An ineffective, derivative, and awkwardly executed mash-up of ghost flicks and voodoo movies.

Gorgeous and disturbing, Big Hero 6 is a departure for Disney: a film targeted at older kids, and the studio's first venture into straight-up comic book culture. Walt would flip in his cryogenic chamber if he saw this anime-style production.

Einsteinian, Kubrickian, Malickian, Steinbeckian - Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's epically ambitious space opera, is all that. And more. And, alas, less.

The filmmakers don't bother hammering home a backstory or explaining why David is crazy. They just throw us in the deep end and dazzle us with a series of violent encounters that ends with a deadly chase in a surreal fun house maze of mirrors.

Firth is brilliant as a preternaturally patient man - every day he has to tell her the same exact story. But he has a creepy way about him. Is it love that drives him, or something darker?

Araki's films have never been known for their subtlety. Think Douglas-Sirk-meets-Johnny-Rotten. He tries to rein in his tendency for the baroque in White Bird in a Blizzard, but he pushes the story too far in the direction of the grotesque.

Adapted from the devilishly clever 1955 novel by master crime author Georges Simenon, The Blue Room is a dazzling deconstruction of the mystery genre that turns its conventions on their heads.

This is a complicated story, but it's efficiently laid out by Poitras in this smartly edited project. She has posed Citizenfour as the final piece of a post-9/11 trilogy that began with "My Country, My Country" (about the 2006 elections in Iran) and "The Oath" (about Guantanamo).

Yet, despite a mesmerizing performance by Gyllenhaal - he's as transfixing as a cobra in a snake charmer's dance - and a terrific turn by Riz Ahmed as an unskilled homeless kid Louis hires as his assistant, Nightcrawler doesn't quite have the satirical smarts that made "Network" a classic.

Lieberher, a Philly native transplanted to L.A., is a reed-thin, wide-eyed wonder. There's none of that precocious Hollywood child-actor stuff going on; he's seriously thinking about what he has to say, assessing his words and their implications. It's rare to see any actor - let alone a novice, barely out of the single digits - so readily and naturally displaying inner thought in front of the camera.

The Best of Me is neither worse than his other films nor particularly better. At 118 minutes, it is, however, one of the longest. Interminably long, dragging out its molasses heart through what seem like three different endings.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

Although it's pretty much impossible to avoid the cliches and constructs of a war movie, Ayer pushes his actors to find the adrenalized fear, and fire, in their guts. Pitt brings "Wardaddy" alive in ways that put his cartoonish "Inglourious Basterds" Army lieutenant to shame. Lerman's rabbity dread is palpable.

With its improvisatory score (drummer Antonio Sanchez provides a hustling backbeat throughout), its seamless shots, its leaps into the surreal, and then back again into the excruciating, embarrassing real, Birdman ascends to the greatest of heights.

Clare Lewins' dizzyingly disjointed documentary, I Am Ali, has one thing going for it: its subject, boxing immortal Muhammad Ali.

Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly. Instead, it's just terrible.

Hong, who makes his feature debut here, has a masterful command of rhythm, beautifully weaving each strand of the narrative around that momentous opening scene.

Dracula Untold is a movie that gives good trailer. That's not surprising because it's a visually arresting saga. Unfortunately, the story in the final, full version is thicker than blood.

British screen stalwarts Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton appear as locals - he twitchy and reticent, she chatty and full of cheer, both with their hearts in the right place.

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

A sweet, if predictable, kids' comedy. But you have to overlook the conveniently inconsistent behavior of all the characters - except in Garner's case. She never establishes a character.

It hobbles its otherwise fascinating premise by descending into hagiography. Webb's story is a tragedy, to be sure, but portraying him as a saint and martyr does little to advance the truth.

Sure, there's a witty reference to another, vastly more momentous legal drama (To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Duvall's film debut). And yes, Farmiga gets to call out Downey, and stay in character, for "that hyper-verbal vocabulary vomit thing that you do." Small pleasures, in a bigger mess.

Even with a voice-over narration, and conversations with her dog, Robyn's nomadic quest is full of grand silences, all the better to take in the sky, the rocks, the world spinning underfoot. Wasikowska plays this wordless wanderer just right. That is, she makes her real.

A weak "Toy Story"-esque animated film for preschool kids made with little imagination, little art, and even less soul.

Sadly, Annabelle, a cheap, sleazy, low-budget prequel meant to explain the origins of that particular doll, is as undistinguished, uninteresting, and unscary as the worst of the Chucky films.

If a movie with suicide as a central theme can be deemed funny, then writer/director Craig Johnson has pulled it off, mixing heartache and humor and giving Wiig, especially, the opportunity to shine.

That's something else Ridley and his actors do: make you appreciate what a life it was - impossibly short, impossibly brilliant.

Identity theft and credit-card fraud never looked as exciting or sexy as in Plastic, a frothy little heist movie from Britain that starts off with great promise, only to devolve midway into an empty derivative shell of a film.

It's a wondrous mix of the momentous and mundane, the profound and the perverse, with Cave blues-talking his way through the goofy juxtapositions, the darkness, and the light.

A bleak, despairing testament to the cruelty of war, and how it mangles and defaces everyone it touches.

Filled with embarrassing gosh-golly moments about non-Western cultures, it's a staggering, and insulting, example of cultural myopia.

Two Night Stand, is a clever, if uneven, romcom about Generation Y's conflicted, paradoxical views of sex and love. Featuring strong dialogue and terrific performances, the film has moments of near-brilliance, but falls apart with a lame, conventional ending.

The Equalizer, which reteams Washington with his Training Day director, Fuqua, is an origin story, like the birth of Batman, or Daredevil. If audiences and star are so inclined, it's easy to see this premise and this character - a tough, taciturn gent burdened with regret and a very special skill set - going into Roman numerals.

The Green Prince is an extraordinary achievement. It has all the suspense of a great espionage yarn, but it's also a powerful moral document that calls into question the tactics of terrorism.

Some viewers will dismiss Autumn Blood as a pretentious Euro-art iteration of Straw Dogs. For those willing to be open to its experimentation and more charitable about its many faults, the film can provide a powerful experience and serve as an fascinating testament to the tenuous nature of the social contract.

It's bleak business, and as it hurries toward its explosive, expository conclusion, the film becomes nonsensical, too.

Love Is Strange has a gentleness about it, and an empathy, that inspire.

The Man on Her Mind, a mirthless, stagy romantic comedy about a pair of New York loners, isn't so much a story as a threadbare concept - a one-liner, really. An old, used-up one at that.

The film's conceit - mopey strangers meet, form a band, and take to the dance halls - has a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let's-put-on-a-show innocence, and exuberance.

For all its frank sexual language, Kelly & Cal is hardly revolutionary or shocking. It drags in the second act and has an ending so obvious, you can smell it from the opening scene.

Charming, emotionally resonant, yet nowhere as fresh and dramatic as its predecessor.

Wetlands is one of the most daring, visually arresting, innovative, and imaginative examples of filmmaking to come out of Europe in recent memory.

The raw emotions on display need no translation. David Mackenzie directs the film in a piercingly realistic style. His ingenious decision to forgo a score makes Starred Up even more immersive, because all you hear is the dehumanizing din of prison.

While it misses the mark most of the time, director Hilary Brougher's film has a promising story, an impressive cast, and occasional moments of grace.

A Summer's Tale is one of those movies where it looks like nothing is happening; there is a lot of walking and talking (against exquisite backdrops), dissections and discourse about the intricacies of romance, the false signals, the fickleness.

The Trip to Italy doesn't feel entirely new, but there's comfort in familiarity, too. And as Brydon and Coogan note in one discourse, it's the rare sequel (The Godfather: Part II) that's better than its forebear.

Life of Crime is like an errant golf putt that appears headed for the hole, but just keeps rolling and rolling, all the way off the green. In other words, just missed . . . by a mile.

An efficient, if not exactly inspiring, espionage thriller, full of high-tech gadgetry (surveillance drones! flash drives!) and low-tech action (car chases! shootouts! a shovel to the head!).

The script depends entirely too much on a succession of reporters, announcers, and spectators to provide context and detail in clunky, implausible dialogue.

If Matthew Weiner's Are You Here is good for anything, it's to illustrate how the themes and conflicts he has worked out with such depth and dexterity in all these seasons of "Mad Men" can go terribly amiss with the wrong actors, wrong backdrop, wrong tone, wrong time.

A delightful, oddball surprise.

Featuring an awe-inspiring, stellar performance by Parks and Recreation's (and Wilmington's) Aubrey Plaza as Beth, the film opens with the high school girl's short-lived death.

Any movie that considers the possibility of an afterlife, or the possibility that there isn't one, without first getting all postapocalyptic about it, merits some respect. Stay, Mia, stay!

Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi is going for a quiet, thoughtful character study: a modern woman, sure of herself, but still trying to come to terms with her place in the world.

The constant flipping between stagecraft and reality creates a dissonant static that prevents any satisfying connection with the film.

Mostly, Dinosaur 13 is far too long, slogging along without momentum or suspense. These events would have been better handled in a single installment of Dateline.

Their film would be even more compelling if it followed up with further reports, perhaps a few years apart, charting the three boys' fates.

Iceland is beautiful. Really, really, really - really - beautiful. That pretty much sums up the new feature film Land Ho! That message is the film's alpha and omega. Its raison d'être. Its soul and its being.

It's all head-spinning and lovely - and a little exhausting, too.

Hollywood's latest entry in that tried-and-true genre, the disaster movie, is . . . well, it's like . . . a totally gnarly roller-coaster ride!

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

Calvary is also just jaw-droppingly beautiful. McDonagh and cinematographer Larry Smith capture the four-seasons-in-one-day miracle that is Ireland, with its jagged stonescapes, roiling surf, fairie towns, and bracing skies.

What If boasts a couple of near-classic comic moments, one involving jalapeno peppers and a precipitous fall.

It would be curmudgeonly to count all the ways in which The Hundred-Foot Journey is unsurprising, unrealistic, unnecessary.

Nicely timed to cash in on the Ebola panic, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero - the prequel to the gross-out franchise about a lethal flesh-eating virus and its party-hardy victims - isn't going to do much for the tourism trade in the Dominican Republic.

Code Black is sobering stuff. The American health system, McGarry's film argues, is broken. But the film is undeniably inspiring, too: Despite everything that is wrong, there are nurses and doctors and technicians determined to do things right.

This story truly is inspirational and a lesson about civic responsibility. However, it makes for little more than a TV movie or a straight-to-video snack.

For all its visual delights, Magic in the Moonlight, the 44th feature written and directed by the admirably industrious Woody Allen, has to be one of his bigger duds.

As superb as Boseman is - moving with athletic grace, doing splits with hair curled in a sky-high pompadour, approximating Brown's rapid-fire, guttural speaking voice without descending to Eddie Murphy SNL parody - he's never quite good enough to convince you you're watching the Hardest Working Man in Show Business up on screen.

The gadgetry and fight scenes are nicely rendered. The aeronautical battles, though, fall well short of state-of-the-art. Maybe they're collateral damage to the film's goofy style.

Is it dumb to say, "Wow?"...I don't care. Wow.

The Killer Inside Me is tough, disturbing stuff: We're tagging along with a sociopath as he explains himself, reveals himself, works things out inside his head.

A clever, fun, and affecting romantic dramedy about love and rock-and-roll.

A Most Wanted Man's cast - a mix of Germans speaking English, Americans speaking English with German accents, Russians, and men and women from the Middle East - is uniformly stellar.

When it comes to sheer comic-book fun, few summer movies deliver a more consistent, satisfying, thoroughly enjoyable shot of cinematic jouissance than the delightfully adventurous actress Scarlett Johansson's latest bit of strange, Lucy.

The animation in Planes: Fire & Rescue is considerably better, the landscapes grander, and the 3-D flight and firefighting scenes more exciting.

Isn't a cheap knock-off but an equally effective, deliciously disturbing movie. It's bound to delight genre fans (and dismay critics, who attacked the first as heavy-handed and sloppy).

There isn't an original frame or line of dialogue in Rage. It's strictly paint by numbers. Or in this case, plasma.

Wickedly smart and wickedly playful, Roman Polanski's adaptation of David Ives' Tony-nominated Venus in Fur works on so many levels, it's almost dizzying.

At a certain point in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you expect Caesar to say, "Et tu, Koba?" Maybe a bit obvious, but it would have shown some wit.

Swinton is delightful in a twisted turn as Wilford's enforcer, a Margaret Thatcherian dragon lady who adores watching her men torture miscreants who have defied the train's No. 1 rule: Know your place.

An exceptionally fine children's film.

Like other entries of its pulpish ilk, the picture packs lots of violence, a fair bit of gore, and plenty of cheap scares.

Supermensch is one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tales.

A remarkable, thoroughly disturbing creepshow that burrows deep under your skin and refuses to let go.

In Don McKellar's remake of "Seducing Doctor Lewis", a 2003 French-Canadian comedy, the charm feels force-fed.

The Signal is a road movie turned upside down and inside out.

Funny, passionate, full of compassion for its just-pubescent protagonists, We Are the Best! is a total charmer.

One of this year's true surprises, the superior animated sequel not only is infused with the same independent spirit and off-kilter aesthetic that enriched the original, it also deepens the first film's major themes.

22 Jump Street's scattershot approach to comedy is rooted in the belief that for every anatomical, scatalogical, sexual, or pop-cultural reference and pun gone awry, another will stick to the wall like, um, bodily fluid.

A kind of Tracy/Hepburn rom-com with a "Dead Poets Society" backdrop and dollops of human failing for added drama, Words and Pictures stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche - a matchup that makes you want to like Fred Schepisi's film, even when it becomes impossible to do so.

Maybe it's generational: In a movie about teens, it's the teens who should rule. And they do. With certainty. With laughter. And with tears - buckets and buckets.

At its best, Edge of Tomorrow plays like a tripwire time-travel thriller. As it progresses, though, the built-in repetition can, and does, grow tedious.

The 85-year-old Chilean-born auteur returns this week with his latest directorial attempt, The Dance of Reality, an intensely personal, deeply felt, if at times solipsistic autobiographical work about his childhood in Tocopilla, a seaside town at the edge of the Chilean desert.

A road trip at once tragic, hopeful, and unforgettable.

They're not exactly Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy, but French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch's "Spanish Apartment" movies - 2002's "L'Auberge Espagnole," 2005's "Russian Dolls," and now, Chinese Puzzle - have their devotees, too.

Pulp fiction doesn't come much better than Cold in July, a gritty, grisly - and perversely giddy - crime yarn directed by Pottstown-born indie-film provocateur Jim Mickle.