Camp X-Ray never makes the bond between this particular woman and this particular prisoner feel genuine or organic. Their relationship (platonic, obviously) smacks more of screenwriter contrivance than of two put-upon souls finding each other under duress.

Citizenfour finds its strength in both the story and the telling: The information about government spying is chilling, of course, but the movie also gives us the opportunity to get to know the elusive Snowden.

Writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“Play”) brilliantly mines this dark material for awkward hilarity.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

An exquisite, hand-drawn marvel and an alternatingly jubilant and heartrending epic pastoral.

Given its double burden of being both a toy adaptation and a bloodless kiddie horror show, Ouija winds up being more fun that you might think, even if it's the sort of film you can't really take seriously for a second.

Sweet and sharp and exciting and hilarious, Big Hero 6 comes to the rescue of what's become a dreaded movie trope — the origin story — and launches the superhero tale to pleasurable new heights.

Both ludicrous and ludicrously entertaining, John Wick's stylish look, B-movie vibe and less-is-more, longer-takes-are-stronger-takes approach to action make it a standout.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

Shelton's comedy isn't just smart, but cheerfully wise; not just funny, but cleverly and endlessly so.

The bad news is that no matter how charming or fizzy the chemistry between the actors might be, they're still trapped in the dead, fake melodrama and brainless coincidences of a Nicholas Sparks story.

Those willing to commit to a fascinating story about talented and intelligent people who can also be selfish, vulnerable, strong-headed, short-sighted, and emotionally needy, however, will want to pull this one off the shelf.

The four main actors, all uniformly excellent, can wrap their tongues around Simien's verbose dialogue, but some of the minor actors have a harder time, resulting in several jokes falling flat.

The Book of Life manages to be genuinely surprising and engrossing.

This isn't disposable popcorn entertainment, or a winking “war” film like “Inglourious Basterds.” Ayer's aim here is a film that will stick, and stick with you. And he achieves it.

Whiplash redefines the teacher movie (to say nothing of the young-musician movie) with a brutal energy and no easy resolutions. It's a challenging tune that will nonetheless get stuck in your head.

The material swings between the sensual and the puritanical with whiplash-inducing speed; the dialogue all too often has the flat, dead sound of a first draft.

It's a lengthy burlesque on paranoia, on conspiracies both real and imagined, so dazed in its color schemes that Anderson clearly wants you to get stoned watching it. But the sense of being blissfully out-of-it, which can have its pleasures, soon drifts into another aspect of drug use: detachment.

For about the first hour of its running time, Dracula Untold is far too restrained and tasteful, and it certainly suffers from its tediously noble hero; it's well made but fatally lacking in thrills or excitement.

The Judge is tailor-made for Downey's gift for delivering a quippy, arrogant put-down like he's doing his target a favor. Hank's anti-heroism is a refreshing splash of lemon juice with an occasional spritz of sour vinegar. But much of director David Dobkin‘s cynically cloying legal and family drama goes down like a lump of aspartame.

For a comedy set around one epic catastrophe of a rotten day, this wisp of a farce feels strangely chaos-deficient.

The thing that catastrophically sinks “Him” – or “Her,” if that's the film you see second – is that the two films are enough alike that sitting through the second immediately after the first is a slog.

They're thematically richer and more tonally cohesive than their hybrid. But because the two films are so similar to one another, they fail to deliver on the promise of their unique structure, rendering the “he said, she said” complementary design of the two films a dull, self-indulgent gimmick.

Has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and production values that verge on parody.

The late-60's Satanic panic and housewifely ennui make for a surprisingly complementary mix of fear and paranoia in Annabelle.

It works as well as it does precisely because of an intelligence, humanity and restraint we rarely see in Hollywood films.

Reitman clearly wanted to create a mosaic of sharp-edged shards held together by the mortar of art; with Men, Women and Children, what he's delivered is a group of broken bits mired in the morass of pretension.

The intent of the film, and its timeliness, are beyond reproach, but that doesn't make Kill the Messenger as stirring or inspiring of indignation as it clearly wants to be.

At its best moments, Pride makes the chest flutter and the neck hairs stand up with the revolutionary adrenaline that comes from a potent protest song.

In its conflation of happiness and self-knowledge, “Hector” often feels like the visual approximation of a therapy session. And just as therapy is work, enduring this mess is exertion, too.

Not only brutal but also brutally funny, Gone Girl mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you're still watching the blade go past before you notice you're bleeding.

The excellent cast of This Is Where I Leave You cannot be faulted; all talented performers, they collectively make a constant effort to bring some sort of life to the limp script and uninspired direction.

As nauseating as the film's inventive sadisms can be, Frank succeeds far more in the details than in the larger picture that tries to relate this world to ours.

It's not even that the film shifts wildly in tone as much as the fact that none of those tones work at all: the horror parts aren't scary and, surprisingly for Smith, the comedy bits aren't funny.

“ASIII” feels like the most scattershot entry in the trilogy, despite a relative rally toward competence with the second movie.

The film's look and feel are far more purposeful and propulsive than the story and script, but even so, Space Station 76 has more than a few laughs inside its brazen bizarreness.

[A] perfectly serviceable thriller.

I was tempted to remark that Benson doesn't know how to write women, until I noticed that he doesn't know how to write men, either.

The whole thing just works; the film gets pretty close to the Platonic ideal of accessible but still meaningful edutainment. And in a movie landscape that's aggressively dumbed down and cynical, a little integrity goes a long way.

For its first half or so, The Maze Runner tells a captivating tale of survival and weaves a potentially interesting mystery. Once its path become clear, however, you realize this is a puzzle you've worked out before.

Willfully empty but wildly entertaining, The Equalizer stands out from its peers like a wolf among lapdogs, as Fuqua and Washington bring out the best in each other for the benefit of the audience.

This is Tom Hardy‘s show, and any opportunity to see this actor exercise his skills merits attention. He, along with the rest of this top-notch ensemble, give “The Drop” far more than they get back.

Credit must be given: run-of-the-mill mediocrities come and go, but The Identical is the most woozily misguided flop to grace the screen since the “Oogieloves” movie. Connoisseurs of the most wonderfully terrible cinema need to run out and catch this one early and often.

The ingredients steadfastly refuse to whip up into the froth this film so clearly wants to be.

The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.

Bahrani (and co-writer Amir Naderi) want the audience to go to the dark side with them without losing their faith in the system. To anyone who has watched this crisis unfold over the last decade, it will feel like a cheat.

Green operates in a smarter mode of storytelling, giving the audience the benefit of the doubt that they'll notice the details, and he's clearly whispered Pacino into giving a nuanced and human-sized turn.

Lacking appealing characters (or character design), this misfire will, with any luck, eventually become a forgotten footnote among the output of a production company that has, up until now, shown real promise at making films that defy the usual tropes and storytelling mechanisms in contemporary family-friendly animation.

It's clear from the start that Dowdle isn't taking any of this seriously. The same cannot be said for the game and luckless cast of young actors, who are so whiny and hysterical right from the start of their plunge into the tombs that they win hearty unintentional laughs throughout.

There is some humor to be found here, of course, and a bit of exploration of the sheer boredom of being trapped for days inside four white walls, and moments of real connection between Bahari and both his family and the political revolutionaries he gets to know on the street. But Stewart doesn't pursue any of these ideas enough to stick, resulting in a film that relates incidents without ever really telling much of a story.

The director has wisely assembled an ensemble of performers who know how to handle a long take; this will certainly rank among Keaton's career highlights — in a role that allows him to completely dump out his paintbox and show a vast range of emotion — but everyone shines.

It's a film that takes its characters and their crises seriously, allowing them to fully explore their situation before providing them (and the audience) a genuine roadmap for finding their way through.

"When the Game” is like a bad seven-layer salad: it's tempting in theory, but it's really just a jumble of random ingredients that wind up supremely unappetizing in the aggregate.

For a film loaded with decapitations and gun-toting ladies in bondage gear, Sin City gets really tedious really quickly.

Love is Strange boasts an abundance of patience and kindness — but not much of a pulse.

While many of the big moments of If I Stay can be easily dismissed, it's the little ones that elevate the film to at least mixed-bag status.

Winterbottom and cinematographer James Clarke use the gloss of both food porn and travel porn to occasionally distract us from the darker elements of the story, in the same way that Coogan and Brydon will turn to humor to lighten up their roiling inner conflicts. In this case, however, both the sugar coating and the bitter pill are a treat.

This is the sort of film where the plot and even the action become so uninteresting that you start asking plausibility questions.

There are too few real humans in Life After Beth, resulting in a lack of both brains and heart.

With a combination of jokes that don't land and a constant flurry of exposition and plotting to keep these flimsy plates spinning, Let's Be Cops more often than not feels more like a court-ordered defensive-driving class than a rousing high-speed chase.

The Giver is an anti-totalitarian allegory so farcically hyperbolic it feels like only a teenager could have come up with it.

Even if the big numbers in Step Up All In don't always hit the heights of its immediate predecessors, there are enough exultant moments – during the crew battles or Sean and Andie's pas de deux on a carnival ride — to tide you over until the inevitable Part Six.

Though The Dog can be seen through any number of lenses — a study of media distortion, an illustration of life-sustaining grandiosity, a love story gone deliriously wrong — it's perhaps most meaningful as an exploration of the limits of the gay rights movement's political correctness.

At the climax of Into the Storm, colossal tornadoes make noise, blow things up, and go around in circles; that's pretty much all the film does, too.

Perhaps the best thing about What If, the new romantic comedy from director Michael Dowse (“Goon”), is that for all of its banter and batted eyes, from its awkward introductions to its inevitable climactic declarations of love, everyone in it feels like a real human being.

The Expendables 3 is silly and overblown, yes, and it could definitely do without Antonio Banderas‘ motor-mouth routine (not to mention an out-of-nowhere reference to Benghazi), but it's less silly and overblown than “The Expendables 2,” for whatever that's worth.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie that takes its characters and its premise seriously, until it doesn't, and that operates at two speeds: tortoise (ponderous) and hare (head-spinning).

A National Geographic special writ large, Deepsea Challenge 3D is watchable and engaging throughout, even though it's pretty clear how everything is going to come together.

Get on Up belongs, as it must, to Boseman, who delivers the kind of charisma, showmanship, sex appeal, and tireless energy that allows us to believe him as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

It delivers the kind of sentimental sledgehammering I found myself willing to forgive — the presence of Helen Mirren goes a long way in that regard — but once the story goes off on a pointless tangent, the whole soufflé collapses.

It's a supernatural epic that never feels quite colossal or consequential enough, as well as an utter waste of Dwayne Johnson‘s unique dopey-flirty charm.

Hoffman doesn't get a lot of flashy, awards-show-clip moments, but he's all the more engrossing for underplaying and revealing volumes with the slightest of reactions and inflections.

Unlike the stiff-jawed heroics of the other Marvel films, this feels a little looser and lighter, with Pratt as charming, amoral accidental leader Peter Quill, an earthling among the stars who, as he will tell you, is also known as the roving brigand “Starlord.”

Douglas and Keaton conjure just enough empathy and optimism and cozy charm between them to make us believe that anything can happen at twilight.

Lucy is a confounding experience, but at a brisk 85 or so minutes, it manages not to outstay its welcome. Those not enamored of Besson's particular brand of Euro-schlock grindhouse existentialism, however, may find their brains more stimulated elsewhere.

The final third of I Origins helps make up for much of the movie's earlier shortcomings, and while it does have a nice gothic look, it's not nearly as captivating as Cahill intends.

Ultimately, “Anarchy” is too cartoonish in its politics to gain the allegorical resonance it clearly strives for — and worse yet, it's just no fun.

Emma Stone couldn't be more charming, but her on-screen romance with Colin Firth couldn't be more contrived or ickiliy age-inappropriate.

A balm for the harried soul, Land Ho! is part travelogue, part therapy session. Watching it could inspire you to call an old friend or book a trip to an exotic locale. Maybe both.

The death- and religion-obsessed Wish I Was Here is such a manifestly personal project that it's a shame it isn't even more idiosyncratic.

Sex Tape is a hustler of a film — it works very hard for its laughs — but it's so haphazardly directed (by Jake Kasdan) and written (by Kate Angelo and Segel and Nicholas Stoller) that it can easily be divided into three distinct sections.

For its few visual and many script flaws, however, director Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” “Let Me In”) balances the splashy set pieces with quieter moments (sullen teen Kodi Smit-McPhee gives a copy of Charles Burns’ “Black Hole” to a wise orangutan named after Maurice Evans!) in such a way that “Dawn” never feels dull or draggy.

As he has throughout his career, from “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” to the lovely “Bernie” to the “Before” trilogy, Linklater proves himself as a filmmaker unconcerned with flash and dazzle but thoroughly compassionate and empathetic to a wide range of characters.

This movie hardly rates as first-class animation, but it gets in, gets the job done, and moves on both swiftly and well.

Life Itself paints a captivating portrait of a man who embraced life and art, whose spirit never flagged even when his body did. You don't have to be a film critic to find inspiration from Roger Ebert's extraordinary life.

For all its embarrassment of riches, “Deliver” never manages to transcend its bloody, screechy, pulpy origins. That makes the film both a horror tale and a tragedy.

While the provocative title promises a film that will reveal new information about the infamous Koch brothers, there's little on display here that regular viewers of “The Rachel Maddow Show” won't have already heard.

[McCarthy] and her husband Falcone (who also directed) have created a character comedy that's missing both comedy and character.

It would be one thing if D'Souza had an idea, or any idea, he could stick to as a through-line in his project. But America isn't a documentary; it's more like the badly-filmed version of a badly-written, meandering op-ed piece from a paper that lacks fact-checking or proofreading.

Attractively made, good-hearted, and more than a little redundant even as it's trying a little too hard, Earth to Echo nonetheless will hit the sweet spot for parents looking for innocent PG-rated entertainment for their kids in a summer full of PG-13 spectacle and mayhem.

In superlative previous films like “The Host” and “Mother,” Bong elevated, then transcended, the humble genres of the monster movie and the murder mystery by refashioning them into exquisitely heart-wrenching human drama. Disappointingly, then, his alchemical touch is absent here. Snowpiercer warms the heart, but doesn't penetrate it.

Begin Again is as uncynical and unironic a film as I've seen in a while, which will no doubt be a turn-off to many. But like a catchy summer jam, it doesn't need to apologize for being exactly what it is, nor do its fans have to feel guilty for getting it stuck in their heads.

The battling, metallic heroes have never looked better, but Michael Bay's choppy, dissonant storytelling methods remain as audience-punishing as ever.

What makes this film go astray are the problems that plague so many screen biographies: too much narration, too much telling and not enough showing, and presenting an artist's accomplishments in lieu of exploring his perspective.

Third Person is an intricately constructed but unaffecting bore. Kinder people might call it an “interesting failure,” but to earn that label it would need to be interesting.

Whether it's the closest you'll get to the beach this year, or you have to tear yourself away from the dunes to enjoy it, it's an essential part of any movie-lover's summer.

There are moments of fun to be found in Think Like a Man Too... It's just a pity that the movie does better by members of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority than those of the Screen Actors Guild.

The characters, the situations, and the story are whatever they need to be in the moment to launch whatever joke the movie feels like telling at that moment. This is Wain and Showalter working in “Wet Hot American Summer” spoof mode, and if you're a fan of that movie, you may well like this one as well.