A movie about bisexuals sounds fresh and fun on paper, but a sensitive acoustic song under the opening credits shows exactly where The Happy Sad is going. Deadly earnestness and sex don’t mix well at the movies.

Farahani determinedly underplays her character, and is often very touching. But while there is a satisfying final scene, The Patience Stone is essentially a monologue, and Atiq Rahimi (directing the adaptation of his own novel) doesn’t have what it takes to make the story more dynamic.

It’s an entertaining melodrama of the old school that plays out with the clockwork inevitability of a “Columbo” episode.

Twi-hards, Beliebers and Whovians have nothing on the cult of Jane Austen, whose beribboned ranks are ripe for satire. Unfortunately, this scattershot comedy only occasionally hits the mark.

In mashing together story elements from Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” with the look of Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” Lowery put 90 percent of his energy into the atmosphere and 10 percent into the script.

The friction between a couple of still-struggling artists sounds rather depressing, but in fact the film is often funny; it shows that love is present in even the couple’s harshest exchanges.

This one is essentially “The Firm” with smartphones.

Jobs amounts to, at best, a Cliffs Notes version of the man’s early life. If you want the real story, you’ll have to read Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2011 biography, which would make a much better film than this one.

I do get a chuckle out of movies with wildly inappropriate behavior, rude language and ultramayhem, especially when they involve children, but Kick-Ass 2 sometimes felt like being trapped in a room with the funniest guy in seventh grade.

Although director Lee Daniels dials things down a bit here, subtlety is not what he does. That strategy worked for “Precious’’ but turned his more recent “The Paperboy’’ into a feature-length howler.

The landscape cinematography is often eye-pleasing, but the script is labored, filled with clichés and never allows for character development.

As pure comedy, it’s a hoot.

The Zipper is a carnival ride, a tumbling cage whose screaming customers are spun around like a Ferris wheel.

The final scenes, when Mancini meets Kim’s son, have the awkward feel of an “Oprah” episode, with the editing and music suggesting a catharsis that isn’t always backed up by what’s on-screen.

An uneasy mix of Richard Linklater and Abbott and Costello, Prince Avalanche is an oddment, but one that brings some small, peculiar pleasures.

This morbid, cruel movie seems leached of all things that might inadvertently give viewers pleasure.

My own voice-over would go something like this: “This summer. One woman. Will see this movie. Again.”

Often less really is more, and that’s why I can recommend Planes, a charmingly modest low-budget spin-off from Pixar’s “Cars’’ that provides more thrills and laughs for young children and their parents than many of its more elaborate brethren.

The superficial script doesn’t go nearly deep enough to begin explaining Lovelace.

Like some hybrid beast out of Greek mythology, this young-adult sequel has the body of a “Harry Potter,” the head of a “Twilight,” the feet of a “Hunger Games” and the tail, oddly, of a “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

For a 99 percenter movie, then, Elysium is kind of a head-scratcher. It throws away its best opportunity for drama. It’s as if Han and Leia parked on the Death Star and started asking, “How much is a two-bedroom around here?”

The movie, directed by the formerly promising Rawson Marshall Thurber (the hilarious “Dodgeball” and the awful “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”), thinks it’s subverting the conventions of the sitcom with a revolutionary new idea, which is: Do everything exactly the way a sitcom would, plus lots of swearing and dirty jokes.

Cardinale’s few brief scenes are the ones with the most depth; her facial lines really did come along with some wisdom.

Breakup at a Wedding works, because Quinaz has come up with a concept that lets him skewer directorial pretension alongside wedding hysteria.

I’m a sucker for films with great surfing footage, let alone wacky ’70s hairstyles. But this overlong, cliché-infested Aussie period drama tested my patience.

The sincerity and simplicity of the film, however, lift it somewhat above the ordinary run.

The teen movie The Spectacular Now begins like “Say Anything” but soon turns into “Drink Anything.”

Superficial and hokey yet still oddly endearing.