The villains are all wrong, the motivations are muddy, even the gadgetry is off. And the swaggering genius at the center of it all has become a preening fool.

Just because two people are miserable doesn’t mean they’re interesting.

The agent in this interesting little thriller — well played by John Cusack — is up to the Company’s usual dirty tricks.

Alas, the film’s relevance — and ultimately sane upshot — is buried beneath a meandering and oftimplausible plot.

In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”

The result is no masterpiece, but neither is it a disaster. In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.

Morales’ spin on the old ransom plot is fresher and more gripping than most big-budget Hollywood products.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

Mud runs over two hours, climaxing with a shootout that belongs in a different movie. It’s a rare misstep in an art-house movie that will pull mainstream audiences along as inexorably as the Mississippi River. Go see it.

One of the best films released so far this year, At Any Price signals the arrival of Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani in the ranks of major US directors.

“I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch The Big Wedding.

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

Director Christian Charles gets some comic mileage from the inimitable Walsh and Rae, but it’s ultimately hard to care too much about a caddish protagonist like Norman — or, for that matter, about the clichéd “women are crazy!” sentiment that hums nastily under the antics of Dori’s unorthodox family gathering.

Bhalla’s advocacy gets its force above all from the oddly similar personalities of the two main subjects — Wallace and Sumell — zealous reformers possessed of astonishing optimism, even as Bhalla closes by noting that there are 80,000 prisoners in solitary in the US.

In the House promises to be a social satire with a flash of Hitchcockian menace, but gradually it turns into a routine thumb-sucker on reality versus fiction.

Movies by Rob Zombie, the goth rocker turned cult filmmaker, aren’t for everybody. But he couldn’t care less. He makes movies exactly the way he wants to, with no thought of pleasing mainstream audiences. They can like it or lump it. His latest effort, The Lords of Salem, is true to form.

It’s a sympathetic portrait of an artist whose heart lay more with new work than old glories, right up to the end.

Whatever the unanswered mysteries of Jay’s personal life, just watching this magician’s hands at work with a deck of cards is positively mesmerizing.

Without an exceptionally skilled director of actors (such as Cameron Crowe), Cruise can’t dial up much emotion, so the two love interests for his character are two more than he can convincingly handle. He may be at home in the cockpit of a killing machine, but when it comes to displaying his humanity, he’s no Wall-E.

This is a horror movie that’s really a supposed comedy; she’s (Lohan) a supposed comedy actress who’s actually scary.

Soulful though the film is, melodrama gradually sneaks in, and then it takes over.

A trove of home videos, vintage commercial and propaganda footage and black-and-white animation dress up this energetic if somewhat unfocused look at the birth of skateboarding in the German Democratic Republic.

The debut film of Brandon Cronenberg deals out shivers and flinches in little hypodermic jabs.

At age 76, Loach also decided to offer his characters, and audience, some hope — at the bottom of a glass.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.

Typically, To the Wonder seems mostly locked in the thoughts of its characters, whispered so only we can hear, with no more actual back-and-forth dialogue than would cover the back of your ticket stub.

42 may not be a home run, but it’s certainly a solid three-base hit as worthy family entertainment.