Clouds of Sils Maria is oodles more poetic and enigmatic than the term “backstage drama” generally encompasses.

Farhadi’s orchestration of all these elements is complex and viscerally kinetic; few viewers will experience it without holding their breath at some point.

A rare and welcome exception to that norm.

Ned Rifle, the final chapter in a strange trilogy with “Henry Fool” and “Fay Grim”, is a movie about damaged people coming to terms with their damage by turning to others. And it’s Hal Hartley’s best movie in years.

While Mirren unquestioningly rules this roost, one cast member’s late arrival onscreen did get the audience murmuring in recognition. Namely, Lady Grantham herself — Elizabeth McGovern — who appears as a judge during one of the key moments in the legal case. One can assume that the “Downton Abbey” star took the slim part as a favor for her husband, who happens to be the director.

It has a beautiful, low-key approach that earns its cheers and tears without resorting to the manipulative or dramatic tricks of a typical feature film.

Eventually, the fact that the characters are all aware of the multiple clichés they’re uttering — an exchange between Brian and a young editor (Olivia Thirlby) is particularly excruciating in this respect — doesn’t redeem or excuse the clichés.

From the beginning, Cut Bank isn’t just tonally inconsistent, it doesn’t really have one. It’s flat. There’s no sense of rhythm, tension, or atmosphere.

As Ruskin, Thompson’s real-life husband Greg Wise looks exactly like surviving photographs of the man he is playing: handsome, gloomy, lofty, and a little blank and bland.

A sharply crafted, highly entertaining portrait of two young Londoners who made their names and fortunes by managing a fledgling band called the High Numbers, who became The Who.

It’s tightly directed and well-performed, particularly by Columbus Short and a career-redefining turn from Wilmer Valderrama. If anything — and trust me when I tell you this is the opposite of most independently produced noirs from debut directors — there’s an overabundance of ideas in The Girl is in Trouble, sometimes to a distracting degree.

Last Knights is so thoroughly mediocre, so dully empty, that it’s difficult to summon the enthusiasm to trash it.

So while Cheatin' does have a narrative spine, it's most entertaining when it's hardest to pin down.

Like Lee Daniels' hit TV drama “Empire,” Furious 7 is stuffed with situations that require go-for-broke absurdity, but even Daniels and his nighttime soap predecessor Aaron Spelling would pause before attempting the level of “get the f—k outta here!” style shenanigans director James Wan and writer Chris Morgan employ.

Nightlight is a perfect example of a film with interesting ideas that are totally smothered by poor execution.

Despite the harrowing stories that fill the film from start to finish, Dreamcatcher is not hopeless.

It’s tedious at best, almost unwatchable at worst.

Balancing itself with an enviable self-assurance between drama, comedy, character study, and, in the last ten minutes, suspense, the film sends the audience out of the theater with a sense of shame for laughing when the narrative wanted us to.

Genre fans ought to check it out post haste. I’m one myself, and my admiration for the superb conception and execution of the film goes hand in hand with disappointment and irritation.

It’s a film that seems to have no further point than to remind us that some powerful jerks were once powerful jerk kids. Point taken, but it’s not cinematically satisfying.

It’s a flat-out disaster, the kind of film that its cast and crew hope gets buried as quickly as possible as they race to move on to other projects.

The result, though not without flaws, is an invigorating and interesting observation of the man, his work and the entire medium of photography.

If you love rape jokes, Get Hard is your movie.

A brutal but stirring fantasy.

There are traces of Woody Allen at work here as While We’re Young vividly makes fun of a specific subculture of hyper-articulate New York denizen, as well as the way its characters try to stave off the malaise of aging by clinging to characters who radiate the exotic promise of youth.

I kept thinking about “Lilo & Stitch” while watching Home, a decidedly disappointing effort based on the popular kid-lit book “The True Meaning of Smekday” from the already embattled folks at DreamWorks Animation.

This is pretty much the opposite of a contemporary American comedy: rather than broad, The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq is an exemplary example of narrow.

It’s all pretty effective but in the end, somehow empty. Not to make an unfair comparison to a classic, but the movie “Deliverance” actually followed through on all of the themes that its storyline suggested, while in Backcountry, we end up with a storyline in which all but the most elemental stuff winds up as window dressing.