There is a lot to admire here. Writer-director Alejandro Monteverde (Bella) is not afraid to take his time letting you get to know the characters or moving things along, but the movie never seems ponderous.

The Road Within backfires by emphasizing the same quirks and imbalances it seeks to soften. Reducing it to the genre of idiot comedy doesn’t advance the cause, either.

As a director, Mr. Crowe’s camera meanders all over the place; as an actor, he mumbles and growls his way through the carnage like it was nothing more important than a re-make of Gladiator, filmed on old sets from Gene Autry westerns.

It’s a metaphorical stretch for a simple movie title, but never mind. Closer to the Moon still manages to be a strange blend of history, black humor and art.

True Story trips and stumbles so much in the telling that you don’t know what to believe, and instead of one man’s irony you end up with two men’s lies.

The formulaic cat-and-mouse game played to the death rattle by Michael Douglas’ rich, vicious corporate maniac and Jeremy Irvine’s nice, clean-cut, homespun country boy in Beyond the Reach is so old it’s hairy.

This one is no scarier than running out of ink in the middle of a midterm exam.

The movie moves as slowly as the oncoming fog, but Juliette Binoche is always a pleasure to watch, despite an awkward coda set in London that I found jarring.

From this less than enchanting excuse for a feature-length movie comes 5 to 7, featuring delicious performances, extremely witty dialogue without the customary Hollywood television punch lines, a convincing believability quotient, and some beautiful cameos, especially by Glenn Close and Frank Langella as Mr. Yelchin’s disapproving but modern, adaptable parents.

Written by Emma Thompson, it’s literate and respectful, but a dose of lithium in a champagne glass that is too stolid to ever come alive.

It’s a touching film that entertains with warmth and humor while teaching us something about history, law and justice with enormous heart, subtlety and compassion, brilliantly acted and skillfully written. Is there anything Helen Mirren cannot do?

This is an unfortunate next step for Mr. Cooper, while Ms. Lawrence, who co-starred with him memorably in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle," finds the third time far from a charm, more like a curse.

A dreary bummer.

Danny Collins is nothing to write home about, but it kept me entertained without too much guilt, and I didn’t wince. By today’s American movie standards, that’s becoming very high praise indeed.

For meat-headed incoherence, a badly written, poorly directed and confusingly acted muddle of global nonsense, The Gunman is another ill-conceived entry in the latest dopey trend of middle-aged men blowing up stuff.

Every generation gets a new one, and this time, replete with computer graphics and singing mice, Kenneth Branagh has created a live-action fairy tale that pulls out every stop and spares no expense.

An idiotic bore called The Lovers has so little connection with anything professional that it’s hard to believe it was written and helmed by the same man. It’s so deadly and unintentionally funny (I hope) that it practically defies description.

Written and directed with precision and sensitivity by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), it revives the pleasant art of storytelling most of today’s young filmmakers have all but abandoned, and cures (temporarily, anyway) my allergy to Adam Sandler.

The senior set deserves a few crumpets with their tea, and Part Two, which takes up where the original left off, aims to satisfy.

Anthony Hopkins plays the king of the hops, and he is excellent. So is the rest of the movie, a sober, no-frills account about the highest ransom ever collected up to that time — $10 million and counting.

October Gale features picturesque scenery, crisply photographed by Jeremy Benning, and composed in shots that could pass for glossy tourist postcards. The two stars are pretty to look at, but Canada is hard to upstage.

The salacious sadism in Everly is nothing more than "Die Hard" meets Victoria’s Secret. That is not a recommendation.

She’s (Moore) the best thing in this toxic carnage of creepy, self-indulgent decadence, but under the direction of loopy Canadian David Cronenberg, she goes beyond the limit of acceptable artistry.

It’s beautifully photographed and entertaining, with charming performances by Will Smith and newcomer Margot Robbie that tease and tantalize. You won’t be bored.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many thrills and the pace is so slow that I fell asleep from tedium waiting for something that resembled a goose bump.

It might prove to be too insular to appeal to a wider movie audience, but to a passionate Anglophile like me, Queen and Country is a funny and nostalgic portrait of a bleak, rationed postwar England still digging its way out of the rubble.

This dumb movie turns from dubious to preposterous.

Expensive, derivative and boring as mattress ticking masquerading as designer fabric.