The film boasts all the cinematic strengths we’ve come to expect from the animal-focused nonfic label... But director Mark Linfield’s film is also distinguished by its fascinating focus on the rigid but not immutable social hierarchy of the macaque world, as well as a smartly structured story of repression, rebellion, and triumph.

The Sisterhood of Night is too messy to qualify as a great film, especially when it begins introducing, in passing, peripheral characters who survived rape and incest, but it certainly isn’t muddled.

Overall, The Longest Ride feels cloying and contrived; the only time it’s unpredictable is when the plot takes a turn so utterly unbelievable that, admittedly, no one would see it coming.

Laxton’s measured pace appropriately parallels the slow stifling that Effie undergoes, but he extends his muted approach too far, depriving the film of the emotional crescendo it badly needs.

The mystery is solidly structured, but the answers it gradually yields are silly at best and lazy and offensive at worst.

If incoming director James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Saw”) falls the tiniest bit short of what Justin Lin brought to the third, fifth and sixth entries, Furious 7 nonetheless ranks a very successful fourth place overall, with at least one gargantuan set piece that ranks among the series’ finest.

Densely packed and gorgeously expressionist, the old-fashioned tragedy is very nearly a satisfying experience despite its various shortcomings.

Ferrell and Hart don’t bring anything that we haven’t seen from them before, but they create a bouncy, playfully defiant rapport. It’s promising enough that you wish they could have made a movie in which they’re just making us laugh, instead of leaving us wondering how every third scene could be made less offensive.

If you’re going to make propaganda, fine, but at least make good propaganda.

It’s an undeniable triumph of mood — perfect for anyone who wants to practice clenching their fists for nearly 100 straight minutes — as well as an ambitious effort at reinventing horror by eschewing the genre’s common tricks.

On the one hand, the story goes pretty much exactly where you think it will, but at the same time, Danny Collins generates its funniest and most dramatic moments precisely when the characters behave more like human beings and less like moving parts of what’s clearly intended to be a feel-good hit.

While The Barber may be a first-time directorial effort, it’s tense and taut enough to make an impression thanks in no small part to the steadying, strong presence of Glenn.

There’s a lot to like about director Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeously fanciful tale.

Spy would be a standout if only for its ability to keep me laughing while also keeping me from figuring out who was really double-crossing whom. Add to that this extraordinary ensemble of actors (who knew Jason Statham could be this funny?), and you’ve got another memorable offering from McCarthy and Feig.

When it seems like the movie can’t get worse, it does, with a finale that’s just cringe-inducing and far too neat and tidy. It’s the kind of climax that undoes all of McCarthy and Sandler’s efforts to make us invest in Max and his story.

Take everything annoying about a cobbled-together, overly familiar YA adaptation, add the built-in wheel-spinning of a sequel, and you’ve got Insurgent, a film that works best when it places its heroine inside virtual-reality situations — at least then it has an excuse for eschewing logic and context.

Hawke is probably too respectful a director and disciple to challenge anything that his subject says, or even query about the vaguest outlines of his personal life.... The title is truth in advertising; “Seymour” really is only an introduction.

A rancid comedy fueled by male entitlement and uxoricidal rage.

There’s not much new in this tale of grim men staring, and then shooting, each other down, but this cast and crew know how to spin this yarn with efficacy and economy.

There’s nothing in Home that you haven’t seen before, but there’s a lot in it your kids haven’t; as animated sci-fi for small fry, it’s a success whose modest but well-executed ambitions are no small part of its charm.

It’s one thing to bring a gravelly gravitas to characters like this, but Penn suffers and glowers so much that it weighs down the material. If he plans to strap on the Kevlar in future, he might consider lightening up a little and saving the intensity for more serious movies.

It’s too bad that neither the philosophy nor the pyrotechnics on-screen in Chappie can distract you from your own sinking feeling that you’ve seen almost all of this before.

Unfinished Business isn’t a laugh-free experience — Nick Frost steals every scene as a business underling with a kinky side — and some of the comic set pieces actually work.

Breeziness is a quality Queen and Country has plenty of, making for a lovely journey that never ends up anywhere particularly groundbreaking.

The action is shot far better than it is in most Marvel movies, with clarity in the framing and a fluid skill to the cutting.

A timely, thorough and truly inspiring documentary about the financial and marketing imperatives that lead academic institutions to deny their students safety and justice.

The Lazarus Effect is a smart, unsubtle chiller that should leave even a dedicated horror fan shaken and spooked from its opening scene’s revelations to its final scene’s implications.

Like a perfect cocktail mixes the sour with the sweet and the bright with the boozy, Focus combines seamless, superbly-crafted filmmaking with the fizz and fun created by its leads.

Wild Tales represents the work of an exceedingly skillful storyteller.

Drunktown’s Finest shouldn’t be viewed simply as an anthropological curiosity, though, but as the promising debut of a gifted filmmaker who wants to show the beating and hurting hearts of the people behind the headlines.

There’s no doubt that The DUFF is clever, funny and quotable enough to become this decade’s “Mean Girls.” Watch your back, Regina George — there’s a new queen bee in town.

If the undemanding silliness of the first “Hot Tub Time Machine” was your cup of comedy, then you may well enjoy another plunge in these waters. Apart from a few laughs, however, I found the experience tepid and soggy.

Unrepentant, uneven and unique, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus proves that Lee can still make a film worthy of the arguments it will most certainly start.

At a brisk 86 minutes, What We Do in the Shadows never sags or drags, delivering its comic punches with surgical precision and then getting off the stage. Being immortal doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of timing.

This switching-places comedy warmly and trenchantly sends up the telenovela genre’s swooning melodrama and oversexed-but-prudish contradictions.

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

Starring a vivacious Dakota Johnson and a game Jamie Dornan, Taylor-Johnson’s erotic romance is a skillful distillation of James’ first book that captures the heady exhilaration of being someone’s fixation.

Seventh Son tells a story of dragons, witches, ghosts and ogres, but the most fantastic thing about it is the idea that someone thought this lumpy, bumpy and swollen sack of tired tropes and cluttered CGI would attract audiences.

A feel-good movie that earns all those good feelings, McFarland, USA might be running on a predetermined track, but the heart it shows along the journey is what makes it a winner.

Delivering boredom when it promises mayhem, Wild Card is a bad bet that doesn’t pay off for either the film’s makers or its audience.

It comes across less like an actual documentary you would show to a curious audience than a good-job-everyone piece of internal documentation you’d screen at a company party or to potential outside investors.

A misguided attempt to spin a nightmare scenario into a cutesy rom-com premise, this British production takes place in a harrowingly claustrophobic world where personal growth ends at age 18, and you meet everyone you’ll ever become friends with in your whole life during high school.

Who cares if the story is occasionally impenetrable or if some gags land with a thud when the thrills and the eye candy keep coming at such a breathless pace? Jupiter Ascending doesn’t break the new ground that the Wachowskis have managed in the past...but the film never slacks in its efforts to wow us.

The jokes are consistently hilarious, with enough variety to tickle the funny bones of old salts and young fishies alike.

This silly chamber piece about sex and murder elicits only yawns, interrupted by the occasional unintentional giggle.

Save for a few standout scenes of carefree elation and daring camaraderie, Girlhood is largely a grim and stilted study of oppression.

Even with all the teen angst and temporal alterations, the film stays fleet, funny and fast, especially as our leads figure out, through trial and error, how they can take advantage of their new abilities in ways large and small.

The three lead performances cut through Dolan’s showier tendencies, creating relatable, empathetic characters; we share in their glimmer of optimism for a better future, making it all the more painful when reality comes crashing down.

A thoughtful and frequently moving drama that insightfully illuminates what it’s like to live with illness and agony at least as well as last year’s other Best Actress vehicles like “Wild,” “Still Alice,” and “Two Days, One Night” do.

Red Army is a thoughtful and cheer-worthy examination of how sports can shape cultures, redraw borders and change history.

Mortdecai is by no means a disaster — the occasional joke lands, and there’s at least some fun to be found in the frenetic farce of all the conspiracies and the running-around... Still, I spent most of the movie waiting for it to find its rhythms and set a witty pace for itself that would allow the humor to build and the outrageous situations to pay off grandly.

Terrible character design, combined with a painful lack of laughs and a crushing plethora of ghastly songs, makes Strange Magic perhaps the worst animated feature ever to come out of Disney (which might explain why the studio is releasing the film under its now-rarely-used Touchstone label). Compared to other Lucas missteps of recent years, it’ll make you nostalgic for Jar Jar Binks.

Gripping, smart and genuinely thrilling, Black Sea elevates itself above most other thrillers by how wisely and well it brings you down to the depths alongside its crew.

Neither good nor bad, nor campy nor scary enough to be in any way memorable, The Boy Next Door is a lot like our own neighbors, just there. You could make the effort to sneak a peek, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.

Unabashedly truthful and restlessly intelligent, Akhavan’s remarkable, near-perfect debut has wit and charisma to spare. Miss it at your own risk.

There are plenty of laughs — and nothing that goes over a kid’s head to an adult funny bone is smutty or smarmy — and the sentiment never feels strained or artificial.

While The Wedding Ringer isn’t the total waste of time that its painful trailer (and January release date) threatens, it’s also a movie whose occasional good ideas are ultimately drowned out by sloppy, contrived screenwriting.

Blackhat is such a massive fiasco that it’s hard to know where to begin analyzing it.

Audiences the world over made Neeson an action star when they fell in love with his “particular set of skills” in the first “Taken,” but this third go-round finds both cast and crew opting not to exercise any of them. Everyone involved seems to be determined to quash anyone’s interest in a fourth chapter.

The writer-director never finds a coherent point of view (or a way out of Strindberg’s three-wall play structure), and Miss Julie ends up merely a whirlwind of moods without a center, as changeable and as random as a TV flipping channels.

The chasm of the wealth gap and the slow destruction of the middle class should matter to us all, and films like Two Days, One Night remind us of the human faces affected by corporate greed.

Every good idea this sequel has to offer winds up taking a backseat to the most obvious cat-in-the-closet “BOO!” moments imaginable.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a startlingly enjoyable and well-made action film leavened by humor and slicked along by style, made by, for, and about people who’ve seen far too many Bond films.

Marshall deserves credit for knowing how to shoot and cut (alongside editor Wyatt Smith, “Thor: The Dark World”) a musical number, and his work here ranks much closer to his success with “Chicago” than to his dismal “Nine.”

No amount of self-referential jokes can make up for a lack of heart and spirit. Thankfully, Annie lacks neither.

While The Interview never slacks in its mission to tell jokes, it's such a messy and meandering movie that it never quite lands as a satire of politics or the media or anything else.

It's hard to get invested in the father-son dynamic here, even it when it represents a diversion from the limp comedy bits and the flatlined suspense.

Top Five is that movie precisely so good and yet still so flawed that you can watch greatness slip out of its ambitious but awkward reach right in front of your eyes.

The paucity of new ideas is evident from the opening crawl.

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?

There's an extraordinarily tough and smart delicacy to Still Alice, and it stretches far beyond the writing or Moore's performance or even the sympathy of the circumstance.

For director Jean-Marc Vallée, the film's smarts and soulfulness give him a leap upward from “Dallas Buyers Club” that puts him head-to-head with Tate Taylor (“Get On Up”) as 2014's Most Improved Filmmaker. The other big surprise of Wild turns out to be Reese Witherspoon, going far from her usual comfort zone here.

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service.

Ultimately, the strengths of Unbroken far outweigh its flaws.

This stodgy adaptation creaks with solemnity — not to mention reactionary casting choices — and apart from some nifty frog and locust infestations, even the special effects pale next to a wind-blown Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea.

The romance of patriotism and pain, depicted here in lush greens and velvety blues, makes “The Imitation Game” enjoyable enough to render it a vindication of the formula. It disappoints as biography, but makes for a great yarn, even if you've heard it before.

The Babadook is the rare horror tale that's also a triumph of empathy.

The Circle has a sincerity and an honesty that shames far more expensive but over-polished dramas. Plenty of movies have happy endings; The Circle shows you both the happy ending and the incredibly hard work it took to get there.

The Captive is chock full of sealed rooms, kidnappings and abducted prisoners, but what it can never escape is its director's own shadow.

Director Doane offers no storytelling pizzazz; the lighting is careless, the pacing is deadly, the occasional stabs at comedy fall flat. Ultimately, Saving Christmas has nothing to share that Linus Van Pelt didn't already say better on “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Jones’ riveting Western is bleak and very nearly misanthropic, but it's also passionate, earthy, unpredictable, sensitive, and gloriously distinct.

Especially in a year so devoid of serious female-led dramas, it's invigorating to see a feminist crowd-pleaser with the force of moral righteousness on its side. But Big Eyes is good, not great. What keeps it from excellence is its reluctance to explore the very questions it raises.

The visuals remain homely and brutally efficient, the plot convoluted but the pacing brisk, and the humor often inventive and resourceful — and just as often tired or offensive (to women, people of color, gays and lesbians, old people, take your pick).

A movie called Horrible Bosses, or even a movie called Horrible Bosses 2, should essentially write itself. Unfortunately, that's exactly what the creators of these two movies wanted their cast to do, and the result is puerile, ugly and painfully unfunny.

Selma is one of the best American films of the year — and indeed perhaps the best — precisely because it does not simply show what Dr. King did for America in his day; it also wonders explicitly what we have left undone for America in ours.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Director Clint Eastwood‘s focus on Kyle is so tight that no other character, including wife Taya (Sienna Miller), comes through as a person, and the scope so narrow that the film engages only superficially with the many moral issues surrounding the Iraq War.

Like so many memorable yet hard-to-describe movies, Why Don't You Play in Hell? takes a ridiculous concept and commits to it fully. You might laugh with surprise or shriek in horror — both, most likely — but you certainly won't dismiss it.

A cover version is pretty much what this do-over of The Gambler represents, with the rougher edges mixed out and sweetened. It's no mystery why actors and directors want to relive the magic of American studio movies from the fabled 1970s, but if you're not going to take the risks that the originals did, or illuminate as much about the characters, why redo them at all?

Suffice it to say that while Mockingjay, Part 1 might not be as consistently thrilling as “Catching Fire” — the second movie always has the luxury of being all PB&J and no crust — it's the movie equivalent of a page-turner, consistently suspenseful and filled with surprises and illuminating character moments.

Admirable throughout is the balance that Ribeiro strikes between dewy eroticism and the contextualization of sexuality as just a single aspect of one's identity, albeit an essential one.

In attempting to work through its family issues, it arrives at catharses that are contrived and unearned, and in attempting to find humor in this pungent situation, it fails to deliver laughs.

The pacing, the performances (Albert Brooks is a stand-out as Abel's lawyer), and every facet of the production serves the story and the film's larger ideas.

Mr. Edwards has given his film a strong narrative spine — depicting years in the life of young Abraham Lincoln as his family suffers and strives to succeed in Indiana — with such committed actors bringing life to the tale that the audience can't help but be engaged even as the staid, stark visuals keep viewers at arm's length.

Unfortunately, it's just when Jessabelle looks like it might transcend its haunted-house trappings that the Southern Gothic clichés rear their tortured, screaming heads.

Much of what makes Horns so impressive, and such fun to watch, is the film's ability to juggle a variety of genres.

The dramatic weight loss Gyllenhaal endured for the role, which transforms his dreamboat looks into a bat-like mask, is startling. But the actor's performance is just as impressive, nimbly selling Gilroy's occasionally overwritten lines while Louis’ punishing optimism finds new gradations of sadism and rage. Nightcrawler is the arrival of a thrilling character actor.