The movie fails, but it’s like watching R.P. McMurphy try to lift that huge marble fixture in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—at least they tried, goddammit.

Even in its rougher patches, The Spectacular Now has a disarming earnestness that keeps it on the level, helped along by two superb lead performances that add up to more than their sum.

Kormákur lets his stars balance the buddy-movie levity with just enough dramatic weight to keep it grounded, and his directing style seems like a conscious corrective to the disorienting cutting and obvious CGI effects that have come to dominate Hollywood action films.

If Schrader and Ellis set out to prove that movies are dying or already dead, they might have done their job too well. The Canyons doesn’t play like the cure for a moribund industry, so much as a mildly effective, highly depressing administration of the last rites.

A film’s quality should be measured not by its agenda’s transparency, but by its narrative heft. And the narrative is the problem with Rising From Ashes.

It’s a modest, reserved character piece that doesn’t push an agenda. The problem is that it comes across as if it lacks opinions, rather than holding them back.

As bluntly unimaginative as its title.

Marking...does her best to keep it lively, mixing in actual security-camera footage and animated re-creations, along with pieces of old tourist promotions, newsreels, and industrial films. But Smash & Grab’s overall tone is too reserved, given the subject matter.

The problem with Smurfs 2 isn’t the message, it’s the way the film repeats it so baldly and emphatically that even the youngest kids can get it. Also, the way it surrounds that message with groin-smashing and farting.

Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often, it’s frustrating: It’s a film without a net, and it tends to land with a thud.

The lack of anything resembling a narrative at times makes Pavilion feel more like a demo-reel than a movie, but the fleeting moments Sutton has captured are so vibrant that they accumulate into something that hums.

Duhamel and Fogler play off each other nicely in the early going... The arguments and contrasting worldviews are banal, but the relationship feels genuine.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

I Declare War holds off as long as it can before dumping its emotional payload. Until then, the film gets uncomfortable laughs from the games children play, and play for keeps.

It deserves credit for avoiding the conventions of romantic comedies and defying audience expectations, but only to a degree. Instead of hitting the expected notes and beats, Drinking Buddies instead ambles sideways. It’s headed nowhere in particular, but at least the voyage is pleasant.

Stranded isn’t a for-the-ages howler—just a terminally stupid, monotonously unimaginative rehash of umpteen space-horror classics.

At every turn, Frankenstein’s Army exhibits a preference for jolt scares and gore over actual suspense, which never materializes, thanks to a general indifference to plot and minimal interest in character.

Shamelessly exploitative, but never entertainingly so.

The Time Being is a visual pleasure, with Cicin-Sain unveiling shot after shot of glorious landscapes and striking silhouettes.

Wasteland reveals itself as little more than a bloodless plot engine, but it purrs and hums under the ultra-slick chassis.

While Drug War is ultimately more an exercise in craft than a movie with a lot on its mind, it’s a remarkably skillful exercise, and hardly devoid of ideas.

There’s a strain of gross-out humor—most bodily fluids make cameos—that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie. But more bothersome is a tendency The To Do List shares with its heroine: mistaking checking items off a list for progress.

For all the memorable dialogue and elegant camerawork (courtesy of Javier Aguirresarobe), it’s Blanchett’s movie, and her performance tells yet another story, that of a woman losing control.

The lack of plot coherence is a lingering irritant in a film that otherwise seems to be trying to improve on its cinematic-series forebears.

A film that grows less compelling and original by the minute, R.I.P.D. serves due notice that the mismatched-buddy-cop movie is wearing out its welcome all over again.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

Compared to other, similar offbeat monster movies, Grabbers is under-realized. It isn’t as smartly plotted or funny as Tremors, nor as politically charged as The Host.

Broken may someday be remembered only as a minor footnote in Norris’ career, but it’s already a career worth following.

After an unpromising beginning, Iceberg Slim develops into a thorny, engaging exploration of the strange twilight and late-in-life fame of a bona fide American outlaw.

Wiig’s new comedy sulks limply along with her, unable to bring the kind of energy that might complement her tendency to underplay every scene.

Taken as a whole, Blackfish does an admirable job of preaching without force-feeding, seamlessly blending opinion with reportage, and addressing its central issues from enough angles to make a series of end-runs around dubious viewers.

Only God Forgives suffers from the disconnect between its stylistic high-art archness and its content’s pulp gratuitousness. Refn gives every sequence a hushed consideration, but there’s rarely a sense that he’s earned it with equivalent profundity in theme.

The Act Of Killing raises all kinds of provocative questions about the sins of nations in transition, and about how important it is for those in power to control the narrative.

The focus is much more on Sarah, Frank, and their repetitive, ugly dynamic than on the giddy elements that made the first film trashy fun.

With The Conjuring, [Wan] once more turns the familiar terrifying, making it easy to fear what’s behind that closed door, or under the bed, or just around the corner, making a creaking noise that doesn’t sound quite right.

Computer Chess may seem like a novelty item, but it’s that and more, accumulating insight and substance without ever losing the fun of being a lark.

There’s nothing remotely revolutionary about Turbo’s underdog-sports narrative, but that’s okay—it’s one of the sturdiest plots in film for a reason—and the film’s emotional beats are no less potent for being expected, thanks to the ground-level focus on the human-snail relationships that fuel them.

As routine and undercooked as Beneath’s one-wet-corpse-after-another plot is, the movie is still breathtakingly beautiful at times, with compositions and color tones that resemble a high-class fashion-magazine layout circa 1965.

Intriguing without ever proving insightful, the film nonetheless has a formal patience and meticulousness that sets it apart from its jump-scare-loving mainstream-horror brethren.

All four of the main performances are so strong that they deserve more space to develop and intertwine. Instead, at times, Blood plays like one long “previously on” montage for the series that inspired it.

Cordero and screenwriter Philip Gelatt demonstrate a deft understanding of how to handle a found-footage narrative without making it too familiar.

Given that the camera always seems to fall or get knocked into the perfect position to capture the craziness at hand, any vérité pretenses soon prove ridiculous. But it’s no more ridiculous than the plot, which incessantly wastes time trying to flesh out its characters, but barely bothers with building suspense.

The film is so slight that it feels less like a proper sequel to Grown Ups than a failed television spin-off that inexplicably cast Sandler and the gang in the lead roles instead of their low-budget television equivalents.

It’s a soul-stirring tribute to a man whose vision was too bold and revolutionary for his lifetime, or the convention-bound ways of the music industry, but was ultimately too powerful to be denied.

White House Down is never more than a sliver away from gleeful self-parody. It’s pure patriotic kitsch, the cinematic equivalent of a black-velvet painting of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in its talons as it soars majestically over Mount Rushmore.

Apart from its shallow analysis, Terms And Conditions is, if anything, not alarmist enough: Its worst-case scenario has already come true.

The film is less effective as an inspirational saga than as a simple portrait of a marriage in its twilight years, with the house-in-progress serving as a metaphor for love that endures by being constantly renewed.

The film doesn’t feel like a fresh riff on familiar tropes so much as a bad cover of Pulp Fiction.

Under the direction of Susan Seidelman—who first focused on a lost woman with identity issues in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan—the leads in The Hot Flashes come across as one-dimensional, pseudo-feminist clichés whose conversations seem contrived and whose jokes land with the thud of airballs clunking on hardwood.

V/H/S/2 is content to recycle the conventions and stylistic restrictions of the original while pursuing the default vision of just about every horror sequel: more of the same, with less inspiration, a bigger budget, and more gore.

While The Hunt skillfully puts viewers through the wringer, it’s often for no higher purpose than pushing buttons and generating outrage.

Even with shaggy, semi-improvised projects like Crystal Fairy, there’s a need for some kind of conclusion, and Silva devises one that’s simultaneously terribly contrived and by far the most powerful scene in the movie.

Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.

Pacific Rim never amounts to more than the sum of its setpieces, but it delivers on the promise of its premise.

As a buddy-cop movie, The Heat seems almost deliberately generic, with boilerplate plotting carried across with zero panache. It wagers that McCarthy and Bullock’s comic energy will make all the difference—a smart bet, as it happens.

The default middle ground between true-to-life and wacky in I Give It A Year turns out to be a place of dreary artificiality.

It’s light and loose in ways that Almodóvar hasn’t let himself be in decades. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a lot of fun, a relentlessly entertaining lark that, like its setting, soars into the clouds, then discovers it doesn’t really have a way to get down.

There’s a potentially compelling story here about children of divorce and the tentative ways they set about forging their own relationships, but the filmmaking is too rudimentary to draw it out subtly.

Nothing Can Hurt Me is frustratingly unfocused, petering out considerably after its first hour.

The Kevin Hart brand is clearly doing well, but Let Me Explain doesn’t seem interested in providing anything more than a surface-level presentation of the product.

Despicable Me 2 has its charms, in its spritely pacing, a rapid-fire gag-delivery system that hits as often as it misses, and especially in its innovative, expansive use of 3-D space.

Verbinski orchestrates complex action sequences, including two spectacular bits of derring-do on a moving train, with a precision few in Hollywood are capable of pulling off. Yet The Lone Ranger, like his last two Pirates movies, seems conceived to deliver spectacle by the bulk, which means carrying the baggage of multiple subplots for the purpose of multiple climactic sequences.

There’s a matter-of-factness to Israel: A Home Movie that’s disquieting, as it shows the joy and determination of a nation in the making, and the dismayed faces of those elbowed aside.

Fantastic Mr. Fox may be his most purely pleasurable film to date, evoking the Dahl books and Rankin-Bass productions that so transported him as a kid.

Maddin mixes personal reminiscences with elaborate fantasies of Masonic rituals and collectivist brothels, to construct a vision of Winnipeg as a city of sleepwalkers, roaming through mazes of snowbanks. In the end, it’s the “my” that matters more than the “Winnipeg.”

Park’s pristine framing and yen for extreme violence give Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance the pop of a graphic novel, but there are times when his point about the poisonous nature of revenge is eclipsed by stylized torture and sadism for its own sake.

With Mysterious Skin, Araki burrowed into the hearts and minds of his audience, looking to provide his viewers with Neil and Brian’s deeper understanding of how to piece together a fractured life, then go looking for the fragments that are still buried deep.

As a piece of filmmaking, the documentary The Five Obstructions is nowhere near as artful as Leth’s films-within-the-film.

There’s no other movie quite like it.

This movie is a portal, leading to a living museum of childhood at its most poignant.

As specific as the film is to Italy at the turn of the turbulent 1970s, it’s also a film about how power first corrupts, then makes mad those who possess it.

The original musical holds up well, and Marshall and Condon’s adaption doesn’t wreck it.

The digressiveness of Y Tu Mamá También is its masterstroke.

Co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg—the latter then a top-rank cinematographer making his directorial debut—it begins as a nasty slice of British underworld life, and ends as a psychedelic excursion into insanity.

George Washington is a mood piece first, and its triumph is in bottling up the intense feeling of early adolescence, and watching how tragedy transforms it.

Kirikou is a wonder because it’s such a familiar kind of story, told in such an unusual way.

After establishing the AFFA’s complex, corrupt social structure, Stone and Logan wimp out considerably in the second half of Any Given Sunday, piling on the sports-melodrama clichés.

At least White summons the camp energy that Lake Placid is fecklessly seeking.

Ravenous is misbegotten in multiple ways. It isn’t scary enough to be an effective horror movie, or funny enough to be much of a comedy... But say this for Ravenous: It isn’t generic.

Jingle All The Way is one of the most mindlessly flailing films I’ve ever seen.

The simplified, handheld camerawork and the idea of “cutting for emotion” rather than continuity gets the most out of his actors, who are free to clash and improvise within a scene without worrying about hitting their marks.

Ballard makes a simple, deeply affecting emotional associations between Amy, her father, the geese, and the absent mothers and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathes the action in an appropriately magisterial beauty.

Whether some jokes were studio-tweaked or others simply failed on their own, MST3K: The Movie feels unmistakably like a compromised product, flattened by the stiff headwinds of mediocrity.

For a movie that’s so photo-realistic in its backgrounds and detailed in its character design, Ghost In The Shell is just as effective when it goes minimal, suggesting presence through absence.

As a piece of filmmaking, Safe is brilliant for the way Haynes, in concert with cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy and composer Ed Tomney, blankets the mundane in the eerie tone of science fiction and horror, especially in the first half.

The strength of Eastwood’s Bridges is in its patience, and how it lets the love story develop from start to finish, even though the audience knows from the beginning the broad strokes of what’s going to happen.

Mostly, however, Candyman: Farewell To The Flesh is content to rely on easy jolts and an overabundance of fake-out scares, rather than hard-earned suspense. It’s never awful, but it also never feels necessary. Mostly, it proves that even the most innovative horror concepts can find ways to spin their wheels.

Even if Eat Drink Man Woman had no plot, it’d be a pleasure to watch.

The Shadow was one of the original pulp heroes, but his movie is more copycat than pioneer.

Much of the fun of Malice derives from Sorkin, Frank, and director Harold Becker understanding the been-there/done-that formulas of thrillers past and tinkering with them as much as possible. Instead of a little bit of misdirection, they devote a vast swath of the film to one.

The Age Of Innocence possesses a tension between the flowering of private passion and the quiet forces that make its survival impossible—and Scorsese, a master of coiled intensity, brings it across with heartbreaking force.

Part period piece and part coming-of-age story, King Of The Hill balances an incident-packed script with muted tones, painting a rich, absorbing picture of one boy’s struggle to live by his wits.

Even with the impressive talent assembled in front of and behind the camera, and a healthy budget for a television movie, Body Bags is still little more than an agreeable lark, and its breezy charm might not have survived a drastic cut in budget and shift in shooting locales.

Rising Sun boasts shiny, shiny production values befitting a big-budgeted Sean Connery vehicle adapted from a bestselling novel, but scratch the glossy surface and Rising Sun reveals itself to be a Cinemax-ready B-movie, complete with a rogue’s gallery of villains, each tackier and more ridiculous than the last.

A decent-enough inroad to one of film history’s most respected parodists.

A singularly beautiful nostalgia piece that radiates with love and sadness, and doesn’t extract one type of feeling from another. It’s a film of aching bittersweetness, impeccably realized, past perfect.

It is, in short, a strange and unrepeatable success, driven by its own uniqueness as much as anything else.

As is so often the case with Crowe, what mostly stands out about Singles is how sensitively and honestly it tries to capture the way people with deep convictions are inevitably headed for heartbreak.