The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It’s a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past. It’s as if millennial hipsterism, with its feigned fascination for all things retro, took a surprising further step: actual respect for learning, for experience, for wisdom.

Pollak obviously had fun, but you get the feeling the best bits never made it in.

The pleasant but forgettable Adult Beginners strains a bit too hard for a happy ending, and tends to lay on the schmaltz and metaphors (like the swim class that gives the film its title) with a trowel.

Though Wilkinson gives an atypically restrained performance that lends the movie its best moments, and Watson manages to breathe a little life into her underwritten character, the movie is hopelessly simple-minded, with corny fantasy sequences, slathered-on folksiness and a plot twist that it would take a miracle of self-delusion not to see coming.

Soggy, strictly by-the-numbers crime thriller.

Crowe makes the most of his own quiet presence, and this ode to the world’s never-recovered soldiers and their families is a fitting meditation on the insanity of war.

It’s his home movies with Love and baby — some playful, others drugged and drooling — that fans will find the most emotional viewing. As the credits roll, it’s hard not to just root for the sensitive, progressive, fiercely creative Cobain and wish that he’d lived long enough to find a little peace of mind.

Just Before I Go is a “Garden State” retread in which filthy jokes gradually cede ground to sentimental slush.

Is it never funny? No, it’s not never funny. It’s just not funny nearly often enough.

More funny than scary.

Franco’s distancing routine helps sink True Story, an already turgid and tone-deaf adaptation of a self-serving memoir by a disgraced New York Times reporter (played by two-time Oscar nominee Jonah Hill) who bonds with a murderer he’s trying to exploit.

Tender, heartfelt and exquisitely dull, the drama Félix and Meira illustrates the perils of trying to tell an emotional love story with meaningful stares and long pauses.

Antarctic Edge will make good viewing for science classes of all levels, and ideally inspire a new generation to continue this hardy mission.

On the whole, though, you couldn’t do much better than Monkey Kingdom to get kids invested in learning about, and protecting, the natural world.

Ivo’s farmhouse looks leftover from another century, which gives a timeless feeling, as does the regal bearing of Ulfsak and the dry humor of the script. The film telegraphs its pacifist message early on, but it’s still deeply affecting.

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

Calling Child 44 a mash-up of “Dr. Zhivago” and “Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t do enough to capture how strange it is.

Coming down too hard on this load of schmaltz — as I said when reviewing my first Sparks adaptation back in 2002 — feels like taking a baseball bat to a sack full of newborn kittens.

The heart of Dior and I is with these seamstresses and cutters, artists in their own right.

It may fall into some conventional paces as a triumph-over-adversity story, but Desert Dancer does manage to movingly convey the chilling, ultimately triumphant experience of Ghaffarian’s struggle for creative expression under a regime that tried to crush it.

About Elly shows that the ethical dilemmas of ordinary adults can, with this level of talent, become as gripping as any thriller.

The bloodshed is artful, at least.

A circle of lowlifes gradually kill one another off to no great effect in the dull and woebegone comic noir Kill Me Three Times.

Ex Machina offers plenty of intriguing style but a spotty story line.

A backstage drama that has all the sizzle of a glass of water resting on the windowsill, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria mistakes lack of dramatic imagination for smoldering subtlety.

Intrigue doesn’t begin until the last third of the movie, which is by far the best part. The Victorian melodrama in Effie Gray works better than the Victorian suffering.

Proving it’s still possible to stick to the broad contours of “The Graduate” story and come up with something brightly endearing, 5 to 7 is a memorable directorial debut for “Mad Men” writer Victor Levin.

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.