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.

The Rover is less an allegory than a suggestion how bad things could become. It's well made, and it's disturbing, if not overly passion inducing.

It works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn't do is answer the question, “Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of ‘Behind the Music'?”

A little more deviating from the playbook would make Hellion stand out more amidst an ever-growing pack of similar films.

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.