What makes The Martian work is Damon.

The rare movie that improves as it goes along, shedding its cliches and getting down to what matters.

It's also a real shame that such a fascinating reminder of how far civil rights have come in the last five decades has been reduced to such a turkey of a film.

Like Brad Pitt and Robert Redford, Gere's good looks have made it hard sometimes to recognize his acting ability, but it's on full display here in what is anything but a vanity project.

It's fun to watch The New Girlfriend the way it's fun to drink a glass of Champagne, and about as memorable.

Just because it's how they did things in the old country doesn't excuse clinging to these outdated, oppressive traditions, even if Ravi manages to negotiate them with surprising good humor.

A featherweight comedy in which he fetches coffee for twentysomethings and calls them "ace" and "boss" without a hint of irony. It's painful to watch for anyone who remembers the thunder De Niro used to have at his fingertips.

Sleeping with Other People turns out to be more entertaining than it sounds. The movie, that is.

He's good, but Depp can't quite annihilate the self-consciousness that makes some of his more light-hearted work shine. Too often, it feels like he's channeling other actors: here he's Jack Nicholson with Hunter S. Thompson's nose, there he's an Irish-American Ray Liotta.

Grandma is a movie that, for what it's worth, gets an A+ on the Bechdel test. Writer-director Paul Weitz may still be cashing residual checks for the "American Pie" movies, but this is his most heartfelt, successful effort since 2002's "About a Boy."

Makes the case that Fischer's chess prowess and his mental illness were inextricable. The chess fed the paranoia which supported the chess which drove Fischer deeper into madness, and so on.

There have been plenty of mountaineering documentaries over the last few years, and Everest suffers in comparison to them simply by being a dramatization. As realistic as the effects are (and you can occasionally tell when a shot is green-screened), you're still aware on a gut level that Jason Clarke and Josh Brolin were not actually filmed at 29,000 feet above sea level.

Actually an entertaining action-adventure that not only stands on its own, but surpasses the more limited rewards offered by "The Maze Runner."

The performances, especially that of Regina Casé in the lead role, inject potent, lived-in humanity to the movie's flat political allegory.

Jason Schwartzman is upstaged by his dog in 7 Chinese Brothers.

The Visit is not a head-scratcher, like so many of Shyamalan's movies. It's more of a shoulder-shrug. That's it? That's all you've got?

Rather than explore and embrace the contradictions within Jobs ("he had the focus of a monk but none of the empathy" is the best he can do), Gibney puts the hammer down.

It doesn't help that director Ken Kwapis stages everything like a sitcom, has no sense of pace, and buries the theme of late-life friendship under a haze of sentiment and trail dust.

Mistress America is a different kind of channeling, straight through the screwball comedies of the 1980s, "After Hours" and "Something Wild," back to "Bringing Up Baby," where Katharine Hepburn sang "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard while Cary Grant looked for the last bone (the intercostal clavicle) for his Brontosaurus skeleton.

Z for Zachariah has things to say about the tugs-of-war between science and spirituality, thought and action, men and women. It's just not exactly sure what they are.

Sometimes those kinds of movies work (just ask the Duplass brothers) and sometimes they seem like the cast and crew had more fun making them than you do watching them. This one sits somewhere in the middle.

No Escape is xenophobic claptrap of the highest order.

What it doesn't do -- and this is what makes this "Diary" different -- is let what happens define her or ruin her.

At its more abstract moments, it's a treat for the eye and the soul.

Peter Bogdanovich made a great screwball comedy. This isn't it.

If the filmmakers had opted to play things closer to the vest, this could have been the clever "Pineapple Express"-meets-"The Bourne Identity" mashup it wants to be instead of the shallow, gratuitously violent exercise it actually is.

Starring in, directing and writing (in collaboration with Michel Marc Bouchard, on whose play it's based) a movie at Dolan's tender age is certainly a Wellesian accomplishment. All three actors are convincing, especially Cardinal as the cruel, manipulative Francis, and their characters' behavior feels authentic even when it's not logical.

The End of the Tour can feel like a down-home deification at times: Like Einstein riding a bike, only it's Wallace going to the Mall of America. It's not sentimental, though, at least not until the very end, and is moving in beautiful, unexpected ways.