Just because two people are miserable doesn’t mean they’re interesting.

The agent in this interesting little thriller — well played by John Cusack — is up to the Company’s usual dirty tricks.

Alas, the film’s relevance — and ultimately sane upshot — is buried beneath a meandering and oftimplausible plot.

In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”

The result is no masterpiece, but neither is it a disaster. In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.

Morales’ spin on the old ransom plot is fresher and more gripping than most big-budget Hollywood products.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

Mud runs over two hours, climaxing with a shootout that belongs in a different movie. It’s a rare misstep in an art-house movie that will pull mainstream audiences along as inexorably as the Mississippi River. Go see it.

One of the best films released so far this year, At Any Price signals the arrival of Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani in the ranks of major US directors.

“I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch The Big Wedding.

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

Director Christian Charles gets some comic mileage from the inimitable Walsh and Rae, but it’s ultimately hard to care too much about a caddish protagonist like Norman — or, for that matter, about the clichéd “women are crazy!” sentiment that hums nastily under the antics of Dori’s unorthodox family gathering.

Bhalla’s advocacy gets its force above all from the oddly similar personalities of the two main subjects — Wallace and Sumell — zealous reformers possessed of astonishing optimism, even as Bhalla closes by noting that there are 80,000 prisoners in solitary in the US.

In the House promises to be a social satire with a flash of Hitchcockian menace, but gradually it turns into a routine thumb-sucker on reality versus fiction.

Movies by Rob Zombie, the goth rocker turned cult filmmaker, aren’t for everybody. But he couldn’t care less. He makes movies exactly the way he wants to, with no thought of pleasing mainstream audiences. They can like it or lump it. His latest effort, The Lords of Salem, is true to form.

It’s a sympathetic portrait of an artist whose heart lay more with new work than old glories, right up to the end.

Whatever the unanswered mysteries of Jay’s personal life, just watching this magician’s hands at work with a deck of cards is positively mesmerizing.

Without an exceptionally skilled director of actors (such as Cameron Crowe), Cruise can’t dial up much emotion, so the two love interests for his character are two more than he can convincingly handle. He may be at home in the cockpit of a killing machine, but when it comes to displaying his humanity, he’s no Wall-E.

This is a horror movie that’s really a supposed comedy; she’s (Lohan) a supposed comedy actress who’s actually scary.

Soulful though the film is, melodrama gradually sneaks in, and then it takes over.

A trove of home videos, vintage commercial and propaganda footage and black-and-white animation dress up this energetic if somewhat unfocused look at the birth of skateboarding in the German Democratic Republic.

The debut film of Brandon Cronenberg deals out shivers and flinches in little hypodermic jabs.

At age 76, Loach also decided to offer his characters, and audience, some hope — at the bottom of a glass.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.

Typically, To the Wonder seems mostly locked in the thoughts of its characters, whispered so only we can hear, with no more actual back-and-forth dialogue than would cover the back of your ticket stub.

42 may not be a home run, but it’s certainly a solid three-base hit as worthy family entertainment.

Gandolfini acquits himself well in a rare big-screen lead as the depressed operator of a rinky-dink amusement park in the waning days of winter.

Writer-director Antonio Campos, making excellent use of the queasy rhythms of a percussive musical score, keeps piling up the dread as we wonder just how dangerous Simon can be to the women who keep taking pity on him.

The last topic is the hook for audience members not related to Gregory or Kleine, but just as insight appears, back we go to Kleine's tediously selfreferential narration.

Temple and Angarano, entertaining enough, never quite sell the idea that this goodhearted couple would be so easily transformed by greed.

The disappointing The Company You Keep consistently stretches credulity way past the breaking point in its depiction of journalism, police procedure and political activism.

The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments. Passages from the memoir of one family matriarch, Esther Stermer, in many ways the heroine of the tale, also are used as narration.

The movie's title might sound like a splatter-fest by Rob Zombie. But despite the theme, “Eddie” goes easy on gratuitous gore. What we get is a cerebral horror movie and a satire of the art world.

This enigma-delivery system from a sharp mind has enthralling moments but becomes a bit enervating in its self-seriousness. By the end, the whole thing feels more academic than mind-bending.

A preposterous supernatural thriller that inexplicably managed to sign up Julianne Moore to star.

This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It’s what happens when film noir goes out to a rave.

Though it tries — with a much too heavy hand — the new Evil Dead is far less humorous than its predecessor.

The hippie heroine of this wacky Aussie comedy cheerfully theorizes that Australia was actually originally settled not by convicts but by mental patients — which may possibly explain the antics of Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, among others.

Detour does a fine job of giving drivers yet another reason to stress out, but that anxiety doesn’t extend to its hero’s fate.

Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is the purest, boldest re-imagining of silent cinema yet.

There are a lot of casualties in this stylish, unoriginal thriller, but James McAvoy’s knee was the only one that moved me.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

The biographical bits soon feel like a distraction from the music, performed by Gavilán. It’s heard often, but not often enough. Judging by the movie, Parra’s songs are fiery and haunting, sometimes sensuous, sometimes bleak. When Parra sings, the movie becomes worthwhile.

For a long while, director Benjamin Epps goes for breakneck farce; at its best, this is a batty mixture of family-values editorial and teen spoof.

Like the paintings of the master, Renoir is beautiful to look at, but it would be a mistake to call the film (or its subject) shallow.

A long, tedious and often unintentionally hilarious adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi follow-up.

Willis is at his relaxed best this time.

Don't let the quiet, indie stylings of The Place Beyond the Pines fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.

An inept, brutally unfunny collection of sketches.

Argentina’s noir Everybody Has a Plan is as sludgy as the river delta in which it takes place.

It’s not a documentary, it isn’t entertainment, and aside from Chung’s intelligent, dignified performance, this sure as heck isn’t art.

The young, novice actors are charming, but they haven’t completely mastered the art of natural-sounding dialogue.

Gould’s lugubrious presence is always welcome, and Rue plays her lovelorn part with verve.

Although the golden-hued cinematography (a filming cliché that really needs to be retired) and the sometimes slack direction by Marc Evans are minuses, Hunky Dory does deliver in the musical department.

You do have to give Starbuck credit for engineering perhaps the largest group hug ever put on film.

The plot doesn’t entirely escape formula, and the ending is jagged and forced, unable to commit to either hope or gloom. But for at least part of its length, My Brother the Devil brings refreshing changes to a genre badly in need of them.

Love and Honor may be politically clueless, but Hemsworth and the student journalist he hooks up with (fellow Aussie Teresa Palmer of “Warm Bodies’’) do make an undeniably attractive couple.

The upstart Sapphires are a smash to watch as they cover soul tunes like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “What a Man” and “I Can’t Help Myself.”

This unapologetic B-movie at least keeps the action rolling, and the time goes by quickly. To put it another way, I’d rather see Gerard Butler stab a terrorist in the neck than flirt with Katherine Heigl.

I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack. And yet Cage is the least of the problems with The Croods.

She’s (Fey) so good that — up to a point — you can ignore Paul Weitz’ erratic direction and a patchy script, both of which clumsily handle shifts between comedy and drama.

The bright palette of Reality is an obvious way to underline the hero’s unraveling, but it looks good, and it works.

Toward the end, despite the wintry script and chilly acting, some emotion begins to break through. But it’s never a good sign when the art direction offers more fascination than the sex.

A great writer deserves a more penetrating and inquisitive documentary: Reverence is not the path to understanding.

Clip hurts your eyes, but if it’s supposed to hurt your heart, it misses the mark.

Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance Upside Down is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

I’ll say one thing for The Call: Its ending is actually a bit of a surprise. Just when you think it couldn’t get any stupider, pow! I’ll be damned, Hollywood, you still have the power to blindside.

Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle.

Admittedly, I’m far from a fan of Korine’s “Gummo,’’ “Julien Donkey-Boy’’ and the absymal “Trash Humpers.’’ But that he is proud of making intentionally sloppy and tedious movies doesn’t make them any easier to watch. Or all that much fun, for that matter.

It’s a film heavily dependent on tone and atmosphere for its charm, the budding relationship shown through things like a lovely twilight bike ride down a hill to the shops below.

There’s not a bad performance in the bunch. Hendricks’ and Fanning’s Brit accents are nicely un-showy.

There was a time when the climate-change alarmist movement was like a guy with a megaphone at your ear, but now it’s more like a squirrel at your shoelaces.

The result is like an hour and a half listening to someone bellyache about her landlord.

Fake documentaries annoy me — why not put in the effort and deliver the real thing? — and this one is not only aimless and stiff, it also rings false.

What this means is that at times the pace of Beyond the Hills is nerve-wrackingly slow. But Mungiu has his own way of creating suspense, and he has a gift for making a known outcome as shocking as a twist.

Most are exercises in sickening bad taste, with an emphasis on human bodily functions. The biggest stinkers? “T Is for Toilet” and “F Is for Fart.”

Pineda is lovely, but I stopped believin’ in this documentary long before it was over.

Director Baran bo Odar puts all this in the service of ghastly clichés. The rape of children has long since grown nauseatingly familiar, in books, in films, in each season of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Part of the limp-rag ambience is due to Talt, who seems to be channeling Sarah Jessica Parker — which, unsurprisingly, does not work. Mostly it’s due to the script, which fails to meet the major romantic-comedy requirement of being clever about keeping lovers apart. All by itself, “The hero is kind of a drip” doesn’t cut it.

While a mob thriller can be as nasty as it likes, what it can’t be is silly.

“Let’s show ’em some good old-fashioned American swagger,’’ MacArthur says on his arrival in Tokyo. It’s too bad director Webber and the screenwriters, David Klass and Vera Blasi, didn’t take his advice to heart instead of largely wasting Jones and some very nice period details.

Save your money and wait for the new 3-D version of the 1939 classic that Warner Bros. has promised for later this year.

Just because your comedy is dumb doesn’t mean it’s funny.

Todd Robinson’s Phantom gives us a couple of things we haven’t seen in a while: the great Ed Harris and a Cold War submarine thriller. It’s not something you want to plunk down $12 for, but just diverting enough to check out when it arrives on Netflix Instant.

Most of the humor, though, is wan, exemplified by letters like “Dear General Lee: Sounds great! Please proceed with your plan.”

The adventurous souls who stick with it, however, will find head-spinning images and a cumulative impact that does, in fact, amount to a story.

Brutality and tenderness are a potent mix in War Witch.

Molly’s Theory of Relativity is anti-cinema. All hope for any plot atrophies as Molly and her husband discuss their possible move to Norway with the wit and passion of a representative reading a tribute to Calvin Coolidge into the Congressional Record.

By the movie’s end, the party guests may be ready to dance the hora — or they may find themselves sitting this one out. “Hava” will have its revenge, however: It’s still stuck in my head.

I don’t know how many sex scenes featuring Winstone and Atwell you can handle, but the movie breaches my limit, which is a firm zero.

Sure, it’s got its horror aspects. But for my money, this movie belongs alongside “Secretary,” “Ginger Snaps” and “Thirteen” in the family of deliciously dark female coming-of-age stories.

This digitally tricked-out fairy tale makes for a reasonably engaging kids’ fantasy, but at best we’re talking about a junior varsity “Lord of the Rings.” It’s March. What did you expect?

Mostly, though, it all ends up feeling like a lost, minor episode of “The X-Files:” A little scary, a little silly and catnip for those who want to believe.

11 Flowers boils down to a coming-of-age tale merged with a why-dunit — not unlike “To Kill a Mockingbird” — but the plot is molasses-slow, as threads are dropped, picked up and dropped again.

Nature films don’t come any more spectacular than the BBC’s One Life.

The next time Siddig plays a man of intrigue, let’s hope he’s chasing something more interesting than a clueless kid.