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.