You may feel echoes of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Starman,” but writer-director Jeff Nichols has ultimately crafted his own unique twist on the genre.

Any Christian movie dealing in miracles is likely to be too sweet for some but this one is gently moving rather than pushy about its religious elements.

A real nail-biter of a monster movie. The question is: Who’s the monster?

As a comedy, The Brothers Grimsby is weak and scattershot, but it’s useful as an unintended self-indictment of the chattering classes’ disgust and disdain for white working folk.

While the premise (inspired by the true story of tune-challenged American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins) could be as cruel as “Carrie,” Frot’s would-be diva is achingly sympathetic.

Even the most extreme punishments are softened by hilariously neurotic dialogue. Vive la Delpy!

Christopher Plummer confronts Nazi horrors again in Atom Egoyan’s preposterous thriller, which squanders a terrific performance by the Oscar-winning actor.

Field, as usual, goes all-out; the film may be a comedy, but she attains a few moments of real heartbreak.

South African director Gavin Hood (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine’’) pulls off some really tricky tonal shifts.

There aren’t enough movies in which Tina Fey fires an AK-47 while grinning maniacally. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot turns out to make excellent use of her established skills while revealing new ones: It’s “30 Rock Me to the Casbah.”

Where Zhao excels is in the range of emotions she gets from a mostly nonprofessional cast.

The year’s best film so far.

Racist, stupid and boasting cheesy effects.

Chop up the film’s segments, replay them in any order, and things would make no more or less sense.

The film begins by telegraphing impending doom (and wraps up, underwhelmingly, with thriller clichés).

The Wave, competent as it is, lacks the heart-rending power of the similar 2012 tsunami movie “The Impossible.”

Scary and sad, Trapped is for anyone who cares about the precarious future of reproductive health for American women.

Like the lobby of a Donald Trump building, it looks ever so expensive and amazingly cheap at the same time.

Hugh Jackman, as a (fictional) former American jumper named Bronson Peary, enlivens things a little.

In the end, this relentlessly nihilistic crime-caper thriller adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

Frankel has a fine eye for telling detail, and the result, while sentimental, is as irresistible as the dessert cart.

“I see dead people,” Adrien Brody all but exclaims in Backtrack, a movie that tries to make a choo-choo out of “The Sixth Sense” but immediately goes off the rails.

Hitler didn’t actually snub Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, but the story is too good not to tell, so Race tells it anyway — adding the (true) detail that Owens was snubbed back home. By someone called “the White House,” because this supposedly truth-telling movie can’t bear to spell out the words Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It’s a creepy little gem, and its imagery will stay with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Tautly directed by Kiefer’s longtime “24’’ helmer Jon Cassar, Forsaken greatly benefits from the poignant teaming of its father-and-son stars — as well as Michael Wincott as an especially elegant and eloquent gunfighter who has great respect for John.

A sudden lurch into trippy abstraction at the end simply doesn’t work, but for the vast majority of the time this is a strong and original film.

Risen veers so far off the Bible’s path that it might as well be a tale of this 13th apostle, called Marty, who was in charge of snacks and mini-golf reservations.

Stiller’s one good idea is turning things over to Will Ferrell, who does some amusingly demented things while haranguing Anna Wintour and Tommy Hilfiger and is probably funnier in his sleep than Stiller is at his best.

This one is a “different kind of superhero movie,” meaning even more fiercely attached to the mode of artistic expression known as “puberty.”

It will probably not surprise you to learn that this film, generically directed by Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”), was written by the people behind 2009’s “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Seven years later, guess what? He’s still not that into you! And I wouldn’t be, either, not with this lot.

This well-intentioned drama — writer/director Paul Dalio has spoken publicly about his own struggles — veers into a common pitfall of films that portray mental illness: Romanticizing it.

Despite a too-tidy wrap-up, it’s a humane film, one that sees the war as a tragedy for the Afghans, not just Western soldiers.

I was too bored to hate the movie. Besides, who hates a stuffed animal? If it actually said something intelligent or surprising, you’d be alarmed, not pleased.