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.