Shooting in South Africa and Botswana, director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee never lacks for atmosphere, but his film is painfully awkward in execution, from the stiff dialogue to the time-padding slo-mo sequences and glaring CGI.

Beyond Outrage fails to live up to its title as Japanese superstar Takeshi Kitano can’t find much in the way of fresh ideas for the genre.

An intriguingly Hitchcockian premise gradually takes on a preposterous air in the art-world noir The Best Offer.

Even the audience at whom the movie is aimed — the crowd for whom dinner and a movie means meeting up at 3 p.m. — will be bored by the stale funk coming off every scene.

There’s little sense of urgency, or — oddly, given the film’s title — of scale. You never really think that the 47 are truly outnumbered, and the large action scenes are often just incomprehensible.

By refusing to consider that Dickens and Ternan ever brought each other any happiness, the movie is more Victorian in its attitudes than even some Victorians were.

Hoogendijk ends the movie just before the museum reopens; but her last, soaring image is a stirring vision of what made all the agita worthwhile.

If The Past doesn’t equal the masterpiece that preceded it, it’s still an exceptional film from a man who is clearly one of the best working directors.

Poor John Leguizamo, who hopefully got well-paid to voice a stereotypical Latino bird providing a stream of nonsensical narration.

This is, by some distance, the best movie of the three, and it showcases the impeccable symmetry of his compositions, while retaining his compulsion to wag a finger in your face.

It is admirably unsparing and gloomily atmospheric. And I looked at my watch a bunch of times.

The story of a guy who never goes anywhere or does anything. Until he goes everywhere and does everything, but he might as well have stayed home.

There hasn’t been this bizarre mixture of hooah and death since John Wayne hung up his combat boots.

There is still enough venom spilled in August: Osage County to make this drama relatable to anyone who’s suffered through a wildly dysfunctional family dinner — and who hasn’t, especially at this time of year?

Jonze seems to be heading for a far quirkier ending than the one he actually delivers, but he does tap into the zeitgeist with his unlikely romantic fable.

Anchorman 2 is like watching “Anchorman” being re-enacted by semi-professionals trying to cover up their lapses by being extra-emphatic, super-doofy: 2013 Steve Carell does a lousy impression of 2004 Steve Carell.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

Nuclear Nation is likely to attract those who already oppose such power plants. But supporters should see it, too, if only to hear the opposition’s arguments. The film raises issues that aren’t going away.

Minus its smirky twist ending, it’d make perfect material for New York’s new “That’s Abuse” domestic violence awareness campaign.

The movie is essentially a theater piece in which Nolan (Walker) is mostly alone on screen, making use of what he finds a la John McClane, but without the smart pacing or inventiveness of “Die Hard.”

There are probably enough moments to satisfy hard-core fans, but for the rest of us, this amounts to the Middle Earth equivalent of “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones,’’ a space-holding, empty-headed epic filled with characters and places (digital and otherwise) that are hard to keep straight, much less care about.

American Hustle is a movie that was built backward, or inside out: It puts actors’ needs before the audience’s. There’s no heart under those polyester lapels, and what all that Aqua Net is pasting together is a few sparse strands of wispy story.

Except for a couple of isolated, mildly subversive moments, Hanks is basically playing the genial host of “The Wonderful World of Disney’’ rather than an actual person.

Highly entertaining documentary.

It’s all terribly talky and low-energy; that wonderful noirish title, it turns out, was just a front for a history lecture.

The film strains credulity as it hurtles toward its conclusion.

Despite all its problems, The Last Days on Mars serves up a deliciously shivery hypothetical: Wouldn’t we all secretly love it if the Mars rover sent back footage of a “walker” or two?

About the only reason to stay with this increasingly histrionic film is to satisfy curiosity about exactly how Diego will (as we learn at the outset) die, but long before we learn that Twice Born chokes to death on its own melodrama.