The movie makes something of a case for him, in that he is quite a good piano player, with absolute command of the blues, country and rock idioms, but there isn’t enough here to make someone a fan who isn’t already interested.

The short, sad life of Amy Winehouse is compellingly told in a new documentary that sidesteps sensationalism and dime-store psychologizing and lets archival footage do much of the work.

Fortunately, Beau Garrett brightens things up with her performance as the neurotic Brenda.

Don’t expect profundities on the ethics of cloning. And don’t expect Oscar-worthy acting. Senese’s accomplishment — and it’s done with a certain restraint — is to replicate the look and feel of ’70s horror films, which had become more assaultive on audience sensibilities than their predecessors, breaking taboos and borrowing techniques from exploitation films.

This sequel goes beyond disappointment into a sublime realm of embarrassment that's beyond and yet better than merely bad, because it fascinates: What on Earth were they thinking?

For all its weaknesses, Terminator Genisys is a "Terminator" movie that feels like a "Terminator" movie, more than did "Terminator 3," not to mention the ghastly "Terminator Salvation."

Isn’t a bad film. But it’s a little slow and a little too un-chaotic for its own good.

The film is a fascinating look at how a true event can become a media event — and how courting the media can have good and bad results so mixed up that it’s hard to know where the good influence stops and the corrupting influence starts.

More emphasis on these darker, subterranean elements might have made for a fuller experience, but Infinitely Polar Bear is really all about a father as seen from a child’s perspective. It’s better than a scrapbook item, as in a film made to be appreciated by one family. But it’s not quite a successful movie.

Again like Chabrol, Fontaine has a way of making you laugh, on and off, for 90 minutes, before leaving you feeling a little queasy from too much truth.

The Bay Area filmmaker’s Sundance Prize-winning film achieves much on a relatively meager budget (it has an impressive futuristic visual design), and the last half hour is so irresistibly creepy that it’s sure to invoke discussion after the screening.

The handsome and appealing Max, by the way, is played by five dogs. For the record, he is a Belgian Malinois, a breed that in real life is often used in police and military work.

Writer-director Seth MacFarlane is like some weird combination of a stupid, dirty-minded teenager and a brilliant comic master. His impulses are sophomoric, but he knows where to find the punch line, and he hits it, again and again.

It’s a movie about a geeky teenager living in the Los Angeles hood, and something about it, or rather everything about it, feels real.

The not-as-good news is that, like “Wall-E” and “Up,” Inside Out has a great opening, a satisfying finish, and something of a sag in the middle. But this time it’s only a sag.

Alas, the main thing that comes through in Heaven Knows What is that a junkie’s life is really, really monotonous.

To see this film is to understand — not in an intellectual way, but in a direct, visceral way — why the British ignored the threat of Adolf Hitler for so long.

The film may work best as a supplement to the underwhelming three-hour-plus extravaganza broadcast in February to celebrate “SNL’s” 40th anniversary.

So this is a very worthy movie, not that this will hold any sway with illness-phobes, who’d rather stare at the wall for 105 minutes than see a good movie about sickness.

Jurassic World is an intelligent action movie that’s saying something simple but true: Yes, people are that stupid.

What makes Aloft better than dismissible is that it’s a sincere failure, not a cynical one, and the cinematography is arresting. In fact, for scattered seconds throughout the movie, Aloft is beautiful to look at.

Riveting from its first moments.

Insidious: Chapter 3 is simply not scary. Not a bit, not a whit. Except that the audience will be terrified of the next stabbing of their eardrums, at generally predictable intervals.

Love & Mercy captures with striking immediacy the unbound power of the artist in his element.

The film’s depiction of loss, isolation and reconciliation, and the rewards of friendship, grows more touching as the story builds to its highly emotional conclusion.

There’s an absurdist edge, but with nothing of the smart-aleck about it. Rather than use wit as a way of bypassing thought and emotion, Bujalski’s concerns are serious, and his attitude toward his characters is warm without being indulgent.

Nobody is better than McCarthy at over-the-top comic hostility.

The party scenes are entertaining fantasy, but the insider-business end of the picture is occasionally interesting in its own right.

By turns frightening, exciting and ridiculous, San Andreas is, in the end, more impressive than anything else.

Aloha shows how far a movie can go on charm alone.

If ultimately Slow West seems more like a filmmaking exercise than an engaging piece of work — despite Fassbender’s star presence — that’s all right. Filmmakers need to get their exercise. Let’s see what Maclean does next.

There are more enigmas than answers in Jauja, an artsy South American Western directed by Lisandro Alonso, an Argentine filmmaker who delights in undermining movie conventions.

There’s not enough of a story, and it’s a film that we end up admiring more than liking.

Now after 43 years in feature films, Danner has gotten the opportunity to show what she can do, and in I’ll See You in My Dreams, she is simply jaw-dropping, just wonderful.

Both as writer and director, Farhadi is skilled at depicting the spiraling growth of social malignancies, as duplicity and uncertainties beget confusion, fear and anger. It’s an incisive portrait of a particular society, but it should resonate everywhere.

This is a deluxe French film, longer than usual, with strong performances by French cinema mainstays Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet and a movie-stealing turn from relative newcomer Adele Haenel, who has become a major French actress in just the past couple of years.

The movie is saying something worth hearing about the place the future holds, the concept and promise of it, in human existence. It’s an attempt to wrest that vision from the narrow fantasies of doom-peddling action filmmakers. That’s an attempt worth making.

By showing so many examples of his art, the film attests to Giger’s real gift for startling images. But it’s hard not to see, in addition, elements of repetitive adolescent provocation.

Patrick Stewart needs to work on his interpretation of Darth Vader in “Hamlet: Return of the Siths,” but it’s those little comic diversions interspersed throughout Hunting Elephants that make this Israeli movie a little gem.

Perhaps most of the humor just doesn’t translate (the film was a smash hit in Sweden). Whatever the case, the script needed to mine more comedy from the characters, not the clownish plot machinations.

Saint Laurent’s designs and working life take a backseat to scenes of him stuffing his face with pills, accidentally poisoning his dog and sleepwalking through sex with a variety of lovers. Two and a half hours of this. Bonello might as well have shown him sleeping eight hours or using the toilet for all that says about the man and his work.

Spinney owns the character, down to the last feather.

As of today, this is the most delightful movie out there.

Yet all this wit and effort and occasional beauty is in the service of a movie that is little more than a two-hour chase scene, one that seems founded on the assumption that if you show one set of people chasing another, that’s enough to get an audience excited: Oh, no, let’s hope they don’t get caught!

Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) plays the infected daughter. Her performance seems unsettled at first, but it doesn’t take long for Breslin to sink into Maggie’s (rotting) skin, aided by some fine makeup work. Her most effective moments come when the teen faces the inescapability of her death.

If there’s a weakness to The D Train, it’s only in the filmmakers’ ultimate choice to stop the pain right before the finish, as if any good might really come to the characters they’ve created. Perhaps the assumption was that, by then, audiences will have suffered enough. But some misery you really can’t get enough of, especially when it’s happening to other people.

The chief virtue of Iris is its amiability — it’s a delight to spend time in Apfel’s company, and thanks to Albert Maysles, we can.

The alliances of the characters are a tad confusing at the beginning, but you don’t have to be an expert in geopolitics to appreciate the finer points of director Zaza Urushadze’s intimate film, which was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar.

So there’s nothing here to see, except maybe the white dress that Vergara wears in her first scene.

Félix and Meira appears to be a simple movie about fitting in, acceptance and sacrifice. Yet it’s so elegant and poses so many sides that it’s actually a very complex film with very complex characters.

An adaptation not firing on all cylinders.

Supercharged and lifeless, frenetic and stone-cold dead, a barrage of action scenes that look fake, yet make you wonder if fake is the new real.

An odd duck, a Southern melodrama that aspires to be a sensitive coming-of-age story, with some humor mixed in. Sometimes it doesn’t soar the way it should, though it remains engaging most of the way.

The Road Within is never good. The presentation of Tourette’s syndrome may be authentic, but everything else about the movie — the emotions, the characters, the situations — rings false.

Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.

Kung Fu Killer is like a roundhouse kick from the past, a satisfying, old-school martial arts film that has a ’90s feel to it.

For people already interested in fashion, the film’s appeal will be obvious, but Dior and I deserves to go beyond a small target audience.

Crowe is not messing around here, not trying to dream up opportunities to throw himself another close-up. He’s a genuine director.

The film has a good cast, and is competently made in a plain-vanilla way, but its greatest appeal will be to those who share its endorsement of traditional religious values.

Original, winning entertainment, and well executed. No pun intended.

The real problem with True Story is contained in its title. The story isn’t too good to be true, but rather too true to be good.

There’s no one to root for, not even the dead girl. Nothing seems important enough.

A sci-fi movie that actually has intelligent things to say about science — that’s all too rare. It’s what we get in Ex Machina.

The flat-out awful ending, though, deflates much of the goodwill built up by the rest of the film.

It’s not a combination most of us would’ve thought of, but Stewart and Binoche bring out the best in each other.

The role of Arielle was originally supposed to go to Diane Kruger, whose tough-minded realism would have been interesting here. But Marlohe, earthier yet more ethereal, is ideal.

There’s already a small library of films about the Who and its music, but this is the first I know of that examines the men who almost accidentally wound up managing one of the most incendiary of ’60s rock groups.

In the end, it’s hard to know whether to see the Iran of Desert Dancer in optimistic or pessimistic terms. Young people, especially, want to be free, but the other side has all the power. Having YouTube on your side certainly helps, but an army and some tanks can come in handy, too.

This is a needlessly dull movie that should have gone back to the drawing board.

The plot’s outrageousness — which includes Michael Stuhlbarg as a Ted Kaczynski-esque town crazy — would go down better if there were a sympathetic character or two (or, absent that, some laughs), but no dice.

The film is fun and extreme, and though in the end rather pointless, there’s a certain audacity here — a delight in extremity — that’s appealing.

It’s nice to see Pegg stretch a little and play the bad guy. Too bad Kill Me Three Times doesn’t give him better material.

Long before the finish, Man From Reno has flat-lined.

Everything in the movie is suffused by a vision of life that is resoundingly and evidently false, but as this vision is not repulsive, but is intended to reassure, the lies don’t produce anger or frustration. No, they bring on the laughs.

While We’re Young is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements.

The film spends an excessive amount of time on Ruskin’s psychological abuse of his wife, which makes Effie’s eventual redemption feel rushed and out of the blue. But Thompson has once again proved herself to be a talented wordsmith, imbuing Effie with generosity of spirit and intelligence.

Amazingly, the filmmakers claim that no CGI was used in the film. The cast of dogs are all real (none was harmed in the making of the film), a tribute not only to Mundruczo’s unique vision and filmmaking skills, but also to animal trainer Teresa Ann Miller, a Hollywood veteran.

In the title role, Kikuchi is impressive, easily handling Kumiko’s comic and more somber sides and never allowing us to settle into a single or simple interpretation of the character.

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

By the way, Danny Collins is inspired by the true story of Steve Tilston, a British musician who received a 1971 letter from John Lennon some 30 years after it was written. The gist of the letter was about the same, but all the characters and circumstances are creations of the filmmaker.

For all its hidden-camera footage and teary confessions, the movie rings as true as an episode of MTV’s “Real World.”

It matches up two comic actors and instead of clashing or canceling each other out, they bring in the best possible result: A comedy with twice the laughs.

Most of life is melodramatic — emotional, involving and lacking the dignity of straight drama. 3 Hearts is life as felt from the inside.

Funny how there are fans of Jennifer Lawrence who will never see her in Serena. It’s not her best film, but it contains one of her best performances, in a role that challenges her more than any other.

Basically, The Gunman is a movie that asks audiences to sympathize with the equivalent of Lee Harvey Oswald — that is, an Oswald who definitely did it. Oddly enough, it succeeds, partly because the moral climate it presents seems so confused, but mainly because of Penn’s particular aura of irascible integrity. He’s the most irritated action hero since Harrison Ford.

Insurgent would be a much worse movie if the good parts were all at the beginning. But they are saved for the end, and they leave the viewer with a feeling of, “Well, that was OK,” even though most of it wasn’t.

As a call to action, The Hunting Ground truly goes to bat for rape survivors. As a documentary, the movie as a whole is much lesser than its individual parts.

Magician is worth seeing as a kind of curated tour through the movies and through Welles’ interviews. However, if you have more time and want to get into Welles on your own, an afternoon watching YouTube videos followed by a few evenings of watching his best movies might be even better.

When (and before) the end credits roll, you will probably feel a sense of outrage — and helplessness.

Futuro Beach is part of a welcome wave of European and South American films that center on gay characters, yet deal with universal themes and offer a certain sensibility that would please any art-house enthusiast.

The curious thing about this new Cinderella is that every old and familiar element is done beautifully.

After devising a sturdy frame for Neeson’s special brand of sorrowful mayhem, the filmmakers expertly fill in Run All Night with a series of charged action scenes, including a rare one in which Neeson chases after a cop car, instead of the other way around.

The movie rarely, if ever, feels mechanical. Instead, you may find yourself marveling at the fertility of an imagination that could allow itself to toss so many vivid characters and stories—enough to supply four or five movies — into one generous package.

For the most part, good food and good cheer are the order of the day here, and the chatty, old-school Ziggy serves as a reliable — and touching — tour guide.

Though Carolla and co-filmmaker Kevin Hench devise some funny situations — particularly, the one in which a newly divorced woman insists on coming back to his room — the overall feeling that comes across is one of sadness, and that seems intentional.

The Salvation is one of those movies that deservedly (and desperately) requires a do-over. Unfortunately, what you see is what you get.

I would gladly see the movie again, if just to see Smith do her trademark grumpy English thing.

This is just a slightly better than mediocre film with a disconcerting grasp of the truth.