Barnaby puts a mythic frame around a grim history, shaping it in a way that feels always like a creative adventure, not a duty.

The title comes from prosecutor Ferencz, who compares his work to that of the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who said he watched the sky so future generations could use him as their foundation.

Rudderless is humane and almost entertaining. A crucial late plot development disrupts the predictability, instigates a third act and provides reason for watching.

Here’s how good an actor Bill Murray is. He does such a bristly, entertaining turn as a boozy curmudgeon in St. Vincent, that he saves first-time director Theodore Melfi’s obvious dramedy from sliding into a burbling sinkhole of schmaltz.

A film as lithe and seductive as its lethal main character.

The movie’s compromised tone, wavering between emo introspection and rom-com cuteness, is awkward in all the wrong ways.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Fury is a war movie with balls of steel and marbles for brains.

God Help the Girl is about aspirations and goals, musical or otherwise. Murdoch is working some things out here, gracefully on the whole. His own band has toggled between frail sincerity and pop mastery itself over the years. The former is more endearing and original, but it’s not for everyone. Which is how I might describe his film.

Director David Dobkin, best known for comedies such as "Shanghai Nights" and "Wedding Crashers," demonstrates his serious intent mostly by paint-by-numbers psychology and a ponderous pace.

A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn’t nearly as urgent as it needs to be.

Alexander narrates with a rueful, put-upon worldly wisdom that instantly enlists our sympathy, and the young actor Ed Oxenbould may be the most appealing junior loser we’ve seen since Peter Billingsley wished for an air rifle in "A Christmas Story."

A parable that concerns the monstrous conduct of humans, Tusk is a salute to storytelling, a comic send-up of Canadiana – with awesome references to Degrassi and Duplessis – and a terrorizing vehicle for sharply conceived absurdity.

It’s all fun enough to watch for the sheer over-the-topness of the performances, and Horovitz does his level best at working around some heavy spatial limitations, but there’s no getting around the fact that, ultimately, My Old Lady feels as stubbornly stuck in that expansive and underlit apartment as Madame Girard herself, and you may find yourself bolting for a lungful of relief.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

A drama with honourable intentions that feels like a bit of a fib.

Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows.

The challenge for a filmmaker attempting to adapt the Agota Kristof novella The Notebook is how much of its startlingly amoral world can actually be shown.

It’s a felt, funny, bracingly sincere kids’ movie. And even more refreshing, it takes as a theme our social fixation with waste, salvage and repackaging.

The film is so incessant on bolstering Cave’s repute and noble struggle with the art of songwriting that it can’t help but seem bloated and self-important. Sometimes seriousness should speak for itself.

Even the worst homophobes are viewed as simply potholes on the highway to enlightenment, and Maggie herself appears on TV only long enough to get the channel changed.

Bring on the sequel please, because, as fine as Denzel is, director Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer is not so good – a self-consciously stylized, stop-and-start hodgepodge of Death Wish street vengeance, Bond-style Russian villainy, and moodily shot Boston locale.

Although overplotted and underexplained, the movie is rich in memorable lairs.

Throughout, Sachs is quietly observational – the film’s emotional power coming from its rich but unshowy performances.

As with so many movies where the script constructs experiences that are contrived and off-putting, you hope the actors can capture the emotional truth of some scenes, even if the entire apparatus feels bogus.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

This is Canadian cinema as defiantly ugly and mean as anything churned out from the bowels of callous ol’ Hollywood.

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

It is certainly possible that Baena is going for a deeper meaning, but even that feels like a case of indecisiveness.

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

There’s something to be said for a movie that manages to baffle and dazzle in equal measure. If Daffy Duck had taken up political and media theory, his brain might look like this.

Port Dundas remains snoozy and depopulated even when throats are cut and stomachs thrown to the sheepdogs, and so does the movie.

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

While Wojtowicz’s shape-shifting character is the major source of fascination here, the archival footage, including with is terrifically effective in evoking the tumultuous era and occasionally providing a reality check to the Dog’s boastful version of his life.

Still: the Soronprfbs may be the best fake on-screen punk band since the Stains.

Jim Caviezel, as coach Ladouceur, doesn’t get much to work with, the script reducing the man to a two-dimensional motivational speaker awash in “there’s no I in Team” platitudes.

Here’s a date movie that will neither cozily cheer you nor satisfyingly thrill you, but instead leave you scratching your head.

The confluence of poverty, dysfunctional parenting and poor educational prospects makes the oft-idealized small-town life look like an incubator for failure, no matter how high and spectacular the Fourth of July fireworks fly.

If I Stay is true to principle in one significant regard: It makes no concessions to anyone outside its teenage female cohort.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

The interactions between these adventurers, with their varied imperatives and world-views, are compelling and funny – all the more so for being set against such a dramatically blanked-out backdrop.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

Despite being sumptuously shot and competently assembled, it provides no real insight into the tortured mind of its subject or the creative process in general.

Is The Trip to Italy the second Godfather of comedies, or a retread? Neither, exactly. The concept is no longer fresh, but the scenery on the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts is more transporting, and their convertible Mini Cooper is a more amusing vehicle. Finally, the fact that the only singalong CD for the drive is Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is an unexpected master stroke.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

Elena is at once a portrait, an autobiography and a history of family trauma.

Land Ho! is both loose (shot over 18 days, with an improv quality to the acting) and overcalculated in its series of encounters, small revelations and life-affirming beats. The movie is pleasant and mostly forgettable, except for the character of Mitch.

Calvary is an unsettling concoction, abstract and brutal, morally serious and too ghastly in its flippancy to be simply comedy. When you stop gasping at the shocks and jokes, there’s a profundity here, in the struggle to find the balance between outrage and forgiveness.

If TMNT the franchise is going to reach the same lofty heights of blockbuster-dom, it still needs to find its own inner hero.

There could be a fascinating and illuminating movie in this.

One distraction is that everything feels smothered in an extra helping of déjà vu sauce: another movie featuring a middle-aged misanthrope with a dewy younger woman; another film with stage magic as a theme.

When Anita Hill took her seat before an all-white Senate committee in 1991, the optics said nearly as much about the systemic dynamics of race, gender and power in American politics as any of the specifics of the case at hand.

Where the film fails is in its fizzled, melodramatic ending. The problem is that Brown the man had no resolution – no third act.

At once cluttered and cavernous, hysterical and static, romantic and cynical, The Zero Theorem works most effectively moment by moment and in the details.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

A Master Builder really doesn’t work, hampered by odd casting, theatrical performances and a reductive interpretation of Ibsen’s play.

It’s a story where sex and being over 60 aren’t treated as mutual exclusives, which is pretty great in its own way.

Lucy, you may have twigged, is named after our 3.2-million-year-old hominid ancestor.

Although the film and the actors keep on looking good, this solemn, soppy, fantasy has nothing to say about science or faith.

Like a book we want to keep reading, despite the compression of pages telling us the end is near, it’s hard not to want A Most Wanted Man to go on forever, if only to spend time in the company of Hoffman – one of the great actors of his, or any, generation.

Without “spoiling” it, it’s a film that at least opens up a possibility for change, instead of providing another rote reshuffling of power from the Black Hats back to the White Hats.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

The most important question is one that should be answered before setting foot in the theatre, and it is this: How badly do you want to see Cameron Diaz’s butt? If your answer is so very badly, or even pretty darn bad, then by all means, buy a ticket.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with kid-friendly Fire & Rescue – the movie offers enough jokes and glitzy animation to capture its target audience as well as a few witty puns for their accompanying adult – it just doesn’t introduce any new ideas or compelling characters, traits that we’ve come to expect from high-level animated films.

Soulless and idiotic and abysmally scripted as it is, Anarchy, like its predecessor, feels mournfully relevant.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

When it came to describing what was happening to him, Ebert was forthright, clear-eyed and admirably free of neurosis and self-pity.

Begin Again is a not-entirely-successful movie about not selling out; it’s a theme that must concern Carney deeply.

Good news – it’s incredible. It sets the standard for blockbuster action movies, and manages to be even better than its predecessor.

The ensemble cast clicks, and the ribbon-tied ending is always in doubt.

Would that the movie had gone the next step, and possibly imagined that this bright, shiny little E.T. had figured out how to get kids to do its sinister work for him by providing free WiFi and endless smartphone upgrades in exchange for undying loyalty, we might have had something altogether different on our hands.

As a script it is uneven and tonally inconsistent – best as a brainless, gross-out comedy, less successful when striving for emotional poignancy.

If this movie doesn’t leave you howling at the very idea of demonic possession, you’re in dire need of an exorcist.

Delivers a touching, morally outraged portrait that, in memory of Swartz, may inspire people to ask hard questions about how the new world is being shaped away from view, behind closed doors.

Poehler’s Parks and Rec co-star Adam Scott is there, playing a sound engineer and so is John Stamos from "Full House," because, you know, that’s funny. Until it’s tiresome.

Everything about Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers movie is too much. Its 165 minute running time. Its convoluted plot. Its deafening score. Its product placement. Its never-ending action scenes. Its swooping camera work. Its overwhelming stupidity. Well before it finished I was numb from its bludgeoning excess.

In truth, despite its honesty, this is a flawed little film, its low comedy never funny enough to justify its crudeness.

It never reaches the soaring, cloud-busting heights of Frankie Valli’s otherworldly falsetto, and it doesn’t even try.

The film’s bleakness is almost satirical. It’s "Brazil" drained of the daydreams.

It’s not about the world catching up to understand poor, lonesome Hiccup. It’s about Hiccup catching up to the expectations of the world on his own.

Chef is compelling, somewhat convincing and, according to many who know better than I, it’s largely on trend.

The tension fizzles as The Sacrament narrows into predictability, indulging every cliché of found-footage filmmaking and Jonestown-styled cult apocalypticism.

Fault is at heart a full-throttle, by-the-numbers tearjerker.

Visually evokes Coppola’s "Godfather Part II" and Leone’s "Once Upon a Time in America," but in its utterly irony-free melodramatic sincerity also suggests a silent-era woman’s picture à la D.W. Griffith, King Vidor or G.W. Pabst.

All in all, a perfectly superior example of industrially fortified Hollywood fun, and as good a guarantee as Doug Liman can offer that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.

As sweet as the film can be (a burgeoning romance between Kitsch’s doctor and Liane Balaban’s hard-to-get local borders on the adorable), The Grand Seduction is also deeply cynical.

Even when his touch is light, the Swedish filmmaker is masterful at capturing youth’s contracted perception of time and amplified emotions: Every slight could mean the end of the world, and every joy feels limitless.

Stylistically, Baird seems keen to position Filth as a spiritual sequel to "Trainspotting."

In truth, you just can’t wait until the wicked Jolie returns to the screen. Whether a malevolent twinkle illuminates her beady eye or a heartbreaking tear rolls down her alabaster cheek, she is the film’s power.

The Love Punch feels like a remake of an old MGM caper comedy. It’s not, but it feels that way, which will certainly set it apart from the Disney villains, X-people and radioactive sea monsters of the summer movie schedule.

The preposterousness of this plot marks Fading Gigolo as a vanity project, but it’s hard to take Turturro too much to task when he hits so many other grace notes in between blowing his own horn.

The movie offers nothing new or special, but at least it isn’t as painful as watching Sandler walk Al Pacino through a Dunkin’ Donuts rap.

It doesn’t take a lot of wit or imagination to use Richard Nixon as a bad guy, but it’s still satisfying to watch a climatic showdown between two supervillains – one brought back from out of the past and the other from off the comic-book page – and wait to see who blinks first. Seems like we’ll always have Nixon to kick around, after all.

The clever and defiant Ai, who is forever filming himself and others on his phone, does in one instance capture Johnsen on camera, but mainly the doc is missing any explanation of how a dissident forbidden from giving interviews agreed to it – as well as much context about his personal life.

Although no single documentary could give a comprehensive account of the Roma’s culture and history, Yeger’s doc offers a sobering, often harrowing understanding of a people and the workings of genocide.

Never amounts to anything more than its title’s shallow descriptors.

Unfortunately, For No Good Reason sidelines Steadman’s own bona fides, functioning primarily as a second-hand documentary of Thompson, stoking the hagiography of the late hipster icon.