What’s the difference between “21 Jump Street” and 22 Jump Street? Same as the difference between getting a 21 and a 22 at blackjack.

Writer/director Andrew Levitas needlessly pads this captivating theme with over-used tropes.

The real unflinching truth is that an average newspaper reporter can do a more artful, compassionate job with a drug-war story than this movie does.

As much fun as it is, this all-star tribute is awfully one-note, never questioning Gordon’s seemingly casual habit of befriending only the ultra-famous.

Swift and often compelling, it’s also blessedly unbiased.

No, this film by director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre just isn’t funny, and the mismatched leads aren’t even interesting together.

Gregg, who previously directed the very dark comedy “Choke,” never quite settles on a tone; from the opening scenes, in which Molly Shannon plays a neurotic stage mom and Allison Janney a chilly casting agent, it seems he’s going that way again, but a dramatic twist sends the film into less plausible territory.

Certainly nails the era, right down to a lengthy pan across a none-too-appealing dinner buffet.

A sickening horror parable disguised as a comedy of mores, the Netherlands’ Borgman is a rarity: a genuinely shocking, upsetting movie.

A Tom Cruise action flick with a strong female heroine and a sense of humor? Edge of Tomorrow has both of those, plus a “Groundhog Day’’-style gimmick that pays big dividends. Over and over.

Shailene Woodley, already a subtle and rangy actress, easily carries the film as Hazel.

The second half, though, is chilling, as the trio’s actions come into sharp, painful focus. Too bad Reichardt has no ending.

Directors Matthew Pond and Kirk Marcolina wisely keep this unrepentant charmer, in her 80s during filming, on-camera, save for when they’re interviewing fascinated writers and fed-up prosecutors.

Writer-director Jon S. Baird has devilish fun with the hilarious black-comic elements of Irvine Welsh’s novel, but the incessant bad behavior does get a wee bit monotonous, and the twist ending is disappointingly pat.

The frequently funny The Grand Seduction is a thoroughly pleasant way to pass a couple of hours.

The film is passionate, but not exactly revelatory.

I laughed more at Seth MacFarlane’s sendup of ’60s Westerns than I did at all the other comedies I’ve seen this year, combined.

No film I’ve seen so far this year has provided the sheer moviegoing pleasure of We Are the Best!

Clearly a labor of love for all involved. Listen carefully on the soundtrack and you’ll hear the voice of Joanne Woodward as Ellie’s mom. Woodward is one of the executive producers of this lovely little film, which is dedicated to her late husband, Paul Newman.

Clive Owen stumbles around the scenery doing unfortunate drunken-writer shtick in Words and Pictures, a formula movie whose script is yet more unfortunate.

The jovial, hyperverbal comic has played against type before, but his presence feels like epic miscasting in this underwritten dramedy.

Manages to be excruciatingly unfunny despite the presence of Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson in the lead roles.

This is the sort of movie that gets called “hallucinatory,” but it is strongly grounded in the New York in which 99 percent of us live. Fleischner gets his uncanny effects simply by showing what this city looks like to a child who has a different filter.

Barrymore is still cute, and she and Sandler at least seem to like each other as they get on with the grim business of rom-com contrivance.

Bryan Singer’s whip-smart and witty time-travel romp X-Men: Days of Future Past blows a breath of fresh air through the musty Marvel universe.

The film, like the man, is never boring.

The second half of Godzilla is definitely more fun than the first part of a film I enjoyed overall, if less than last year’s similar dip into giant monster blockbusterdom, “Pacific Rim.”

Cédric Klapisch’s film is meandering and cutesy, but his characters are endearing and every so often he comes up with a deft insight, such as how this city’s streets are like a flayed zombie.

Writer-director Schwarz has a lot of fun with this nutty premise. And more important, the twisted dynamics of this particular family ring true.

It makes so little sense on-screen that all you can do is nod along vaguely sympathetically at its sheer creative bravado.

A remarkable attempt to portray what might turn soccer-playing boys into fanatical murderers.

Rookie filmmaker Michael Maren’s script isn’t deep, but it’s heartfelt without being sticky, suggesting that the best way to deal with aging parents is to savor every tender frustration while you can.

Nobody does the rebellious-elder thing as well as Duvall, and whenever he’s center stage in A Night in Old Mexico, this scrappy film from Spanish director Emilio Aragon is entertaining enough.

Phoenix, who was so subtle in “Her” and brilliantly tortured in “The Master,” has lapsed back into the shouty bombast style of his “Gladiator” days, but his efforts to make the character seem layered are to little avail, especially given that Gray waits until the end to try to make him a tragic figure instead of merely a sleazy one.

Fatally mild, slow and factory-made, Million Dollar Arm belongs somewhere less competitive than the multiplex. Like the ABC Family Channel — the entertainment industry minor leagues.

In a move sure to infuriate “nanny state” critics, director Stephanie Soechtig names the US government and food corporations responsible for a campaign to get Americans addicted to junk food — particularly, and most dangerously, sugar — as early as possible.

Based on a lesser-known Dostoyevsky work, Brit director Richard Ayoade’s breathtakingly realized oddity will appeal to fans of David Lynch and the comic surrealism of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

Colin Firth plays a real-life investigator whom the script renders as noble as Atticus Finch. Reese Witherspoon does haunting work as a victim’s mom. But the stately pace and the faultless art direction add to the impression that truth was not only stranger, but more dramatic.

A central problem: Efron isn’t funny.

Consistently stale but not altogether unpleasant.

The result is a thoughtful, dreamlike (at times, nightmarish) tour through the day-to-day lives of several suburban California teens.

Stage Fright starts out as a funny musical mashup — “Glee” meets“Friday the 13th” — but winds up indulging slasher-flick clichés instead of spoofing them.

As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives God’s Pocket an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.

James Franco, all is forgiven. His woebegotten “Oz: The Great and Powerful’’ is practically a masterpiece compared to this eyeball-gougingly ugly, charm-free animated musical sequel.

He’s great as a celebrity chef who’s forced to re-examine his priorities in this extremely funny and big-hearted comedy that Favreau also wrote.

Vanity, thy name is Kevin Spacey.

Both actresses are extraordinary, but Kulesza — bitter, sarcastic and tragic — carries the movie’s soul.

The striking Thierry brings her character to nuanced life on screen.

Well-intentioned, if ultimately underwhelming, ode to the ongoing fight for a cure.

Director Marvin Kren delivers a lot of cheap scares, but the film doesn’t approach the dread-soaked suspense of the 1982 version of “The Thing.”

A buddy comedy that reeks like stale underpants.

If you were wondering what “12 Years a Slave” might have been like as a two-part episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” you might want to check out this unsatisfying but not uninteresting oddity. It renders another historical story about race with exquisite taste but not much in the way of passion.

Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly overload their too-long film with subplots. Yet the actors — including a terrific Aiden Gillen (“Game of Thrones”) as Casper’s no-good father — perform as though unaware that any of this is a cliché.

The Amazing Spider-Man is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.

A captivating Tom Hardy is in the driver’s seat for the one-man show Locke, but like many experimental films, this one suffers from its self-imposed constraints.

Not many surprises are in store, but the film’s affection for the dramatist is pleasing.

Dystopia’s supposed to be worse than what’s in the papers, fellas. Try to keep up.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.

As reactions to budding sexuality go, it’s a little extreme. And it’s also contrived; Isabelle’s decision never makes any emotional, let alone logical, sense.

Sparse of dialogue, terrifically ominous and full of low-key, high-quality performances, Blue Ruin is a vigilante tale even haters like me can get behind.

Playing like a script that’s been moldering since Diane Keaton turned it down in 1983, The Other Woman is a weak adultery rom-com in which the most authentic performance comes from a non-housebroken Great Dane.

Walking with the Enemy may not be another “Schindler’s List” (Ben Kingsley has a small but important role as Hungary’s deposed regent) but it’s handsomely photographed (A-list vet Dean Cundey) in Romania and a compelling addition to the Shoah canon.

Small Time has its heart in the right place, but its screenplay’s in serious need of a tuneup.

Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.

Carl Kranz, as a possibly autistic boy enamored of Natalia, offers his scenes some heart. But Soft in the Head is drab, ramshackle stuff — up in everyone’s face, and finding very little there.

The horror flick 13 Sins is passable enough when it comes to dialing up the suspense, but the “Saw” formula of a mysterious voice guiding our hero through a series of depravities has gone a bit stale.

This is one of those nature documentaries that’s pretty much solely interested in being entertaining, and so is cleverly edited to look like the linear story of a mother (dubbed Sky) and her newborns (Scout and Amber).

With Fading Gigolo, writer-director-star John Turturro does a passable imitation of a mediocre Woody Allen sex comedy, and guess who tags along for this would-be romp?

The dancing’s fine here, but there’s little else to distinguish Make Your Move, an entirely generic drama.

Lethargic direction, bland visuals, credulity-straining plotting and tin-eared dialogue turn even pros like Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman into sleepwalking bores.

A fine cast headed by the underrated Greg Kinnear lifts this year’s third major religious movie, the fact-inspired Heaven Is for Real, somewhat beyond its Hallmark Channel-caliber script and visuals.

Draft Day is lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so dumb it should have been called “Dummyball.”

A rather unremarkable, if endearing, entry in the quirky rom-com genre.

I think I’d rather have the waterboarding than the movie’s bromides about how we’re all victims and hate must end.

Legendary hipster filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s wryly funny exercise in genre bending hits so many grace notes it ends up being his most satisfying film in years.

Like the similar, and slightly superior, "The Conjuring" last summer, Oculus eschews the buckets of gore common to R-rated horror movies and takes a relatively subtle, psychological approach — even if the somewhat disappointing ending leaves the door open for a sequel (or three).

It’s a swift, vivid movie, but 10 years past the scandal, not much is new.

Rio 2 is not what I would call Amazon prime, but it’s got enough silly songs and daffy critters to keep the little ones happy.

David Gordon Green’s Joe largely succeeds in immersing us in a rural world of cruelty, ugliness, decay, neglect and aggression, but if there is a point to it all, I couldn’t find it.

This Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary doesn’t stray much from the nature-doc formula of making its stars look frisky and winsome while sprinkling in a few info-nuggets about the critters (they’re older than dinosaurs!). And that’s just fine.

This retrograde sex comedy is embarrassing for just about everyone involved, but I do think a special endurance shout-out should go to Reid Ewing (“Modern Family”).

Given the scarcity of movies about lust from the female point of view, this is kind of a bummer.

Tedious and pretentious.

Morris is likely to disappoint liberals in The Unknown Known by failing to take down an apparently weak target.

Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character — a craven, narcissistic, provincial TV and radio host who has been amusing the Brits for more than 20 years — proves too much of a sketch-comedy creation to sustain a film.

The film’s reckoning, when it comes, is fully as heartbreaking as it should be.

Halle Berry’s latest vehicle is old-fashioned as a leisure suit, but better-looking and a lot more fun.

This pointless study of a witless character is a sad waste of Law’s talents. The more zestily he delivers Dom’s profane tirades, the more you wish Shepard gave us a reason to care about this lout.

Deeply mediocre and ultra-predictable.

So Arnold Schwarzenegger has reached the shaky-cam-and-hoodies stage of his career. But it’s a bit late in the day for Arnold to try to get all indie and complicated.

Holy ship! Crowe’s grumpy Noah and his dysfunctional clan help God reboot the too-wicked world in this imaginative (but hardly sacrilegious) and visually spectacular elaboration on Genesis.

Those with a high tolerance for violence and gore — at one point, Rama battles assassins labeled “Baseball Bat Man’’ and “Hammer Girl’’ simultaneously — will eat up The Raid 2.

Not since “American Movie” has there been such an entertainingly clumsy, warts-and-all documentary about making a movie, this time courtesy of Cincinnati filmmaker Tom Berninger.

The many silences in Hide Your Smiling Faces don’t speak quite loudly enough, and the film ultimately gets bogged down by its own ponderousness.

Top performances by Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, though, make the film emotionally rich.

It’s too busy with feel-good slogans like “Si Se Puede.” The slogan may be nice, but it’s meaningless. So is the movie.

John Maloof’s documentary has an opening both apt and witty: Talking heads, one after the other, struck dumb by the mystery at hand.

It’s all headed for a showdown, of course, and duly delivers, though Crudup and Taylor are the only ones who really seem to have a handle on the New Yawk accent.