A remarkable attempt to portray what might turn soccer-playing boys into fanatical murderers.

Rookie filmmaker Michael Maren’s script isn’t deep, but it’s heartfelt without being sticky, suggesting that the best way to deal with aging parents is to savor every tender frustration while you can.

Nobody does the rebellious-elder thing as well as Duvall, and whenever he’s center stage in A Night in Old Mexico, this scrappy film from Spanish director Emilio Aragon is entertaining enough.

Phoenix, who was so subtle in “Her” and brilliantly tortured in “The Master,” has lapsed back into the shouty bombast style of his “Gladiator” days, but his efforts to make the character seem layered are to little avail, especially given that Gray waits until the end to try to make him a tragic figure instead of merely a sleazy one.

Fatally mild, slow and factory-made, Million Dollar Arm belongs somewhere less competitive than the multiplex. Like the ABC Family Channel — the entertainment industry minor leagues.

In a move sure to infuriate “nanny state” critics, director Stephanie Soechtig names the US government and food corporations responsible for a campaign to get Americans addicted to junk food — particularly, and most dangerously, sugar — as early as possible.

Based on a lesser-known Dostoyevsky work, Brit director Richard Ayoade’s breathtakingly realized oddity will appeal to fans of David Lynch and the comic surrealism of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

Colin Firth plays a real-life investigator whom the script renders as noble as Atticus Finch. Reese Witherspoon does haunting work as a victim’s mom. But the stately pace and the faultless art direction add to the impression that truth was not only stranger, but more dramatic.

A central problem: Efron isn’t funny.

Consistently stale but not altogether unpleasant.

The result is a thoughtful, dreamlike (at times, nightmarish) tour through the day-to-day lives of several suburban California teens.

Stage Fright starts out as a funny musical mashup — “Glee” meets“Friday the 13th” — but winds up indulging slasher-flick clichés instead of spoofing them.

As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives God’s Pocket an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.

James Franco, all is forgiven. His woebegotten “Oz: The Great and Powerful’’ is practically a masterpiece compared to this eyeball-gougingly ugly, charm-free animated musical sequel.

He’s great as a celebrity chef who’s forced to re-examine his priorities in this extremely funny and big-hearted comedy that Favreau also wrote.

Vanity, thy name is Kevin Spacey.

Both actresses are extraordinary, but Kulesza — bitter, sarcastic and tragic — carries the movie’s soul.

The striking Thierry brings her character to nuanced life on screen.

Well-intentioned, if ultimately underwhelming, ode to the ongoing fight for a cure.

Director Marvin Kren delivers a lot of cheap scares, but the film doesn’t approach the dread-soaked suspense of the 1982 version of “The Thing.”

A buddy comedy that reeks like stale underpants.

If you were wondering what “12 Years a Slave” might have been like as a two-part episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” you might want to check out this unsatisfying but not uninteresting oddity. It renders another historical story about race with exquisite taste but not much in the way of passion.

Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly overload their too-long film with subplots. Yet the actors — including a terrific Aiden Gillen (“Game of Thrones”) as Casper’s no-good father — perform as though unaware that any of this is a cliché.

The Amazing Spider-Man is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.

A captivating Tom Hardy is in the driver’s seat for the one-man show Locke, but like many experimental films, this one suffers from its self-imposed constraints.

Not many surprises are in store, but the film’s affection for the dramatist is pleasing.

Dystopia’s supposed to be worse than what’s in the papers, fellas. Try to keep up.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.