Who gets to say what art is? Does honest emotion count for more than cold abstraction? If Andy Warhol likes it, does that make it OK? Big Eyes toys with some amusing ideas, and that’s enough.

Unbroken, is a cinematic scrapbook, a collection of well-composed scenes practically cut and pasted from “Memphis Belle,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Life of Pi” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Unlike those other films, though, Angelina Jolie’s second effort as a director is more a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

Timothy Spall, a character actor best known as Wormtail in the “Harry Potter’’ series, delivers an Oscar-caliber tour de force as eccentric British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner in the exquisite Mr. Turner.

Beautiful to look at, with its burnished interiors and magnificent Turkish steppes, this long film builds to a powerful conclusion. Ceylan’s characters grind each other to a powder while hardly raising their voices.

The worst Hollywood musical so far this century, it’s another misstep for Sony Pictures, which also sponsored the abortive ‘‘The Interview.’’

For piquing kids’ interest in history and nature, you could do worse than this goofy Ben Stiller franchise. But its third installment is more meh than manic, too reliant on wide shots of the ragtag Museum of Natural History cohorts striding down corridors. You get the feeling returning director Shawn Levy is ready to hang it up.

It’s sprightly, funny and at times piercingly sad.

I was reminded, at times, of the painstakingly detailed beauty of “The Triplets of Belleville,” but Moore has a more ethereal, rounded aesthetic all his own. They don’t make movies like this anymore — except when, lucky us, they do.

Hate to say it, but this film ain’t half the satire it could have been.

It’s adequately visionary, it’s routinely spectacular, it breathes fire and yet somehow feels room-temperature.

An utterly clueless, relentlessly grim and rambling action epic guaranteed to displease devout Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, amuse atheists — and generally bore everyone.

There are a lot of parallels with “Breaking Bad” here: the Southwestern setting, the dorky husband turned criminal, the blond wife and the scene in the carwash. But if you can avoid dwelling on its derivative qualities, After the Fall has its own case to make about how far the middle class has fallen — and continues to slide.

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

Seeing this great actress, age 84, draw real feeling and laughs from such mediocre material is worth the watch.

If this documentary is swift and witty, that’s in part because it relies heavily on clips of Orson Welles talking. And oh, how Welles could talk, that beautiful voice wrapping itself around tall tales and wine commercials with equal grace.

If Top Five doesn’t go deep, though, it is intermittently very funny.

It’s well-executed but familiar territory, with a dearth of jarring moments. Those of us who aren’t friends and family of the crew could use a little wake-up shove here and there.

Thin yet excruciating, the film is a quintessential vanity production. The script feels like a first draft that aspired merely to mediocrity and fell well short.

You won’t see a better performance by an actress on film this year than Julianne Moore as a linguistics professor struggling to hold onto her personality after a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s in the unforgettable drama Still Alice.

Heavy on quirk and light on wit, first-time director Gillian Greene’s comedy leans too heavily on the badly wigged Kranz.

Farrell feels like a weak link here, never quite as masterfully manipulative or brutish as the role calls for.

The writer-director of Dying of the Light is Paul Schrader, screenwriter of “Raging Bull.” The star is Nicolas Cage — Raging Tool.

Fogel’s focus is female friendship, and the challenges presented by growing older and pairing up. It all makes for a rocky road, regardless of the romantic rival’s gender.

Laura Dern — only nine years older than Witherspoon’s fresh-faced 38 — could also net a Best Supporting Actress nod for her outstanding work as Cheryl’s spunky and nurturing mothe.

Turing’s tale needs to be more widely known, and while The Imitation Game may not be a great film, it is an important one.

A lazy, noisy ADHD-addled collection of animated clichés guaranteed to give anyone older than 5 a headache, even if you don’t see it in optional 3-D.

The three friends do things that venture beyond entertainingly dumb and into exasperatingly unbelievable.

The film’s slightly confusing ending doesn’t spell anything out, but that’s all right: We’re left sitting in the dark shivering, reassured there are still some directors who can leave us well and truly creeped out.

Played with enormous charm by Samuel Lange Zambrano, Junior is a handsome kid.

Yes, it’s gross, and no, it’s not remotely original.

The surreal images, offbeat jokes and pointed human-rights allegory make this an altogether different experience from most American animation. It’s dreamy, poetic and not to be missed.

Imagine “The Graduate” as rewritten by a golden retriever, and you’ll have some inkling of the intelligence level in the rom-com All Relative.

This crowd-funded — and overcrowded — collection of interwoven stories, directed by John Herzfeld, plays like an amateur-acting exercise in which each participant picks a name and a couple of defining props.

Hopefully Jennifer Lawrence will actually be given something worthwhile to do next time around. That would actually be worth paying to see.

From time to time, it works.

Mesmerizing, eerie and unpredictably weird.

The film’s mix of elements of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Bad Santa” is amusing.

The teary-eyed sincerity of the music-industry drama Beyond the Lights is at times too much, but despite its cliche elements, the film at least has the feel of a passion project.

The Soviet era is more interesting than the NHL years, but still, the film is entertaining even for ardent nonfans.

Jon Stewart’s filmmaking debut Rosewater has much in common with “The Daily Show” — it’s blaringly obvious, it’s naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it’s enamored with cheap jokes.

Very much a feminist Western — one painting a vivid picture of how difficult it was for even a strong and determined woman to survive in frontier days.

Visually imaginative, The Theory of Everything is an unusually compelling true-life story about an extraordinary couple triumphing over adversity. It’s my favorite movie so far this year.

A Quentin Tarantino knockoff from Japan, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? has some of the master’s nutty energy but little of his cleverness.

Less tiring than a three-hour tramp through the halls, and considerably less expensive than a plane ticket, National Gallery gives the feeling of having seen everything there is to see.

The single theme is “Isn’t this cool?” And if your response is, “Well, it’s certainly loud,” then On Any Sunday probably isn’t for you.

Big Hero 6 even has a title that sounds like a product ordered off the takeout menu of the type of restaurant that recombines a few elements in many ways. That could work fine, if any of the ingredients were particularly flavorful.

Rendering the life of young Abraham Lincoln as a tone poem, The Better Angels sags under the weight of its own resolute earnestness.

The script’s by Robert Ben Garant, also behind last year’s scary-movie spoof “Hell Baby,” and this one teeters right on the edge of laughable, with its V.C. Andrews-like series of goth twists.

Genius director Christopher Nolan reaches for the stars in Interstellar — and delivers a soulful, must-see masterpiece, one of the most exhilarating film experiences so far this century.

In his own twisted way, Lou is just as much a bloodsucker as Dracula, in a horror story that this tabloid veteran can attest is not as far removed from reality as you might assume.

Unfortunately, the film turns out to be not quite as twisty as promised: it’s less a pretzel than it is a Cheez Curl. And I do mean cheez: The resolution, when it comes, is wholly lacking in nutritional value.

From its uninspired, sitcom-y look to its phoned-in dialogue (“I love you plus infinity”; “I love you plus double infinity”) to its creaky plot, Hit by Lightning is anything but electrifying.

As for the magical-realist horns, they make a nice bad-boy look for Radcliffe and a handy plot device, but are never really explained in a satisfactory way. They have the side effect of making anyone who sees them immediately forget them — which I suspect may be the case with this movie as well.

In a way, this marvelous movie does show that the Mekons have declined, because they’ve become the one thing punk rockers never ever want to be: lovable.

Dr. Godard drops and quotes more names than you’d find in a week’s worth of Page Six, but lots of luck figuring any of this out before dozing off. The good thing about Goodbye to Language is that you’ll wake up with no side effects, albeit your wallet will be $12 lighter.

Aside from the very occasional stab with a dagger, John prefers to shoot people at point-blank range. It gets old fast.

It’s endearing how this glorified haunted-house movie tries to reclaim all the old tools, and do so with a straight face and a PG-13 level of violence.

The best thing about the film – which is true of most of his roles – is Rockwell.

Filmed on abstract sets, it’s full of playful touches, such as lines delivered in front of a screen that looks like a comic-strip panel, and glimpses of a mole puppet popping out from a fake lawn.

Though far too long for its wisp of a plot, this stylish film has a nerve-cinching grip that makes it more alarming than most horror flicks, let alone most movies about a couple having a tiff.

“Scratch the surface and there’s only more surface,’’ a character all too accurately observes in this clunky, ugly and dull mash-up of a mystery.

First-time feature director Jeff Preiss has a top-notch duo in John Hawkes, as the affable but troubled Joe, and Elle Fanning as his teen daughter, Amy, but neither can really get out from under the film’s heavy-handed tone, a one-note trip down a bleak memory lane.

The movie is about a situation, not a story — there’s little narrative momentum — and as is often the case with movies about journalists, the mood of smug sanctimony becomes unbearable.

But for all its 21st-century special effects, the characters, dialogue and values of Fury are straight out of the ’50s. The 1650s, maybe.

It’s perhaps the most incisive and funniest Hollywood take on Broadway since Mel Brook’s original “The Producers.”

Stewart’s restrained performance is affecting, the film seems well-researched about what it’s like to try to deal with Gitmo detainees who throw their own feces, and it isn’t as tendentious as the average Hollywood take on the subject.

Like the artificially sweetened junk food it is, this all goes down pretty easily.

In Listen Up Philip, the tiny fury of Jason Schwartzman suggests his “Rushmore” character is now 15 years older and a middling Brooklyn novelist. His deadpan misanthropy is good for some acerbic laughs in a movie that starts appealingly but gradually comes to seem closed and stuck.

Just in time for Mexico’s Day of the Dead holiday comes this gloriously colorful animated musical, which almost (but not quite) makes up in visuals what it lacks in snappy dialogue.

We know Paris never went anywhere, and the film’s a little too flashy and theatrical, with too-neat ironies. As a duel between acting talents, though, this is first-rate.

“It’s a little self-congratulatory and light on story,” says one student of another’s film project in Dear White People, which feels like director Justin Simien getting out ahead of inevitable (and accurate) criticism.

Overlong and sometimes schmaltzy — but still hugely engaging.

A kill-a-minute gore-a-thon whose twist is so obvious your grandma Edna will see it coming, Kite never gets off the ground.

The origins story Dracula Untold is Dracula unbold — unoriginal, unimaginative and utterly non-unprecedented. This Vlad the Impaler has all the edge of Vlasic the pickle.

Sweet and funny — largely thanks to James Corden in the lead role — it’s never particularly surprising.

A thrilling and propulsive drama.

Can a series of irritating events make a movie? Yes, but an irritating one: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Kill the Messenger tries to be the “JFK” of crack, but offers only shrill self-righteousness to answer the crazed energy of Oliver Stone’s masterpiece of deceit.

The crowd-pleasing St. Vincent provides Murray with his first comic vehicle in years. It’s a tour de force and a cause for major celebration.

A glossy, empty and ultimately unsatisfying — if undeniably entertaining — movie.

It’s not great art (in fact, it’s pretty low-rent CGI), but it’s passably entertaining.

Annabelle is mostly a grab into the Great Big Bag O’ Horror Clichés: sound-bombs of shrieking violins explode randomly, doors slam unbidden, rocking chairs creak by themselves, machines suddenly whir to life.

Eerie and utterly riveting.

For parents of very young children looking for a weekend distraction, “Color City” is passable fare — and will at least inspire kiddies to finish what they start, coloring-wise.

The Good Lie may not be anything like Witherspoon’s version of “The Blind Side” (as the ads also imply), but it’s a heart-tugger that’s definitely worth seeing.

Terry’s talent is so magical that you may wish there were longer snippets of his playing. Still, this is a wonderful portrait of two artists strengthened by friendship.

What elevates Men, Women & Children considerably above a dramatized (and occasionally over-dramatized) lecture on the dehumanizing aspects of the Internet is the consistently high caliber of acting (including, yes, Sandler) and spot-on narration by Emma Thompson.

There’s nothing hugely original about the script by Richard Wenk (who cowrote “Expendables 2” with Sylvester Stallone), but Washington is a master at putting his own inimitable and stylish spin on even the most familiar situations.

A sun-splashed noir that loses its appeal in the last act.

Perhaps faithful to the spirit of the man, but frustrating if you’re actually curious about the facts.

The considerable charms of Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton elevate this middling rom-com.

The cast, so packed with talent that Jean Reno and Cherry Jones barely register, is stuck with stagey dialogue. Juliet Rylance, in the Nina part, has a particularly hard time. But there are good points, including Janney’s obvious pleasure in her part.

Khaou’s film features masterful performances from Whishaw and Cheng, whose dialogue is somehow intensified, rather than diluted, through the third-party voice of the translator. But some emotions, the film suggests, are impossible to adequately articulate in any language.

Stephen Beresford’s script’s has its cornball fish-out-of-water touches to be sure, but Pride is a bona fide crowd-pleaser — wearing its heart on its sleeve as the film builds to an ending that’s as satisfying as it is surprising.

Engaging as it is to look at, this stop-motion animation film from the young Oregon studio Laika seems to have been masterminded by people thinking, “Everyone loves Pixar. So let’s do everything the opposite!” Admirably contrarian. Like being cast overboard and calling out for an anvil.

The Maze Runner isn’t based on a video game, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In it, our hero must lead his comrades through a dingy gray concrete maze while dodging cyborg monsters, and it all looks like every gaming trailer you’ve ever seen.

Another project whose narrative gets swallowed by its design.

They don’t make ’em like A Walk Among the Tombstones any more. Mainly because everyone got bored with ’em and stopped watching ’em.