The results are remarkably intelligent and entertaining, even for someone who (like this writer) finds Cave’s music rather dirge-like.

Curran (“The Painted Veil”) never imposes any additional structure on Davidson’s story, which may test the patience of some viewers. But I found the sprawling, wild visuals in Tracks, and the long silences as the sunburned Robyn traverses some of the world’s least hospitable lands, meditative and moving.

Finally, a post-“Bridesmaids” film that lets Kristen Wiig shine — and brilliantly taps into co-star Bill Hader’s vulnerable side, too.

Director Catherine Gund most successfully depicts the visceral impact of Streb’s work with her footage of the 2012 Olympics.

The gimmicky title is doubly misleading: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is neither a mystery nor Beatles-themed, but it is an elegantly wrought tale of anguish.

Even for a movie about complying with USDA regulations, Dolphin Tale 2 is a little lacking in excitement.

Yousef’s story, which he retells in the documentary The Green Prince, is one of unimaginable courage and moral awakening.

Kelly & Cal is at its best when focused on Lewis and Weston.

Michael Berry’s Frontera offers an unsparing look at the plight of illegal immigrants, even if the ending seems too patly convenient.

Only intermittently does the film treat us to more than snippets of Beal’s woozy, misshapen folk-blues, but perhaps these are best taken in small doses anyway.

The gorgeous heartache of songs by the group Belle and Sebastian gives God Help the Girl its dreamy appeal, but thanks to a poky story line it essentially amounts to a series of music videos.

When the legend of Elvis is reimagined as a mushy Christian heartwarmer in The Identical, it’s as if “Boogie Nights” is playing in the background while we hear about the life story of Edna, Dirk Diggler’s nice librarian cousin from Idaho.

Take note, Lars von Trier: This is how you do a truly funny, subversive movie about a woman’s obsession with the human body and sex.

That the story has largely gone untold is a shame, and Kennedy (daughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy) has done a service to the country in reminding us.

The Congress doesn’t fully live up to its lofty ambitions, but it does attempt something most filmmakers wouldn’t even dream of — a dystopian blend of live-action and animation that acidly comments on some of Hollywood’s touchiest issues before drifting off into an existential fog.

Dashing, handsome and self-deprecating, Kevin Kline was born to play Errol Flynn.

The film by Yasuhiro Yoshiura suffers from many of the same flaws as other anime features — a plodding pace, broad humor, a bland heroine and snarly, one-dimensional villains.

The photographs on view are dazzling; the way they are shown here is somewhat less so.

Schechter’s soul-scored film is impeccably styled for the time period, and its easy pacing reminds me of the gold standard for Leonard adaptations, “Out of Sight.” It’s not that good, but it’s within striking distance.

This one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.

The movie reveals some of the most stunning landscape cinematography imaginable, while everyone on the isolated ship waxes philosophical — as who would not?

Compared to another recent teen weepie, “The Fault in Our Stars,” this one comes up wanting. That film’s strong point was the delight its heroine took in detonating romantic clichés; If I Stay seems determined to keep them on life support.

Like many movies that premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, The One I Love has plenty of story — for a 30-minute TV episode, in this case of “The Twilight Zone.”

Nearly as good as the average episode of TV’s “Friday Nights Lights,” which makes it better than most movies and one of the better sports films of recent years.

As it stands, there’s little to explain the existence of this confoundingly unfunny film. It’s as if a talented cast (Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler) assembled to make a comedy and at the last minute was told to play everything straight.

Love is Strange is very well worth seeing for its two stars, who acutely convey the pain their characters feel over their separation as well as displaying their considerable comic chops to keep things from getting too grim.

Time to pull the plug on this brain-dead franchise.

It’s photographically yummy, heaving with sun-dappled vistas and four-star dining. The boys float around a bit in the sea and enjoy homemade pasta while trundling out their impressions of, say, Marlon Brando.

In Abuse of Weakness, Breillat, notorious for her sexually explicit films, casts the excellent Isabelle Huppert as her avatar, Maud, to tell the tale.

If Michael Fassbender wears a giant papier-mâché head for most of a film, is he still mesmerizing? Happily, yes.

The only truly lethal weapons in the criminally unfunny action comedy Let’s Be Cops are the lame script, putrid direction and pair of sitcom stars mugging nonstop in frantic pursuit of laughs that have fled over the state line.

The Giver is at its best when Bridges expounds on civilization’s lost beauty and savagery; at other times, it’s strewn with implausibility: For a totalitarian society in which everyone is monitored constantly, our hero is able to sneak around an awful lot.

Nowhere near as funny as you’d expect with its stellar cast.

Jealousy has a quiet melancholy that’s very pleasing.

They’ve been around so long that they’re now the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their ’80s vibe — cowabunga, dude! — is so strong that I kept expecting a cameo by Huey Lewis or Max Headroom.

The found-footage disaster flick Into the Storm is “Twister’’ for dummies, but by no means is that an insult. The new film is enormous fun if you’re in the right mood.

Brief and timely, this documentary directed by Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia is also frustrating.

Wojtowicz was a folk hero thanks to the movie, and he cashed in on his celebrity by signing autographs in front of the bank he tried to rob. He also retained the love and support of his wife and his doting mother, both of whom are interviewed with him in The Dog, until his death in 2006.

There’s a secret at play in After, which director Pieter Gaspersz communicates via many side-long glances. I won’t give it away, but it’s a fairly far-fetched twist that feels out of place in this realism-based drama.

What If is a case of the cutes the way the Black Death was a case of infectious disease. The movie is saturated with cute, teeming with cute, rancid with cute. I’d endured all a man could fairly be expected to take when I glanced at my watch and realized there were still 95 minutes to go.

Manages to be a satisfying meal, if not quite a feast, for famished adult audiences.

Frustrating, at times agonizing, the film is nonetheless dappled with a sad beauty. It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

As About Alex moves toward its conclusion, it devolves into some plot resolutions that were a lot less predictable back in the ’80s.

On the whole, the film would probably be more at home on cable and at a reduced running time. I’d like to see a competition series of the same name, in which rival engineers compete to see who can endure having the hard-driving Cameron for a boss.

One funk-tastic musical biopic.

Mumblecore founding father Joe Swanberg is back with this amiable off-season tale of Chicago millennials and their dissatisfactions. It offers his characteristic you-are-there visuals, rackety sound and meandering dialogue, often with appealing results.

Guardians of the Galaxy brings to mind some of the most unforgettable sci-fi event movies of the last 30 years. Alas, those films are “Howard the Duck” and “Green Lantern.”

Lee may not want to let anyone in, but it’s hard to engage fully with a film that doesn’t seem to want to, either.

Child of God is, like the source novel, loosely inspired by the notorious real-life cannibal murderer Ed Gein. So was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.’’ Nobody left that classic bored — but they sure will be by Franco’s film.

Though the filmmaking is not terribly exciting, Fela’s life and music are.

Twice I have left a Calvary screening feeling dazed and moved.

Disturbing but very watchable noir.

And So It Goes appears to be targeting an audience segment that rarely goes out to the movies — while providing them a cringe-worthy incentive to never do so again.

In a captivating climax, the movie turns attractively freaky, though somewhat marred by cheesy special effects, and there’s a huge debt to the immense leaps of “2001.” An abrupt ending feels frustrating and leaves questions floating in space. Then again, I’m using only 3 to 5 percent of my capacity, so what do I know?

The film is full of baffling choices, like the EKG machine that beeps for the first 40 minutes, so loud and so maddening that the great words barely register. Mumblecore is not a good look for Ibsen.

This atmospheric, cool-looking but gimpy thriller based on a John le Carré novel makes “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” look like “22 Jump Street.”

Concert sequences are engaging, though I was disappointed not to see any animated flourishes.

A comic adventure that suffers from a dearth of both laughs and thrills.

This cynical rom-com subgenre has been done to death.

The attraction between the resolutely empirical scientist and his “spiritual,” hippy-dippy girlfriend gives the film an unpredictable quality.

I’ve read ingredients labels that were scarier than The Purge: Anarchy, a plodding horror flick that mistakenly thinks it has big ideas.

This Disney sequel to 2013’s “Planes” is a lot like flying coach: serviceable, but not trying that hard.

The Lord works in mysterious ways but Persecuted works in blundering, obvious ways, straining a Christianity-under-attack theme through a dopey thriller.

As apocalypse scenarios go, this one feels both retro and commendably topical: Nuclear bombs, remember those? (Also: Edward Furlong, remember him?)

Full of appealing actors mugging like crazy, it’s got amusing moments, but the overstuffed visuals suffocate real emotion.

There are enough sharp one-liners and funny situations to keep things entertaining even as Braff delves (lightly) into genuine dilemmas confronting many a married couple.

For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

“Gatsby” meets “Gossip Girl” in this outsider-among-the-wealthy story set, like Fitzgerald’s novel, on Long Island.

The film fragments into an emotionally devastating parable about what enforced silence does to an artist.

Among group-suicide movies, A Long Way Down may prove uniquely inspirational: It’s bound to make audience members want to kill themselves. It might be the only summer movie during which the snack bars will be selling cyanide Kool-Aid.

There’s nothing wrong with being a brainless B-movie, but this one is funless and lackluster, a grinding mess of pulp clichés with dull characters, perfunctory violence and dim plotting.

Linklater ambitiously shot his new effort over a period of 12 years with the same cast, showcasing what turns out to be an astonishing performance by newcomer Ellar Coltrane, who grows up from 6 to 18 before our eyes over the course of 164 minutes.

A refreshingly naturalistic depiction of the dynamic of traveling companionship — at any age.

Expertly serves shivers, buckets of gore — and pretty much every cliché of the genre.

This pastiche of sitcomy episodes never gels into a plot.

Roger Ebert makes an unusual candidate for a documentary: He was a writer, which isn’t cinematic, and not the swashbuckling kind. He didn’t go to war zones, just movies.

The film doesn’t wallow in grief; it’s a thoughtful and nuanced portrait of a stage of life we often choose not to see.

Its sentiment is appealing, though, and its sincerity doesn’t cloy.

More a tribute to youth and its discontents than a fresh exploration.

Even at a cramped and frenetic 82 minutes, the movie feels long. That’s what happens when the audience can guess everything that’s going to happen in advance.

Saint Laurent was known for an almost monk-like focus on his work. And so this film springs to life — the actors, the camera, the editing — when we see his creations the way they were meant to be seen: in motion, and worn by beautiful women.

You get the feeling the guy who wrote Transformers: Age of Extinction used the entire script as a passive-aggressive running joke on his boss, director Michael Bay.

Despite the dramatic dystopia, performances here are uniformly low-affect, which isn’t helpful given the exposition-heavy dialogue and unremarkable set (though Nick’s extraterrestrial visions have a pleasantly kitschy look). Also puzzling is the fact that the pivotal song is not actually performed by Morissette.

Don’t miss it — this is enormously fun visionary filmmaking, with a witty script and a great international cast.

If “Once” was a bracing blast of cool spring water, Begin Again is a can of Fanta. If “Once” was a piano, Begin Again is a keytar. If “Once” was Otis Redding, Begin Again is Bruno Mars.

This one-sided documentary, told entirely by supporters, paints Swartz as a hero pursued by malign forces.

So why isn’t They Came Together more uniformly hilarious? Perhaps it’s that elusive problem of trying to explain why a thing is funny in the first place: Spelling it out deflates the joke.

Roughly a more broadly comic French version of John Favreau’s “Chef,’’ this film stars veteran Jean Reno as a longtime celebrity chef who may lose control of his Paris restaurant because the young new CEO thinks he’s old toque.

This is a handsome movie, rich in period detail, but the stately pace slows to a crawl in the second half.

Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, in his feature debut, achieves effective chills with only eight actors and a living room, intermixing quantum physics (shout-outs range from Schrödinger’s cat to “Sliding Doors”) with the very mundane human tendency toward bad judgment calls in a crisis.

Paul Haggis’ Third Person has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/₂ hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”

An explosion of images, mixing seedy, hand-held reality with groovy grindhouse imitations. Most of the shots are vivid, some are even thrilling.

If Think Like a Man Too was a man, he would be the world’s worst date: humorless, shrill, speaking primarily in clichés (“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!”) and absolutely terrified of women.

It isn’t quite as clever as it thinks. This is one of those man-written feminist parables that looks an awful lot like a Penthouse art director’s idea of a feminist parable.

Jersey Boys tells a familiar story, yes — but rarely told this well and with this much heart and soul.

In Devos’ hard-charging performance, she’s also fascinating, and that’s all a film requires.

Offers some stunningly beautiful sequences and an engaging, if at times quite dark, story line.

Lawless outback, shotgun-toting banditos and even roadside crucifixions somehow add up to an experience that’s about as thrilling as your average trip to the post office.