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.

With ravishing landscapes, violent political allegory and a glacial narrative that takes an abrupt left turn in the third act: Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja resolutely checks every 2015 art-film box.

The very German lack of emotion is so acute it can be hard to tell when Hausner’s playing for laughs, but Friedel is hilariously — if morbidly — tedious as the tortured writer whose pickup line is, “Would you care to die with me?”

Like Cam, Tracers is fun to look at, if not too bright, and even includes a line I can only assume is a winking reference to Lautner’s claim to fame: “There can only be one alpha in every pack.”

This Cinderella is all dressed up with nowhere very interesting to go.

Run All Night is routine in its contours, occasionally sloppy in its editing and filled with the usual implausibilities.

Yet the film is marred by Hawke’s blundering intrusions as he keeps changing the subject to Hawke: He tells us he often wonders “why it is I do what I do,” as if anyone but he is interested in the answer.

Unlike many working in this genre, Mitchell doesn’t punish young women for having sex: This is a gender-blind demonic delivery vehicle.

Dreadful, misogynist slog of a film.

The documentary was filmed in the 1990s by Denny Tedesco, whose father Tommy is credited as the most recorded guitarist in history, including the instantly identifiable themes to “Bonanza” and “Mission: Impossible.”

In the last half-hour, themes start to gel. The final scenes are so good, even moving, that they make the earlier stuff look better. But a film concerned with the nature of emotion needs human engagement throughout.

A painfully earnest and totally unfunny magic-realist fable set on the Lower East Side that works in no way whatsoever.