Eventually, the film muddles its way into a self-indulgent, overlong mess, complete with a flowerlike beating heart, a miraculous new life and a lot of soccer. Long before anyone in Ma Ma expires, the movie does.

The British documentary Dark Horse is a delightful story well told — and, like so many good stories, it begins with a dream.

His name might be a punchline, but his story — and the human toll that it took — isn’t.

The film’s action scenes are masterpieces of stately choreography, with elements of humor incorporated.

This is a production from producer Michael Bay, master of the cinema of CG run amok. And all we helpless mortals can do is cower and duck as those 3D fists fly.

Overall, the film is sweet but often loses impact in its most serious moments by blasting a happy pop soundtrack.

There’s a problem with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It’s attempting to mock something that is beyond mockery.

A traditional documentary with solemn voice-over, career timeline and critical assessments this is not. But while a few more facts along those lines would have been welcome...this visual love letter nevertheless conveys Kirk’s spirit and music well.

Love & Friendship is pure pleasure, from the lavishly precise sets and costumes to the pitch-perfect tone. It’s self-consciously mannered and merrily playful; a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

Inspiration, old-fashioned style, is the main course being served in Pelé: Birth of a Legend. In essence commissioned by the soccer icon, who is credited as one of the picture’s executive producers, “Pelé” is hagiography. But appealing hagiography.

Alice Through the Looking Glass isn’t without pleasures, but this empowerment-meets-fantasy mixture could have used a few more sprinklings of quirk.

The action, aside from the cloudy 3D, looks impressive (particularly the destruction of the Sydney Opera House), and X-Men: Apocalypse moves along tidily, but you watch thinking that all this used to be a lot more fun.

These characters don’t seem like types chosen from a screenwriting manual but like people we might know, with quirks and feelings and flaws and hearts.

It’s predictable — throughout the film, I kept thinking that I’d seen it before — and a bit sentimental, yet thoroughly pleasant.

Combining rowdy concert footage and revealing offstage interactions of the band members, Mad Tiger is a well-executed portrait of a band coming apart at the seams.

Unfortunately as festivities in the building turn violent and/or orgiastic, Wheatley keeps resorting to high-speed montages rather than slyly crafted scenes.

Luca Guadagnino’s moody drama A Bigger Splash is, unexpectedly, a study in charisma, with two wildly different performances at its center.

We can see everything that Manhattan Night has in store from a mile off. Every step of the way it’s predictable. And that predictability makes it tedious.

Writer-director Jo Sung-hee subtly evokes American Westerns and “X-Files”-like weirdness while dreaming up such pulse-quickening set pieces as a shootout in a fog-filled room.

Mark this one down as a sequel that should never have been made.

It should have worked, and it almost does, but Black buries his characters in a sputtering, chaotic story, seeming to realize only sporadically that we aren’t watching this film for the plot and the stunts...but for the byplay between the two main characters. And — who knew? — Crowe and Gosling have comic chemistry to burn.

The Angry Birds Movie is unnecessary but cute, like a bonnet on a cat — and there are certainly worse recommendations than that.

All of this is sporadically funny and cheerfully tasteless in its low-budget way, but it’s also unevenly acted, a bit overlong and never quite as daring as it seems to want to be.

Slick and raunchy when it might have been grindingly realistic, Viva is finally all heart.

Unfortunately, Money Monster, though perfectly competent, is one of those movies that promises more than it delivers.

In his third outing as the Captain, Evans seems totally comfortable in the role. He manages to convey his character’s goodness without making him seem like a self-righteous stiff. There’s an ease in his performance, and a sense of humor that makes him very appealing.

With its opening line, “Imagine you’re dead,” The Family Fang instantly invites its soon-to-be-captive audience on an absorbing, provocative, slightly fantastic path that’s like few others.

Mostly, we watch Binoche’s face, in eloquent, mesmerizing close-up; pain and grief engulf her expression like water flooding into a still pool. She has few words. She doesn’t need them.