If there isn't enough to feel, at least there's a lot to look at. Thanks to the superb 3-D direction by DeBlois, we swoop through the air, whoosh down dragons’ tails, and juuust baaaarely squeeze into small crevices, but still, those experiences are only like being on a really great rollercoaster — they don't mean anything.

Although the film's ultimate payoff feels a little too big, and too insufficiently explained, to justify all of the obfuscation that led up to it, the script keeps the audience engaged and guessing right up to the end.

Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson's important, assured drama best succeeds as a snapshot of a moment in time when every gay man is forced to decide how AIDS will change his life.

The only agenda of this scruffy and urbane comedy, about a young comic contemplating abortion, is to be true and funny.

Though visually unimpressive, Myers’ film is surprisingly rich and expansive in its ideas.

The Fault in Our Stars may not show the true messiness of cancer, but it does grapple with death and the ability to survive great loss. Maybe that's enough truth for one movie.

A few of the self-referential gags get recycled one too many times, but an exuberant buoyancy — and the belly-laugh-a-minute pacing of the jokes — makes 22 Jump Street a hilarious highpoint of an already quite funny summer season.

You don't have to like punk rock to fall in love with We Are the Best!; if a more joyous film comes along in 2014, then it's a good year indeed.

The moments of absurdity land with a wonderfully weird grace, while the desperately vulgar gags about sex and scatology echo and crash as though they were being uttered in a middle-school boys’ restroom.

The aggressively unpleasant visuals certainly detract from the overall film, but Maleficent makes for a fascinating entry in an ongoing wave of projects that give “bad” women of literature a chance to present their side of the story.

For a film about repetition, Edge of Tomorrow never feels tired or familiar.

Words and Pictures never accrues enough emotional resources to bear out the darker, heavier moments, which turns its big dramatic moves into clunky embarrassments.

Blended director Frank Coraci, a Happy Madison vet, is too much of a company man to elevate this passion-phobic rom-com beyond something more than an above-average Sandler production.

The Love Punch gets by in no small part thanks to the individual charms and collective chemistry between leads Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.

Cold in July never actually turns into the film you think it's going to, and even if that means there's a few unanswered questions ricocheting around your head as the credits roll, it also provides real, rich pleasures as it zigzags into the darkness.

Gray does show some amusing facets of this world, such as prostitutes dressed up as society figures like the Rockefellers and Astors, for instance, but mostly The Immigrant is a bleak affair.

While there are fun moments and a continuation of the franchise's main idea — Professor X's peace, love and understanding vs. Magneto's fight the power — Days of Future Past ends up feeling more exhausting than exuberant.

Without a character to really care about, the movie just comes off as fraught and over-stylized.

Director Gareth Edwards (“Monsters”) gets the money shots right, but neither he nor screenwriter Max Borenstein (working from a story by David Callaham) makes the human characters interesting enough to get us through two mostly Godzilla-free acts.

Personal or not, this lazy fantasy doesn't offer many more pleasures than an Instagram account.

What makes Neighbors exceptional, rather than merely great, is its successful attempt to reinvent the studio comedy.

These characters and their dilemmas could be the stuff of great, or at least good, drama, but Slattery's insistence on accentuating their sorrows with clinically depressed art direction wears thin rather quickly.

Coppola doesn't let these kids off the hook for their stupid decisions, of which they make many, but she's not judging them for their folly, either. Unchecked privilege and clueless parents are trotted out as part of the problem, but Coppola seems more interested in exploring human frailty and vulnerability than she is in digging for a social statement.

Directed by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin, this ostensible femme-powerment film is strangely unsympathetic, even demeaning, to its target audience. Rather than pandering to moms, this unfunny, unabashedly anti-feminist comedy consistently points out how wrong or unnecessary or ungrateful they are.

Wallace smartly leaves room for skeptics of Burpo's account to maintain their doubt; what matters most is that audiences understand the film character's reasons for choosing to believe his son's vision/dream/delirium.

The Disneynature movies shouldn't be mistaken for traditional documentary, but if they act as a gateway drug for young children to learn more about the animal kingdom — and to open themselves up to more informative non-fiction cinema — then the films are serving a real purpose.

If anyone walks away unblemished from Walk of Shame, it's Banks, who throws herself into every bit of physical comedy and humiliation the movie sends her way. If the movie had gone for broke as often as its lead actress, the results wouldn't feel so disposable.

Belle's extraordinary intelligence is most evident in its slow but satisfying disentanglement of the jumble of privileges and disadvantages that the wealthy, aristocratic, and learned — but also female, half-black, and pitifully sheltered — Dido embodies.

This “based on a true story” underdog tale is infectiously determined to make you fall in love with it, like a mangy dog that plops its head in your lap and gazes adoringly at you until you scratch it behind the ears. Eventually, you give in and scratch. And then you wash your hands.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is just good enough to make you painfully aware of all the ways it's not good at all.

Hardy might be past needing a star-making performance, but this is the kind of work that raises him to highest echelon of actors working in film today. He and Knight remind us that artists can astonish with the simplest of methods.

The parkour is breathtaking and the plot twists are off-the-charts ridiculous.

A smiling Cameron Diaz and a weeping Leslie Mann bring a lot to any movie, but they aren't enough to overcome the mix-and-match mania of these proceedings. Girls just wanna have fun, but they'd also like a coherent night at the movies.

If A Haunted House 2 is a step up from the previous go-round, it's either because a slightly more talented crew of comic actors are being asked to waste their time or because 2013 offered a better crop of horror films (“The Conjuring,” “Sinister,” etc.) to be lazily parodied.

You can feel this movie's attempts at Big Ideas about technology get weighed down by a dopey, nonsensical plot.

“Theater of Thought” is a movie about exploring the mind – and if the mind we’re exploring most of the time is Herzog’s, well, there are far worse tour guides through this territory.

Farrier doesn’t really take us to any dark corners of Organ’s life that he can’t talk his way out of, but Mister Organ does capture the miasmic anxiety that surrounds his mysterious subject.

What prevents this life-affirming account from turning boringly saccharine is the caliber of humanity that Hawkins lends Philippa.

The awkwardly titled gay rugby romance In from the Side is so padded out at 134 minutes with both rugby games and sex scenes that the final effect is numbing, and writer-director Matt Carter doesn’t bother much with either plot or character to fill out his narrative.

That Peaceful occasionally takes us out of the patients’ world and into the emotional strain put onto the nurses and other doctors is a deft way of showing how cancer affects all.

Silent River feels intensely personal, but also impossibly closed off. But is that so bad? Ultimately, for all its awkwardness and attentiveness, its grab-bag of tones and problematic pacing, there’s a lot about “Silent River” that gives one faith in off-the-beaten-path cinema, from how much Lee cares about what his images and sounds convey, to how little he cares whether your narrative questions are satisfactorily answered.

This is a film of unfolding delights, providing a terrific canvas for the actors.

Thanks to Kore-eda’s characteristic practice of thoughtful scripting and gentle direction, the metaphors, though too numerous, land gently and effectively.

Griffin juggles her many characters well, and she’s very smart about weaponizing the coziness of Christmas movies to make uncomfortable points. Silent Night may wind up being a successful calling card for her (as a director if not as a screenwriter), but for all the beautiful wrapping, it’s mostly an empty box.

From “Body Heat” to “Fargo,” women have driven the action in noir films before — but the way this one plays out, with AARP-age women holding all the cards in a setting we usually associate with rugged men, feels like a genuinely fresh take on a time-honored genre. And the ending, all cagey glances and serene indifference hiding some seriously twisted stuff, is downright delicious.

Ridley is simply extraordinary, and she and MacKay give us a younger, lustier Ophelia and Hamlet than we usually get on the big screen.

While the lessons are light and the road well-worn, our perfectly mismatched travelers make the journey worthwhile.

If Emma Thompson can’t make The Children Act...into something interesting and meaningful, then no one can. And she can’t.

Between the camerawork and the subtle performances, Lizzie could very easily have been a silent film while still telling its story as effectively. But Kass’ dialogue is terrific.

Skate Kitchen is a funny and stirring saga of female empowerment that will no doubt delight young women who skate while inspiring many more to pick up a board. It also heralds Moselle as a director who can easily switch stance on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide.

Co-stars and co-writers Daveed Diggs (“Wonder”) and Rafael Casal have a lot to say, much of it funny and/or provocative, but neither they nor first-time feature director Carlos López Estrada can figure out a way to shape all this material into a cohesive film.

It’s a film that, early on, feels like a standard catch-a-rising-star celebrity hagiography, but as the story continues — and the impressive line-up of interviewees get deeper into their memories of Williams — the film achieves a balance between celebration and unfiltered recollection.

Wardle spent five years making Three Identical Strangers after several other filmmakers had given up on this subject because they were always hitting a dead end, and so he deserves credit for journalistic doggedness and also for making a documentary that plays like a nerve-jangling thriller.

Granik took a big risk here, making a purposefully small film that rejects familiar notions of dramatic conflict. But her approach works well enough that the most jarring note becomes Foster’s movie-star presence.

If there are any takeaways from Grodner’s film, it’s that we are all powerless to stop the passage of time, and, as Future Music owner Jack Waterson says, “Be truly loved or truly hated, man, cuz anything in the middle is garbage.” I think you’ll truly love or truly hate this film, but I’m firmly in the “love” camp for this remarkable Los Angeles time capsule.

It gets away with missteps because of how consistently heartwarming and affable the people on screen are. Clemons and Offerman are especially effective, with Frank’s earnestness comically shot down by Clemons’ quick-witted preciousness.

Paul Schrader has always been a faith-based filmmaker in the truest and most challenging sense, and First Reformed is the sort of stimulating work that a writer-director of a certain age can deliver when he returns to his creative sweet spot; rejoice, Schrader fans, rejoice.

The anguish and determination that Plummer can display with just a look or subtle motion is heartbreaking; this is the kind of naturalistic acting that can just kick you in the stomach.

The buoyancy and electricity of Give Me Future will no doubt win Major Lazer new converts, but the film also offers hope that political and social gaps can always be bridged. Especially when there’s a good beat, and you can dance to it.

Nearly 30 years later, Alma’s Rainbow makes the statement, perhaps even louder than ever, that film can and should reflect the lives and realities of Black women.

The film’s breakneck zaniness sometimes gets into the way of the labyrinthine story, and you’ll be forgiven if you completely lose track of what’s going on (or at least why), but this is a remarkably entertaining and unusual Agatha Christie adaptation, and Randall’s take on the character is, surprisingly, one of the best.

There are tender moments in The Keeping Hours. But mostly there are missed opportunities. When it misses its mark, which is more often than not, it’s hard to wonder why it made you feel anything in the first place.

Louis CK’s I Love You, Daddy is queasy fare, not just because its rambling, self-indulgent story has strange and unfortunate associations with real-life allegations, but also for its tone-deaf narrative and offensive sexual politics.

The film is not alienating; it does not obfuscate its intentions. Pizzi knew what he wanted to make, and what he has made is a touching yarn about the pangs of familial maturation.

Miraculously, Makridis doesn’t undercut the seriousness of Giannis’ plight with humor. The laughs derive naturally from Drakopoulos’ pitch-black performance.

This is a thoughtful and enlightening documentary about artistic censorship and free speech.