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.