The Second Mother is an interesting look at generational and class divides in Brazil, without the feel of a lecture or lesson.

Moss and Waterston are incredible, and even though Queen of Earth is purposefully not a readily digestible film, they keep it intensely interesting.

Phase II has some nice comic touches, but it's a forgettable B-movie.

A story of companionship, loneliness, resilience. It's a small, artfully crafted thing, but it resonates in big ways.

Until Steak(R)evolution gets repetitive, it's fascinating to see how everything, from culture to politics, affects what we eat and how we eat it.

Isn't the whole handheld "real-video" thing kind of old by now? Isn't the Shyamalanian-twist thing kind of old by now, too?

Chloe & Theo is a mess of a message movie, simplistic, sappy, silly.

There are some terrifically strong scenes and terrific actors contributing to them.

Brings home the complexities and contradictions of the man.

There are the bare bones of a plot, but the true purpose of this animated feature is to highlight Gibran's poetic essays, recited sonorously by Liam Neeson.

Digging for Fire, like last year's "Happy Christmas" (also with Kendrick) and 2013's "Drinking Buddies" (with Johnson and Kendrick), is not a film for fans of taut, crafted dialogue and definitive endings. Conversations drift and weave, as do the people having them. Narcissistic melancholy dukes it out with beer-and-pot-stoked merriment. There is longing. There is foolhardiness.

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

Unsullied was made by a director with real promise. It's a shame Rice picked this turkey to shoot as his first

Like "Compliance," Z for Zachariah shows how terrifying and redeeming interpersonal relationships can be. We crave human contact, yet it can still destroy us, even at the end of the world.

Perhaps it's for the best that We Are Your Friends doesn't try to appeal to anyone outside its stars' own kind. Fewer people will have to see it.

A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies.

Rosenwald tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man.

An honest and personal and unblurred examination (even through that druggy blur) of a tricky voyage into womanhood.

If you strip away all the gunplay, Hitman: Agent 47 would be about 10 minutes long.

A loving ode to screwball comedies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that never approaches the films it pays homage to.

Best of Enemies offers a bracing view of a pivotal time in our recent history, as Vietnam and race riots scarred a nation's soul, and as the Establishment and the Counter Culture exchanged epithets and blows.

Comparisons to HBO's "Girls" will abound, but Fort Tilden has a more satirical bent than Lena Dunham's much-talked-about show.

A lot of energy and effort has gone into this endeavor, and I can't say some of it's not fun. But more of it, alas, is just tedious. Say uncle already.

There is intrigue. There is suspense. Guilt - a man's guilt, a nation's - hangs heavy in the air.

We're in the company of a great character here, with a lot on his mind, a lot to say.

Riley's film brings the American icon's career back into sharp focus.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

It's overstating things to say the stars of Fantastic Four are Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, because I can't remember the last time four actors appeared less invested in a movie for which they've teamed up.

Watching these young men brutalize each other is troubling enough, but perhaps the film's most interesting angle is how the experiment changes more than its subjects.

The intention is clear: Garneau wants to make his points as persuasive and accessible as possible. Yet, the truths That Sugar Film contains were already obvious decades ago. It's sad that we need reminding.

Although it often feels like a company-bankrolled promo film, A Lego Brickumentary answers all the questions both Lego novices and Lego nerds would want to know.

There's a difference between velocity and momentum, and while the chases, shootouts and close-quarters combat rarely flag, our interest does.

There's nothing to say that crass can't be funny - and it sometimes is in Daley and Goldstein's iteration - but Vacation loses any of the ooey-gooey, family-friendly heart that made you really want Clark to get to Walley World to begin with.

Baker gets great, sly, unforced performances from his two leads, but it's not all a rollicking good time: There are moments of quietude, inquietude, moments when a sense of wariness and loneliness settles over the women.

The chemistry between Smulders and Bean is simply terrific. Their performances almost save the film from its earnest, if bumbling, attempts to make a statement about the social, economic, and racial differences that divide the two characters.

The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

What keeps this cornball business from getting out of hand is the commitment of Gyllenhaal, whose performance is fierce and muscular, in and out of the ring.

A stunning examination of teenage cruelty, exploitation, and crime that refuses to give us the satisfaction of identifying with the characters.

Williams does a terrific job portraying Nolan's ambivalence, the mix of fear, guilt, and excitement that grips him and the gradual change he undergoes in the ensuing weeks.

While Thorpe ostensibly explores the sibilant consonants and careful enunciation that characterize what we have come to think of as "sounding gay," his film is really about his identity.

There's humanity here, on all sides, and a gentle wisdom beneath the raging rhetoric.

A mid-point twist is particularly ridiculous, and in an attempt to reconcile this turning point, the final act of the movie becomes a mess.

While it has considerable charms, Hippocrates is just too predictable.

Mr. Holmes is about how the past defines us. It is also very much about regret and trying to put things right.

Although its origin-story machinations get the better of it, Ant-Man isn't a bust.

Trainwreck is anything but.

Aloupis is not untalented as writer or helmer. But his first outing is an unsurprising, paint-by-the-numbers picture.

All nutty, all nonsensical, all aboard.

Cartel Land offers a chilling glimpse into a world of violence and vigilantism.

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

Asif Kapadia's extraordinary documentary, Amy, is filled with similarly soul-stirring, heartbreaking moments.

A breathtaking, disturbing look at urban angst and the emptiness of youth culture.

Eden is the kind of movie that hits you when you least expect it. Just when I thought it was a mess, its aimlessness began to make complete sense.

Deeply personal and filled with love, Maya Forbes' Infinitely Polar Bear is nonetheless a hard movie to watch - hard to watch comfortably.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

Students of sound design and horror-movie scores should see - or hear - Closer to God, which elicits more creepy scares than its transparent plot warrants, thanks to an unsettling audio mix and pulsing, percolating music from Thomas Nöla.

It's an interesting look at an often glossed-over aspect of the subculture - although the doc sags as it progresses into the mid-1990s and current modes of fashion.

When the films sticks with heart-tugging soldier stuff, it's not bad. When it goes beyond that premise, it becomes so entirely outlandish that it's not enjoyable anymore.

Winterbottom's films never bore. They do sometimes frustrate, provoke - even anger. That's the case with his entry in the true-story genre, The Face of an Angel.

Funny, wry, tragic, and deeply moving.

Messy and confused, the film is a mishmash of tropes from Shakespeare, heist movies, family melodrama, and romance novels hastily thrown together.

Inside Out is the first psychological thriller that's fun for the whole family. Really psychological. And really fun.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

Acts more like a primer for newbies unfamiliar with the show's history, giving no real insight into Lorne Michaels' long-running creation.

Jurassic World, like its genomed nemesis, is bigger, and it is pretty scary. But it's not nearly as cool, or as smart, as "Jurassic Park."

Deserves to be considered on its own merits, and while not a masterpiece, it is beautiful, nonetheless.

I'll See You in My Dreams is delicate and nuanced, with writing that rejects, or at least reshapes, the cliches of movies about people facing the glare of their sunset years.

A schmaltzy, deeply sentimentalized drama about American slavery and the rise of the Underground Railroad.

Feig, who wrote the Spy screenplay, encouraging his actors to improvise along the way, has his own stealth mission. For all the over-the-top comedy, zigzagging chases, and choreographed fight scenes, Spy is very much a tale of female empowerment.

Its daring dive into the mind of Brian Wilson feels right. God only knows (to borrow a Pet Sound song title or two), but you still believe in . . . Brian.

Let sleeping bros lie.

Sunshine Superman, named for the Donovan song, is about more than just Boenish. It's about the power of the image, something that Strauch uses to great effect.

This peripatetic farce practically propels itself.

Fails to bring Giger to life in any kind of illuminating way.

Quite literally the blockbuster of the year.

Dreamy and impressionistic, full of debauchery, drugs, disco, and dazzling couture, Saint Laurent is a biopic that picks its moments, leaving backstory behind.

One of the most insightful films about the War on Terror since 9/11.

A fascinating, suspenseful story about obsessive love, money, the Mafia, and murder.

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

Unlikely to be remembered in decades to come - or even in months to come, once the next teenage dystopian fantasy inserts itself into movie houses.

There's a fine line between bag lady and belle of the ball, and Apfel instinctively knows it. Her sense of style is uncanny.

Spinney comes across as a man whose warm spirit is literally at the core of the loving, if loopy Big Bird.

The sameness of the two movies doesn't make the second feel like a re-tread. If anything, it feels comfortable.

George Miller's Fury Road is a hundred things at once: a biker movie, a spaghetti western, a post-apocalyptic dystopian action pic, a tale of female empowerment (The Vagina Monologues' Eve Ensler was a consultant on set), a Bosch painting made scary 3D real, a Keystone Kops screwball romp, and an auto show from hell.

At turns horribly funny and simply horrific, Piven's film suggests our therapeutic age has reduced us all to psychic cripples who resort to emotional exhibitionism in lieu of honest self-examination and self-expression.

Always, murmuring just beneath the surface, there's a political undercurrent to Farhadi's films, a gentle whisper of a critique aimed at the weight of Iran's combined cultural and political intransigence.

5 Flights Up is a sweet film with a few nicely turned lines, some good jokes, and some very lovely dialogue. But it's not much more than fluff and air.

The line between ha-ha funny and sorrowful reverence has been crossed - more deftly than you'd think.

This quiet, aching film - punctuated by dead-on music choices, a blues song, reggae, the requisite Leonard Cohen - doesn't answer those questions. It's enough to raise them.

The thing's a behemoth. And as the franchise thunders on, it's also becoming more and more a bore.

Byrne and Kroll are the reasons to see Adult Beginners. The story itself feels truncated, like there are bits missing that we should see, ambling along.

A riveting sci-fi investigation into humankind's experiments with A.I. (with pages from Spike Jonze's Her and Stanley Kubrick's 2001), Ex Machina marks the extremely able directing debut of British writer Alex Garland, of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract," and of the screenplays for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" . . . and "Sunshine."

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

A small, dreamy romance.

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

Sadly, director Lee Toland Krieger's offering, a weak wanna-be Jean Cocteau-esque fable with magical realist pretensions, does great disservice to Lively and her remarkably accomplished costars.

Hugely affecting - and reflective and witty.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.