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.

Dryly comic, arch, sleek, and suffused with mood-setting tracks by the likes of X and Depeche Mode, Electric Slide has some of the mordant absurdity of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. Like its dim hero, it’s going nowhere, but traveling in style.

This ponderous drama from director Kazuaki Kiriya quickly gets weighed down by its own blood-drenched armor.

Though Valderrama gives a standout performance as the avenging Angel, brother of the late Jesus (Kareem Savion), two smaller roles are also worthy of note: Paz de la Huerta as a spacy bartender at Pianos, and J. Bernard Calloway as Dre, a bouncer who’s seen it all, and who can be reliably found eating a healthy salad as he sits outside his nightspot.

Could easily have become a schmaltzy variation on “Whiplash.” But it’s not, thanks to astringent direction by François Girard (“The Red Violin’’), an excellent cast and heavenly young voices.

Even the great Helen Mirren can do only so much to elevate this relentlessly mediocre, fact-inspired drama.

Despite James Wan’s capable direction and very game cast, the whole thing goes increasingly wobbly like a bad axle, until it’s just a tangle of metal and bullets and yelling.

If the jokes in Get Hard were a set of Jeopardy categories, they’d read as follows: Things Will Ferrell Puts Up His Butt, Butt Rape, Shots of Will Ferrell’s Bare Butt and Satirical Comparisons of Violent and Nonviolent Crime Not Excluding Mentions of Balzac.

Grunting and boarlike, Gérard Depardieu supplies a one-note rendition of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Abel Ferrara’s peculiarly unilluminating Welcome to New York.

The film is hard on the eyes, having been shot in a low-budget style with the ubiquitous digital palette of gray-beige-taupe. Fortunately, it’s also hilarious, full of humor that is understated, wry and dependent on familiarity with interests as wide as Houellebecq’s own.

The choppily edited and thoroughly wooden Serena utterly fails to catch fire, even when everything literally goes up in flames. So despite its big stars, it’s getting only a token theatrical release.

Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young amounts to the most hilarious Woody Allen movie in forever.

Many of the images — and Salgado’s accounts of taking them — are as soul-shattering as they are breathtaking.

White God has been compared to “The Birds,” but there are also echoes of “Lassie Come Home” and even “Dirty Harry.” Director Kornél Mundruczó goes big with allegory, violence, drama and sentiment, and the results are riveting.

It’s refreshing to see a nonwhite lead, and the husky-voiced pop singer is likable as a brave-hearted kid searching for her mother. But man, is there a lot of Rihanna in this movie: She also provides what seems like the entirety of the film’s soundtrack, making it feel like a vanity project (is “vanimation” a thing?).

Despising the British upper class is so utterly common, as we see in The Riot Club, a farcically heavy-handed attempted satiric takedown of an elite group of Oxford students.

You know you’re in for a long haul when Kate Winslet’s clipboard-wielding Jeanine, leader of the Erudite faction, comes off less like a Hillary Clinton than a weary Applebee’s supervisor at the end of a 14-hour shift in this plodding sequel to “Divergent.”

Watching Penn pump iron and denounce capitalism for two hours would be roughly as illuminating as this monotonous Euro-thriller.

Certainly watchable, but don’t go expecting much in the way of surprises.

Struggling for the same vibe as male-bonding comedies like “Diner,” Growing Up & Other Lies instead feels like a really long beer commercial, except beer commercials usually contain at least one witty idea.