At its best, Fury examines the psychological experience of warfare.

There are no great surprises, no shocking reveals (except to the characters themselves). But there’s so much to appreciate along the way that it’s a real page-turner.

The film is an improvement on previous Sparks moody-doomed-love opuses such as “The Last Song” and “Dear John.” If that is damning with faint praise, the cogs here are the same as in his previous love machines

But who cares what grumpy old grown-ups think? This reviewer watched with two movie-loving kids, and they did each laugh. Twice.

Until it becomes completely demented, The Guest is a perfectly respectable thriller, and even when it stops being respectable — even when it goes off the rails and becomes ridiculous — it’s still entertaining.

This eager-to-please documentary is short on story, but long on charm. That’s because the seven profile subjects embrace their age and celebrate their style as creative self-expression.

No campy vampire movie, and the early part of the film is well-made enough that the sadness of Vlad’s dilemma is truly felt.

A narrative documentary thriller that effectively employs many elements of a John le Carré spy novel: international intrigue, arresting twists and turns, and characters with complicated motivations.

That Hossein Amini, in his first outing as a director, kept all three of these well-known actors in perfect balance suggests a filmmaker who knows how to steer a performance.

In his performance, Jeremy Renner hints at something dark stirring beneath Webb’s surface, but it never quite comes out, and we’re left with something more on the order of a rough-hewn saint. Kill the Messenger tells an interesting tale, but it’s caught in an odd zone between too-Hollywood and not Hollywood enough.

Beethoven once went five years without composing. Until now, Downey has gone five years without making anything close to a serious movie. The bigger waste of time was Beethoven’s, but talent wasted is talent wasted. This is the type of film Downey should be making.

Abuse of Weakness is 20 minutes of a great movie and another 85 minutes of nothing much.

The filmmakers employ an offbeat and effective technique to get Landis to explain himself.

North American viewers will have one advantage over their South American brethren — the capacity to be surprised. We knew how “Lincoln” was going to end, but The Liberator is a question mark all the way to the finish.

That lack of concern for the way people actually interact renders the film useless as entertainment, or as a conversion tool.

The script highlights an annoying lack of self-preservation on behalf of the protagonists. But the movie tries to be more than just a creepy doll freakout, and delivers the requisite scares.

Gone Girl is a great thriller until it stops being one, about 20 minutes before the finish. Until then it’s brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy, a movie that keeps the audience grasping and reaching in all the wrong directions, while consistently delivering something a little better, a little crazier and a little more disturbing than expected.

IAm Eleven is ultimately a satisfying film because the kids are so compelling. But Bailey’s motivations color the authenticity of a well-meaning “documentary” that borders on nostalgic self-indulgence and wishful thinking.

“Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness,” Hector writes in his book. But avoiding this movie might be a good start.

It’s right up there with the best rock documentaries. That is, if you can call it a documentary.

Quite simply, one of the best movies of the year so far.

That Robyn succeeds reaching her geographic destination is hardly a surprise. But this movie is not driven by plot but rather the delicate emotional ballet performed so expertly by Wasikowska.

A film of great sadness, but also a galvanizing depiction of heroism.

A potent and disturbing experience. Fortunately it’s much more, offering sharp performances and genuine drama.

In making the movie, writer-director John Ridley had to negotiate with the Hendrix legend — that is, reality had to accommodate audience expectation. In that sense, Jimi: All Is by My Side does a reasonable job.

Two Night Stand has its moments. But moments are all this movie has — and all its characters are likely to get.

The Equalizer is silly but irresistible, taking situations of inherent gut-level impact and exploiting them for every bit of emotion and tension. It could never have been a great movie.

In many ways a beautiful movie, and yet in other ways it’s not very good at all. As an achievement in stop-motion animation, it’s stunning — seamless and detailed, so perfectly done that it’s easy to forget that you’re witnessing skill and not magic.

Wetlands, an in-your-face story about bodily fluids and the collateral damage of a family gone wrong, is crass, vulgar and brilliant.

Think “Lord of the Flies,” without all the jerks.

Crazy plot aside, Tusk offers some thought-chewing ideas on human duality, both good/evil and man/beast.

Bateman comes off well, humanizing his character with a strain of melancholy that’s one of the movie’s genuinely touching elements. Fey is all right, though she falls back on her patented shtick. Driver makes the most of his hipsterish role, nicely playing off the other siblings’ tension.

For a good, straight-ahead noirish crime thriller, you could do a lot worse than A Walk Among the Tombstones.

Zero is more of an intellectual exercise in which you’re never given all the variables to solve the problem — and then you find your calculator was on acid the whole time anyway.

Hardy's performance takes a little bit of the sting away from seeing Gandolfini perform on a big screen for the last time. As irreplaceable as Gandolfini may be, it's invigorating to see a young actor elevating to similar heights right before your eyes.

Aside from Patricia Clarkson, who is practically this movie's reason for being, the great virtue of Last Weekend is that it's exactly as it presents itself.

The fine cinematography by Giles Nuttgens ("Hallam Foe," "Dom Hemingway") infuses warmth and texture. It conveys the laze of summer and juxtaposes the cold of the hospital with the not-quite-real palette of waking fantasy. However, also like the music, the filmmaking habitually meanders.

It's a strain to poke fun at Dolphin Tale 2. Even more than the very solid first film, this is cynicism-free cinema; a place where snark goes to die. But while the wholesomeness, PG-rating positivity and conservation goals remain a strong selling point, the story simply isn't as good as the first one.

Shore should have just stuck to his strengths, which is producing music. As a documentary, though, Take Me to the River falls woefully short on offering a serious contribution to the history of African American-inspired music.

The Skeleton Twins suffers from a glaring deficit. Suicide is ever present throughout the film, yet Johnson never seriously examines it.

My Old Lady is affecting, even if many of the revelations and high-voltage speeches occur at predictable moments. But if you can look past this formulaic side, it's a movie worth seeing.

The film is fine in depicting Ellis' times, but it's mostly how he came to realize that he had a serious problem and turned his life around to become a drug-abuse counselor. He died in 2008 at age 63.

This is a film that starts out promisingly and finishes with an effective epilogue. In between, there are some interesting bits - including a scene in which Errol Flynn tries to snag a big-time role in "Lolita." But outlandish as that moment might sound, it's not. Everything here, in fact, is just a tad too respectful.

Earnest and well-intentioned, The Identical is based on a "what if" that straddles the line between ingenious and loopy.

It's a nightmare fairy tale that can be very difficult to watch.

Unfortunately, A Letter to Mona, directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, embodies this sense of frozen time with a tedious narrative punctuated by occasional bursts of sentimentality and hard-to-penetrate humor.

As a stand-alone vehicle, the sensual and atmospheric Innocence is interesting enough to hold your attention to the end credits. But when you consider the source material, the film's flaws become too great to ignore.

See Love Is Strange for its sensitivity and understated jokes, but mainly for Lithgow and Molina's expertly modulated work, which pulls the movie back when it threatens to stray into melodrama or heavy-handedness.

Well-made and -acted, especially by Hawkes and Fisher, if it's not exactly gripping or noir-ish.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

Often frustrating and at times incomprehensible, the Bourne/Bond clone keeps the pulse racing but ultimately fails to satisfy.

Ultimately, Kink has an undeniably voyeuristic quality - it's a glimpse into a mostly forbidding world, and there's value in that.

More in the tone of the big screen "Friday Night Lights" than "Rudy" or "The Blind Side," it succeeds as mainstream entertainment without relying on a conventional storybook framework.

It's probably the only love story you'll see this decade that will make you half-expect the camera to swerve and pick up the sight of Rod Serling, standing there in a black suit.

Moretz is an appealing young woman whose star is rising. She'll probably have an exceptional career, but If I Stay won't be a highlight.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is still a visual buffet, but adding 102 more minutes of double crosses, slow torture and hookers with hearts of gold just exposes the tediousness of the exercise.

The film is good enough to inspire viewers to learn more about Fela, but it should be better than that.

Just in the last few months, we've seen "Snowpiercer" and "Divergent," which also deal with what happens after a civil collapse. The Giver, the latest in this weird trend, approaches a now-familiar topic from a new angle, and, of the three, it's the most visually arresting.

Really, The Expendables 3 has only one thing going for it, beyond the unremarkable novelty of seeing lots of celebrities in a lousy movie. It has Mel Gibson, who is at his grim, tormented and quirky best here, playing someone who has crossed a moral line and has no regrets.

The narrative is a mess, and the overly long action sequences are easily forgotten.

The result is that this is one of those rare movies that gets better as it goes along.

It's hard to imagine any movie ever topping this one's depiction of killer tornadoes laying waste to the Midwest.

One of the smartest and most impassioned films about Christianity in recent memory, though to say that might give the wrong impression. In tone and strategy, the film is low-key and subtle; and the story can be appreciated both for its surface qualities and its deeper intentions.

Fortunately, What If rights itself well before the finish and finds its way back to the truth and the light.

Questions of politics and policy, even urgent ones, seem pretty dry after watching Henry and the other elderly patients come to life. Those scenes are a revelation.

All in all, though, A Five Star Life (which was a hit in Italy) remains a hard film to dislike, and many will savor the fabulous locations where Irene arrives as a "mystery guest."

It exemplifies the same appealing style, which strives to show life as it's lived and people as they really talk and act.

This is all good movie material, so far as it goes ... but Get on Up can't go any further. Sometimes damaged people stay damaged, and sometimes popular artists make their contribution and then stay in one place forever. It's a big letdown for everybody, but in a biopic, it's poison.

The scope of the film can be frustratingly narrow. But even this limited view into the events of the Maywand District murders is gripping cinema.

Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much where action movies are these days - a combination of comedy without wit, action without drama and elaborate visuals that are nothing much to look at.

I'm as reluctant to stop writing about this movie as I was to stop watching it: At 166 minutes, it flies by, and you don't want to leave that world. But one thing is certain: This isn't the last word. People will be writing about this film for years - and looking at it to discover the lost history of our time.

It looks spiffy. It has an attractive cast. Marcel Zyskind's cinematography seethes and shines. And it's a crock.

You realize fairly early in the film that there will be no emotional payoff. Just an hour and a half of vacation photos in motion.

I Origins is at its best when it's a personal story about relationships, and it has a strong first hour.

Now, thanks to A Most Wanted Man, we discover that it's really boring - practically sleep-inducing - to be an international spy.

Perhaps the movie's use of the past is more than cosmetic in this one regard: Watching Woody Allen revisit his old themes and obsessions already feels like a nostalgic experience. Actually setting the movie back in time deflects this and makes a virtue of a shortcoming.

A full-out action movie - and a sober rumination on the nature of existence. It is both things, effectively and sincerely.

A little too corny to endorse fully, but no one should be discouraged from seeing it.

The new film pokes heavyhanded fun at extreme conservatives and has a "power to the people" sub-theme, but it's full of ultra-violence and is dragged down by standard scare tactics, thin characters and the absurdities of the premise.

As British comedy sometimes will, A Long Way Down has an occasional attack of the cutes, but the actors' commitment keeps the movie on the plus side.

All this happens in an India that is both grim and beautiful: bustling, bureaucratic, colorful, harsh, full of cute children playing, full of downtrodden adults hustling for the next buck, full of life in general. It all feels very real. So does the ending.

An occasionally rousing but mostly just adequate sequel to last year's "Planes."

About a third of it is a brilliant setup - but it's for a joke that never happens, at least not completely. A comedy, especially a broad sex comedy, needs to go to extremes. But Sex Tape is a little careful and contained.

Pay attention to the camera, and you will see that Polanski is a clinician. He is in the thrall of no one.

Segerstedt's anti-Nazi stand is the only reason to be interested in him, and yet half the movie is about his domestic life.

If you see the movie, notice how the ending is no ending, and the fact that it even feels like one is entirely a function of Michael Giacchino's musical score.

Hellion is so sincere and so dull that some might mistake it for a true work of art.

A delightful French comedy.

Ultimately, the story of Yves Saint Laurent makes a compelling argument for fashion as art, and begs to answer the question if there is such a thing as innate taste. And although the cadence might not be entirely original, the high-style results most certainly are.

It's fascinating stuff, but secondary to Ebert's genuine passion for the movies, which, if anything, grew toward the end of his life. He saw film as a great civilizing force, "a machine that generates empathy," as he says in the film. If that idea appeals to you, see Life Itself.

The music is hit-and-miss, and the movie sinks into as many cliches as it avoids. But the characters are appealing, and the storytelling is just unconventional enough to keep an audience guessing.

At best, it will be remembered as "that exorcism movie with Eric Bana." More likely, "that exorcism movie where everyone has a bad New York accent."

It's as if there's a barrier between the viewer and the story that never comes down.

As a first-time director, Falcone has trouble maintaining a specific tone - the movie wobbles back and forth between sentimentality and silliness, sometimes even within the same scene.

As presented here, the novelist Violette Leduc is fascinating and strangely lovable, at least as seen from the audience. But actually knowing her? That would have been work.

An intense and affecting report on the experiences of U.S. troops in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

It's a film that, in its own peculiar way, forces viewers to question their values and ask themselves how much they're willing to sacrifice for a functioning society, and how much is too much.

Third Person is Paul Haggis' best movie, and the one he has been building toward for years.