Not even the haunting images and Garfield’s haggard intensity can disguise the gaping void where the film’s soul should be. There’s no there there.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

This is where Fonte comes in. An actor who can make Marcello seem like a pitiful beta-male grotesque one second and a noble, sympathetic hero the next, he’s the thrumming motor behind this fairy tale of dogs and monsters. It’s hard to underestimate how his award-winning performance — good call, Cannes Film Festival — shapes the film and sets its humanistic tone.

The movie pulls you in through the sheer immersive force of its filmmaking. In Long Day’s Journey, the search is everything with meaning as elusive and haunting as a dream.

Still, the moments that hit hardest concern Leo’s relationship with Ahd (a very fine Eric Bernard), another male hustler who claims he’s only “gay 4 pay.”

Alternately smarmy and achingly familiar, Little squeezes "Big" for one more run through the Hollywood grinder.

Hellboy wants to remind you that this Dark Horse Comics brute with a soul still deserves a place in the superhero-movie ecosphere. It ends up simply being a franchise reboot damned to be restaged as its own bloody hell. Some things are better left dead.

Her Smell is a berserker infused a mad poetry. In her third film with Perry, following "Listen Up," "Phillip and Queen of the Earth," Moss takes a character who makes Courtney Love look like Mother Teresa and exposes the shards of humanity that once vitalized and defined her music. The effect is shattering.

You can kill the vibe of Minghella’s film with nitpicking, but Fanning rides the movie home to glory. She is simply sensational.

What you won’t be bowled over by, however, is the storytelling, which makes Missing Link the weakest link in Laika’s chain of movies to date.

The Wind does indeed blow a hell of a chill through you, though that has less to do with thing that bump in the night than in the psyche.

Estevez leans toward sacrificing dramatic power for blatant crowdpleasing. Still, his intent is refreshingly uncynical. Clearly, the quadruple threat doesn’t think audiences will sit still for his message without sugarcoating and a feelgood ending. At worst, you can dismiss him as a naïve do-gooder. At best, you can commend him for actually believing a movie might raise public consciousness and maybe even change things. Your call.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

With Denis there’s always more than meets the prism of snap judgements. Let the movie mess with your head.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

The movie honors King by raising fresh hell for a new generation. It will make you jump out of your seat, but what matters are the provocations you take home and can’t shake. That’s the stuff of nightmares.

This breezy, funny entry keeps things light with a hilarious and heartfelt package of nonstop kid-friendly kick-ass.

The Brink, Alison Klayman’s insightful and often unnerving look at one of the most divisive figures in recent memory, isn’t a particularly fun or easy watch.

Somehow, The Beach Bum is even nuttier, less logical, more visually beautiful and down-in-the-gutter uglier than the film you just imagined from that description.

What’s never in doubt, however, is the compassion the movie shows to its protagonist, partly based on the women in the filmmaker’s own family and embodied by a great actress at her intuitive, indelible best. In capturing what Jones calls “the rhythm of living” even in the face of death, he has turned this character study into a shattering portrait of resilience — and an essential work of art.

This live-action re-imagining of Disney’s 1941 animated classic may be the sweetest film Tim Burton has ever made. It’s also the safest.

That this retelling has no time for the facts, given the book’s dodgy relationship to the truth, isn’t shocking. That it feels this surprisingly fun-free and generic to a fault, frankly, kind of is. Fans deserve better. If any of them want to collectively sue for defamation of character, let me know where to sign.

If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that "Son of Saul" does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice.

Aussie director Anthony Maras, in his feature debut, brings a Hitchcockian feel for suspense and a documentarian’s eye for detail to the brutal events that transpired over three days in November 2008 when the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba initiated an attack on the city of Mumbai.

Dragged Across Concrete is apt to send crime-film fanatics, especially ones who prefer their pulp nasty, brutish and incredibly long, into frothing fits of glee. For other folks, the title will double as an apt description experience of watching it.

There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now.

If you can say nothing else about this free-form valentine, it’s genuinely eye-opening.

That’s not quite enough to make Captive State great science-fiction, but it ensures that the film lingers in the mind longer than it takes to run the end credits.