Some handsome location shooting in New Orleans doesn’t make up for the Oscar winners’ relentless hamming and a plot that twists way beyond credibility.

The Club offers plenty of stifling, agonized atmosphere, but it’s all penitence and no redemption.

Sudeikis, often cast as genial everyman, is quite good in a more prickly role, and Hall brings her characteristic nuance to a smart but lost character.

The film has all the incessant showiness that can make Greenaway irksome: split screens, CGI, deliberately alienating performances. But the man loves a beautiful shot and a witty line; those are the things that carry the film.

Director Grímur Hákonarson excels at building tension through long takes, and the actors are excellent.

The overall film is a mix of “The Thin Blue Line” and Costa-Gavras’ “Z.” At times overemphatic (no one will ever accuse Gitai of holding too much back), this docu-thriller is also agonizingly suspenseful, despite the foreordained conclusion.

The true story behind a Coast Guard rescue depicted in Disney’s The Finest Hours is amazing enough that it didn’t require corny romantic embellishments that threaten to capsize everything.

The stunning visuals in DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 3 surpass the high standards set by its predecessors, but storywise, the latest adventures of goofy Po the panda break no new ground.

A self-serving remark on the part of the filmmakers, who place only the tiniest fig leaf of a story on a panoramic canvas of the gory, gross and repellent.

The undercaffeinated middle of the film consists of dopey twists, slow-burning gazes and dialogue that aims for “heartfelt” but comes out “unfortunate.”

Fanning has little to do beyond grasping her prosthetic stomach, but James is a decent foil for Gere, who gives form to the highly topical subject of how pain meds destroy lives.

The ironically titled A Perfect Day isn’t entirely successful, but Del Toro is wonderful and there are many well-judged moments, some involving a 9-year-old (Eldar Residovic) whose return to his home underlines the tragedies of this particular conflict.

Mojave is a movie-length standoff between two detestable villains. One is a serial killer. The other is a filmmaker.

If you’re willing to overlook some monstrously big plot holes and logic gaps, this half-animated Chinese blockbuster is an agreeably bonkers, occasionally disturbing cinematic ride.

The crime and aftermath (based on a real story) are the best parts by far, but these come well after many overextended scenes of selfish, squalid people treating one another like dirt.

Naz & Maalik does what all great New York movies do: ground unique, engaging stories in the middle of the glorious chaos that is our city.

The Nees lean toward the rat-a-tat comedy of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” presumably knowing they can’t match the profundity of “Huckleberry Finn.” (Who could?)

If I wasn't already convinced of this movie's obnoxiousness, its rendering of Graham's character sealed the deal.

Still, if 13 Hours lacks the gravitas of “American Sniper,” it’s powerful stuff. Bay’s goal is to put you right in these men’s boots, to feel the heat, the fear, the fatigue, the weight of the weapons and the web of camaraderie.

Garrel’s ideas on both are pretty old-fashioned. But he wraps it up with a pleasurable O. Henry-like twist, and a moment of what feels suspiciously like true love.

To call Ride Along 2 rubbish is unfair to rubbish, which at some point had a purpose.

Japan’s loony suicide culture seems like an adequately scary backdrop for a horror movie, but the routine horror flick The Forest mostly settles for cheap thrills.

Despite the underlying wretchedness, though, the characters exude a sense of having so little interior life that none of this, or anything else, fazes them. That’s disturbing, too.

Despite the generally talented cast of Anesthesia, its linked-lives format, which we’ve seen so many times before, is frustrating: Too much adds up to not quite enough.

This reverential documentary, crammed with insidery art-world anecdotes, seems unlikely to convince the average viewer why it was so important that several male artists ventured out of New York at that time to push dirt around with shovels and bulldozers.

This sounds like a comedy, and in its slow, deadpan way, that’s what The Treasure is; the film is an unusual mixture of joy and cynicism.

There’s something strange and dreamlike and delicate and beautiful about Anomalisa, an animated film for grown-ups that takes a long while to make its point, but does so with a dark brilliance.

It’s substantial food for thought, but too scattered for a two-hour running time.

To be fair, Ferrell is almost always at least mildly funny, even when doing something as lame as skateboarding into a power line, but Wahlberg’s cowboy shtick just seems half-hearted.

A film I admired, but didn’t especially like, The Revenant is a master class in craftsmanship, marrying the ethos of 1970s Hollywood, with its beaten-dog heroes forever roughed up by a brutal system, to the technological prowess of today’s digitally obsessed blockbusters.

The Hateful Eight is basically an expensive vanity project allowing Tarantino to expound on his bizarre theories about race relations.

Mostly it’s up to Lawrence to wring all the drama and pathos she can out of a battle over patent rights that pushes Joy to the brink of bankruptcy. No surprise that her mettle cleans up all the messiness in Joy.

At some point in her 50-year career, Rampling became one of the world’s great actresses. Driven by her and Courtenay’s work, and by director Andrew Haigh’s limpid style, the film is devastating.

The film is sober, honest and serious about an important subject.

Three talking critters sing, dance and tell jokes, and I really wish they wouldn’t. Their act isn’t just dull — it’s almost as bad as One Direction’s.

Tilda Swinton narrates this oddball, meandering essay film.

A witty and occasionally wise take on sibling bonds and adulthood — even if the latter only arrives kicking and screaming.

I’ve never seen a restaurant documentary that seemed less interested in showing the joy of food.

Yet while Nemes criticized “Schindler’s List” as “conventional,” all that’s new here is the hyper-realistic technique: Saul’s quest is not very far from the girl in the red dress.

The shamelessness with which Star Wars: The Force Awakens replays the franchise’s greatest hits is startling. To put it another way, it’s a satisfying meal — but it’s $200 million worth of leftovers.

Virtually dialogue-free and animated in a cacophony of playful bright colors and ominous industrial landscapes, Boy & the World plays like a dream segueing into a nightmare.

Though its resolution is a bit pat, most of The Girl in the Book is a smart and pointed look at abuses of power and roles women too often play in the literary world.

Presenting a “true” adventure about a giant whale that supposedly inspired “Moby-Dick” raises tsunami-high expectations about In the Heart of the Sea that are crushed as thoroughly as if star Chris Hemsworth had brought down his “Thor” hammer on the entire enterprise.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel do some of the best work of their careers playing longtime friends navigating their twilight years in Paolo Sorrentino’s witty, wise and swooningly beautiful dramatic comedy Youth.

Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s Macbeth takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.

Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks.

We know Lee can channel anger into art. Now, in the maiden feature for Amazon Studios, he adds poetry, beginning with the spoken-word verse that fills the movie.

The years go fast but the minutes crawl in Wim Wenders’ new drama, filmed in murky 3-D so that, apparently, we can feel as if we’re living through a dozen dull years right along with its main character.

Frothy, forgettable comedy.

Seeing as Krampus is about the Alpine demon who punishes Christmas a-holes, this is a promising start — but alas, it’s all downhill from there, making a murky and humorless hash out of a pretty great piece of

Hard-core Hitchcock fans will not find much in the way of revelations.

One of the year’s warmest and most crowd-pleasing surprises.

The movie doesn’t rise above its music-doc formula of photo, clip, talking head. But for fans — like me — it’s a heartfelt, engrossing tribute.

Capping off the year that transgender stopped being transgressive, the story of artist Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) makes for one of the year’s finest films.

By going exactly where you think it’s going, Victor Frankenstein doesn’t so much invent a fresh origins story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.

The Good Dinosaur is no instant classic like its sublime predecessor “Inside Out,” but is modestly pleasing in its own way.

The third and weakest book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy should never have been split into two films, but since that’s become money-grubbing standard practice for young-adult adaptations (“Twilight,” “Divergent”), here we are.

This version, flatly directed and risibly written by Billy Ray, is saddled with endless coincidences, questionably motivated characters and an utterly laughable climax.

I was searching for a metaphor to capture the experience of watching The Night Before when a character fell backward into a dumpster full of garbage bags. Thanks, guys!

This is in many ways a companion piece to Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” (2002), which remains one of my favorite films so far this century.

My All American would have done better to dig deeper in its portrayal of a man who set such a high bar for the intrinsic character of a football player. Because he’s actually the kind of example the sport could really use right now.

It’s never a good sign when the real people behind a movie’s story appear in the end credits and you’re stumped as to who’s who.

A decade later, these tabloid hall-of-famers are finally back to share the screen in By the Sea — glumly emoting in a pretentiously arty, humorless vanity production that drags along for two hours that feel like at least four.

There isn’t a lot here about her films, or great performances, but this is two hours of Ingrid Bergman, much of it rarely seen before. I’m not about to complain.

Somewhere on the axis where David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Joey Bishop intersect, a man in a Salvation Army tuxedo wanders the Mojave Desert supplying anti-comedy to every cocktail lounge and prison in his path. This is Entertainment.

This featherweight comedy from director Ben Palmer (“The Inbetweeners Movie”) is a lot more fun than many heftier, supposed rom-coms, thanks to the timing and chemistry of its leads.

An indie exercise in macho posturing disguised as a tale of grief, reminds us that losing one’s parents is psychically debilitating. But that’s about as useful as knowing that rain is wet.

Unfortunately, director Jessie Nelson (“I Am Sam”) gradually turns the script into marzipan.

Don’t expect too much of Heist — it’s a cheesy formula picture all the way — but it has solid character foundations, the occasional bright line of dialogue (“Cops, this is robbers,” Morgan says on a phone call) and a neat final twist. As throwbacks go, it’s more bearable than shoulder pads.

A likably gushy celebration of female friendship, sometimes feels like a throwback to the Drew Barrymore of the mid-’90s: At times you wonder if she and co-star Toni Collette might actually break out into a lip-sync-with-hairbrushes routine.

“A license to kill is also a license to not kill,” M lectures his new boss in the 24th James Bond film, Spectre. Well, it’s not a license to bore as much as this bloated drag manages to do.

Good grief! This painfully sincere animated feature seems aimed less at contemporary kids than nostalgic adults who might buy toys marketed for what is being billed as the 50th anniversary of the Peanuts gang for their children and grandchildren.

In the film’s most visceral scene, as the trio stands on the site of a mass grave in Lviv, Ukraine, von Wächter still can’t bring himself to admit his father’s direct culpability.

Bryan Cranston finally translates his critical acclaim for “Breaking Bad” into an Oscar-caliber performance in darkly comic Trumbo, playing an eloquent, witty screenwriter who bucked the Hollywood blacklist and triumphed.

Brilliantly acted by the year’s most carefully assembled cast, Spotlight is one of the year’s best films, showing just how hard it is to uncover painful truths.

It’s the sweet sincerity of Brooklyn that stamps it as both refreshing and nostalgic. The film is as welcome as a photo you just discovered of your mother before you were born, in which she looks prettier than you ever imagined.

A horror-comedy that takes a weak premise (do high school boys even go scouting anymore?) and barely uses it, anyway.

For all of its in-your-face, full-frontal sex scenes and threesomes (one involving a transsexual), this autobiographical story is almost sweet.

Its tactile feel for the dirt and labor of a farm, and tender regard for the young protagonist, are immensely endearing.

Watching Schenck and McBath campaign to fellow Christians for a dissociation between God and guns, you suspect their words are falling on deaf ears.

Both Adam and the stakes are so low, it’s like watching 100 minutes of a slug trying to crawl over a twig.

A slapdash, sporadically funny cross between the infamous “Ishtar’’ and the mercifully forgotten “American Dreamz.’’

Fans of the cartoon should stick around for Lewis’ after-credits sequence, which introduces a dastardly rival band. It’s the movie’s best scene, setting up a sequel we’ll never see.

The movie left me amazed — amazed that Nicolas Cage wasn’t in it.

Despite Mulligan bringing her A-game, the film falls short of its potential.

Wiig and Adebimpe give appealing, naturalistic performances — it’s Silva’s character who grate.

Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg’s best film since “Saving Private Ryan,” stars a flawless Tom Hanks in the smart, old-school thriller as James Donovan.

Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology.

Ethical objections to Milgram’s work are presented as killing the messenger; well-known issues with his methodology appear not at all. The movie’s an intellectual shock tactic, but it succeeds.

James Purefoy (“The Following”) makes a pretty decent bad guy. Olga Kurylenko (“The Water Diviner”) is passable as an action heroine. Neither of those facts makes Momentum any fun to sit through, crammed as it is with leaden dialogue and predictable plot turns.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

What everyone will remember about Goosebumps is . . . nothing. Except that it was kinda like “Gremlins.”

Truth also ignores Rather’s famous showboating, pettiness and hubris. He’s worked in lower-profile gigs since, but trust me, there’s a good reason why no news organization will touch Mapes with a 10-foot pole.

Chastain and Wasikowska take center stage while Hiddleston flutters around like one of Allerdale’s huge black moths. Watching the women square off within del Toro’s eye-popping, painterly palette is a feast for the eyes, if not particularly substantial fare for the mind.

For a long stretch this movie plays well. Quiet moments, such as when Victoria plays a piano waltz and reveals herself to have a concert-level talent, have a feel for urban yearning. Costa is appealing; it’s a pleasure to watch her brush her teeth in real time.

This joyless, 10-megaton bomb fails in just about every imaginable way, as well as some you couldn’t possibly imagine.

Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin and Mathieu Amalric contribute cameo appearances in the The Forbidden Room, a visual feast that may be a bit overwhelming for those unfamiliar with Maddin’s work.