Ryan Reynolds is chillingly perfect as a nice-guy factory worker struggling with schizophrenia and murderous impulses in this tonally wild indie, which is nearly too horrifying to be funny — but not quite.

It’s mainly instructive in that it shows how liberals believe the end always justifies the means.

Ultimately, for the show’s fans, it may not matter if “Sponge Out of Water” shows a hint of mildew. After all, my co-critic’s most enthusiastic note — “Hilarious!” — was written before the lights even dimmed.

I know this is a teen-boy fantasy — it was produced by Michael Bay, after all — but the female characters in Project Almanac are lamely retro, little more than props in short shorts.

Girlhood veers between being a celebration of sisterhood (albeit an occasionally violent sort) and a chronicle of the cycle of poverty.

A sci-fi actioner with the production values of your average porno, Alien Outpost spews clichés like a machine gun set on maximum triteness.

Though somewhat marred by cheesy docudrama re-enactments, the film (produced by Steven Spielberg’s sister Nancy) is nutty, dramatic, surprising and above all inspiring.

Each scene is breathtaking, such as a long shot of a river at a key moment, and an unforgettable soccer game played with no ball. Timbuktu deserves every accolade it gets.

Despite excellent performances by Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer and other cast members, Mike Binder’s racially tinged custody battle drama Black or White never achieves much in the way of dramatic credibility.

A better cast this time around — Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Sofía Vergara and Max Casella, with cameos by Jason Alexander, Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis — tries to breathe life into Goldman’s cliché-ridden plot.

Unintended laughs far, far outnumber intended thrills.

A jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas’ inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the “Star Wars’’ creator’s favorite pop tunes.

Mortdecai is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.

Dolan embraces passion and melodrama to a refreshing degree, and Dorval and Clément are terrific. But Mommy can be exhausting; the structure and plot rhythms are all over everywhere. A montage to “Wonderwall” (every last note of it) seems to sum up the movie; too much, but exhilarating all the same.

Son of a Gun, from first-time feature director Julius Avery, begins with an enticingly dark first act in jail, but descends steadily downward into a mass of clichés.

It’s not quite “Once,” but Song One, featuring original music by Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice, captures a similar, unselfconscious beauty in the way music can make sense of big, ungainly emotions — as James puts it, “for three to five whole minutes.”

Not that a film as taut and exciting as this one needs punchy dialogue, but Black Sea has that, too.

Gunning for the near-annual Ugly Makeup Oscar, Aniston proves, as always, a modestly gifted actress, only this time with scars and weedy hair.

Pacino demonstrates considerable comic chops in The Humbling — which has some interesting similarities to “Birdman.’’ It loses some momentum in its third act, but provides plenty of juicy material for a terrific cast.

An intriguing sci-fi thriller, but in the end it doesn’t do enough with its ideas.

Director Uberto Pasolini (“Machan”) has a gem in Marsan, a virtuoso actor who plays the role delicately where another might have laid on the pathos too thick.

Patrick Stewart knocks it out of the park as a Juilliard School dance teacher forced to spill his biggest secrets in Match, which playwright Stephen Belber effectively directed and adapted from his own Broadway play.

How English is this movie? As English as a cold, rainy day at the beach. As English as the politeness that masks hostility, as English as a pie that contains meat, as English as secretly wishing you lived in some other country.

This Michael Mann-directed film is full of Michael Mann-isms, many of them familiar from, and done better in, “Heat.”

Melding a morality play with a glossy soap, Italy’s Human Capital is a fairly successful balance of entertainment and ideas.

The Wedding Ringer is not so much a rom-com as an anatomy lesson. And the lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls.

Though the film, based on a Ron Rash novel, doesn’t quite deliver on all its grim portents, debut director David Burris creates a neo-Faulknerian atmosphere of indelible sin in a story that rises above cliché. As Wyle’s character puts it, “The South was never one thing.”

Weirder and more contemplative than many of its time-traveling brethren, Predestination is a stylish head trip. It also marks Australian actor Snook as one to watch, as she demonstrates some serious gender-bending range.