Drab, silly and mind-numbing, this Dracula is strictly for the suckers.

The early scenes of Gabe Ibáñez’s impressively mounted but uneven thriller do some terrific dystopian world-building.

The movie’s admirable fleetness, however, doesn’t mitigate some of its narrative errors — Alexander’s opening voiceover suggests his family is totally oblivious to his role in their misery, which is disproved by a later scene — nor does it counteract an overall sense of slightness that prevents this from being a family-film classic.

Seeing as how Kill the Messenger comes down firmly on the side of Webb’s truth, it’s unfortunate that his discoveries are only confirmed via the end credits. Missing from the action, too, is the merest hint of our hero’s demise by suicide in 2004. These aspects should have been better showcased; as is, it’s not the whole story.

St. Vincent has nothing on Rushmore, an obvious forebearer, even though it strains for the same egalitarian spirit of thrown-together family, one that includes a pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts) and a sympathetic but firm Catholic schoolteacher (Chris O’Dowd).

Inherent Vice, Anderson's sexy, swirling latest (based on Thomas Pynchon's exquisite stoner mystery set at the dawn of the '70s), is a wondrously fragrant movie, emanating sweat, the stink of pot clouds and the press of hairy bodies. It's a film you sink into, like a haze on the road, even as it jerks you along with spikes of humor.

Good God almighty: Not since Edward D. Wood Jr. unleashed a flotilla of paper-plate UFOs on beautiful downtown Burbank has there been a movie as stem-to-stern inept as this adaptation of the bestselling Christian novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Centrally, the title character remains an impressive piece of propwork, and Leonetti's restraint in never animating it (à la Chucky) is the only thing worth appreciating here.

Apart from the devastating material itself, some of Lapa’s aesthetic choices are extremely off-putting.

For all its surface effectiveness, however, The Blue Room never quite makes that intangible leap into greatness. It’s a phenomenally executed exercise that, like its protagonist’s memory, is too wispy for its own good.

For a while it’s a low-key fish-out-of-water comedy (with McDonald’s as one of its many obvious punch lines), then it morphs into a cumbrously sentimental tale of redemption.

The final third is a crush of genius, with several Nas tracks (including his lovely, Michael Jackson-sampling “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”) receiving the kind of detailed breakdowns rare in pop-artist conversations.

The Equalizer is a stone-dumb movie.

There’s no real pleasure in any of the musical performances. And when married to the scenes exploring Hendrix’s tumultuous personal life—particularly his semi-abusive relationship with long-term girlfriend Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell)—you’re left with a monotonously grim portrait that’s more rewarding in theory than execution.

It's a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in local law enforcement, tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage).

Probably the biggest sin in a movie filled with many is turning Fonda into a nymphomaniacal sight gag who makes Barbarella look like Gloria Steinem.

Both overindulgent and the writer-director's most fascinatingly strange movie to date.

Director Sam Miller’s attempt to take us on a thrill ride feels more like a slow train pulling up to the station.

The first Reitman film to make the 36-year-old director seem about 400 years old.

Gilroy, vastly supported by cinematographer and Los Angeles specialist Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), directs with the verve of a seasoned pro, even though Nightcrawler is his debut.

The film has a traditional appeal that's wholly separate from its surface.

You can’t help but feel all the palpable joy is eliding some darker realities that would lend the copious musical performances a deeper resonance.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is reduced to a crystalline, though still complicated, essence in Nadav Schirman’s alternately tedious and engrossing documentary.

It helps that Milo (Hader) and Maggie (Wiig) are cranky adult siblings, sharing a whip-crack shorthand that longtime skit partners know how to muster effortlessly.

Until the movie's cathartic showdown (and a few backstory revelations that impress too late), The Drop putters along in a dozy register, less a simmering pot than a cooling one.

Despite the sparkling cast and engaging, well-tuned turns from Chastain and McAvoy, the scaled-down script doesn’t carry much weight, bogged down by clunky, Hallmark dialogue.

The lengthy final two shots (each running more than ten minutes) rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done.

The filmmaker’s second feature is an unfortunate sophomore slump, an abrasive and opaque artist-in-crisis story that feels protracted at barely 80 minutes.

Dank with the effluvia of a proudly unhygienic, sex-obsessed German teen, this frenetic adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s notorious 2008 best-seller is a standing dare to anyone who thinks the movies have gotten too tame.

Ed Harris is a performer made for Westerns, and he’s perfectly utilized in debuting director Michael Berry’s middling if still very watchable modern-day oater as Roy.

The whole phantasmagorical enterprise is so sweetly confident that it just about gets away with its entirely casual approach to believability.

Provocatively, the film suggests that winning small battles was victory enough; Saigon natives, also interviewed, were left behind to endure death camps.

This potent emotional undercurrent goes a long way toward counteracting the movie’s clumsier moments, carrying us aloft to a finale that, in its strange mix of trepidation and tenderness, is truly sublime.

A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.

You don’t often see style this gorgeous (however empty), and that must count for something. Groovy soundtrack cues by Ennio Morricone and others do the heavy lifting.

This one belongs to the women: As a gold-digging mistress, Isla Fisher does half-smart expertly, while Jennifer Aniston demonstrates her underrated timing as a wealthy kidnapping victim turned confidante.

The survey the film provides is bracing, and there are plenty of talking heads to guide us through the kaleidoscope of imagery. Unfortunately, there’s also a public-television vibe to the proceedings that mutes the overall power. It’s essential info presented with little imagination.

[Eva] Green is the only one able to excite this silly material into the spiky shape it’s supposed to take. You wish the rest of the cast was as clued in.

Indeed, the doc works best as a relationship study, filled with endearing moments of intimate bickering. Takei is a self-admitted ham but a playful one, projecting his confidence in increasingly meaningful directions.

The film delivers on its most crucial idea by being an inventive relationship dramedy with actors who handle the dual challenge thrown at them with distinguished poise.

For a drama pretty much aimed at 12-year-old girls, it’s less superficial than you’d expect.

It’s another fascinating entry in the director’s ongoing exploration of the sadistic and masochistic facets of human behavior.

From "Police Academy" to "Hot Fuzz," there are satires to be made about undisciplined law enforcement; this will not join their ranks, try as it might.

There’s social satire for those who want it — don’t tell the rest of the neighborhood our daughter’s risen from the dead! — and a fine, simmering sense of apocalypse that turns this suburban community into a war zone. Still, it’s a lot of heavy lifting for what amounts to “he’s just not that into you,” mainly because you’re as ripe as a cadaver.

Such is Kim’s plotty momentum that the whole thing feels like an extreme joke made of pained silences, one that somehow strips bare the subtext of overbearing parents. Meryl Streep herself couldn’t improve on it.

In its early scenes, Dinosaur 13 works nearly as well as a certain Steven Spielberg thriller, creating the giddy, ominous mood of past and present colliding in excitement.

In comparison with near-impenetrable Garrel efforts like "Regular Lovers" (2005) and "Frontier of the Dawn" (2008), Jealousy cuts straight to the heart.

By using Laura as an avatar, Marker actually helps us see the visuals and their knotty meanings much more clearly. The more we watch, the more Laura softens, until — in a mind-bending conceit — her very status as a fictional creation is called into question. The effect is ecstatic.

You might actually say the documentary itself is Mohassess’s final canvas, so infused it becomes with his alternately infuriating and infectious personality.

For all its eye-opening material, The Dog still feels unfinished, but for students of New York scuzziness, it’s an essential addition.

Utterly inessential, this slightly cheap-looking reboot of the Turtles franchise is froth too — it might even be too tame for the kids who make up the target audience.

The movie’s never tastier than when screen vets Mirren and Puri are sparring, pettily buying out each other’s produce at the local market or bellyaching to the town’s mayor.

So much of Get on Up is uncannily perfect, from its nightmarish Georgia childhood flashbacks to delirious concert re-creations and the casting of Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd as Brown’s longtime manager.

It could have been so much worse; we wish it was a lot better.

Barreling toward its rapidly modernizing future, China takes Internet addiction more seriously than most nations: To watch Web Junkie, an often scary yet half-realized documentary, is to see a society trapped in its old solutions.

These scenes make you wish the rest of the movie had similar bite, but Gibney tends toward that dutiful doc style that mixes talking heads and archival clips into a flavorless stew—a bland complement to Fela’s zesty on- and offstage presence.

There’s a fine line between modesty and inconsequence, and this low-key, primarily improvised feature from mumblecore staple Joe Swanberg mostly blurs the divide.

Winterbottom’s inability to bring off this lurid stew of sex and violence is one problem; his (mis)direction of Affleck is another.

Ultimately, for all its running around in the middle of the night, Sex Tape plays it remarkably coy, reaffirming love, not lust. It’s the cinematic equivalent of sleeping in the wet spot.

The funny thing about all these sub-"Matrix" shenanigans is that they’re genuinely meant to stoke thought and reflection. Frankly, though, few movies have left me feeling as shorn of gray matter.

The film is weak on its essential indictment, vaguely suggesting a mood of battlefield boredom without quite pinpointing the pathology that would lead military men to squeeze the trigger pell-mell.

Disappointing plod of an espionage thriller.

Mainly, though, this is a humorless film that skimps on the delicious opportunity for spousal retribution.

The director’s latest—a lighthearted romance set in 1920s Germany and France—won’t do much to sway proponents or detractors from their own perspectives, though taken at face value, it’s one of Allen’s most charmingly conceived and performed efforts.

The results make your head spin more than they make your spirits soar.

The film adheres closely to a well-reviewed theater production cocreated by and starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, both of whom get to riff on their prickly "My Dinner with Andre" rapport.

Some will find the director’s toothless brand of epiphany comforting (and download his mixtape), but the vast majority will find it tired.

Displaying a weird lack of memorable or endearing characters, this animated effort feels more like a direct-to-video job from the 1990s than a fully fledged John Lasseter–exec-produced theatrical release.

Land Ho! avoids schmaltz to get at that rarest of male timber: rekindled hearts.

The journey is often challenging, but the rewards—heady, emotional, provocative and invigorating—are endless.

They have little feel for the technical side of filmmaking; the imagery is flat and the editing amateurish. Most shots seem held for a beat too long or too short, wreaking havoc with the comic rhythm. Nonetheless, McCarthy and Falcone’s attempts to make Tammy more flesh-and-blood than a figure of fun are often poignant.

You’re either awestruck, dumbstruck or just plain struck in the face.

This is still one of his (Berlinger) most ambitious films, vibrating with the same municipal unease as "Chinatown."

Sprung from a 1982 French graphic novel and bearing its era’s trickle-down tensions, Snowpiercer is a headlong rush into conceptual lunacy — but you’ll love it anyway.

Here, though, everyone involved seems above the rom-com conventions they’re satirizing, so anxious to get to each punch line that they let the connective tissue languish. You howl often but quickly forget why.

False moments far outweigh the genuine ones, be it smarmy Dan’s indisputable genius (he’s such a stubble-sporting rebel, he refuses to wear suits) or the bogus anticorporate finale that leaves an especially slick aftertaste.

This is a movie that preaches to its rafters-raising choir.

Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws.

Imagine "Goodfellas" without much in the way of stakes, and you’ll get Clint Eastwood’s pleasingly square and forgettable adaptation of the Tony-feted 2006 jukebox musical.

Resident turned filmmaker Ryan McGarry sometimes displays shrewd instincts for hardheaded vérité — there’s compelling stuff here, even if you shear away his occasional stabs at issues of bureaucratic overcrowding and corporate cost-cutting at the expense of intimacy.

For a sci-fi indie of vast ambition but limited means, Coherence does a sterling job with coherence.

It’s crushing, then, that the movie’s big reveal is the kind of narrative do-over that could only spring from the mind of an almighty writer in love with playing God — or with himself.

Novelistic is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but Diaz’s film more than earns the adjective, and you’d have to go back to Edward Yang’s "Yi Yi" to find another movie that approaches a marathon-length running time yet still makes you wish it were twice as long.

Like :Carnage,: it’s a bit of a minor lark until a deliciously grotesque finale pushes it into the realm of such kinkily profound Polanski films as: Cul-de-sac: (1966) and "The Tenant" (1976). By that point, you can’t help but submit to the perversity.

Things quickly fall apart, with a pileup of sub–Rod Serling narrative twists, a choppy action sequence heavy on the Michael Bay slo-mo and a sequel-ready climax that reveals the whole project as little more than a feature-length calling card.

The main talking point of this empty-headed thriller from Mexican director Amat Escalante is a sure-to-be-notorious instance of penis incineration — a dubious distinction.

The Rover is almost worth it for the coiled central performance of Guy Pearce, who outfuries Mel Gibson with his pinpoint shotgun skills and monomaniacal quest.

This is a more rugged affair than, say, "Frozen," and any admirers of that film might find themselves yearning for a few more songs and a little less testosterone.

Hellion aims to cut deep, striking a tone that melds the hysterical moralism of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) with the coming-of-age melancholy of Mud’s Jeff Nichols (also this film’s executive producer).

You feel for the potential Wesleyan parent who asks an administrator if his daughter is going to have to move home after graduating: His question is met with an uneasy pause. Crucial stuff.

It’s a movie about coming to peace with solitude, leagues beyond most biopics.

Though supported by Woodley’s subtle narration, The Fault in Our Stars is relentlessly outward. That’s part of the book’s inspiring touch, and even if some of the supporting cast comes off as merely functional onscreen, the core of the tragedy comes to life in a heartbreaking way.

Only Jones seems most at home, striking just the right note of low-key malevolence. You’d follow him anywhere — maybe even into a better movie.

Granted, there’s something charming here — Ping Pong Summer itself feels like an underdog — and there are retro touches that children of the ’80s will smile at (remember smelling the liner notes of cassettes?). But ultimately, those are too few and far between.

The documentary is strongest during these conference-room brainstorms, similar to those of a political campaign. (It could have used more of Boies’s witness-demolishing courtroom eloquence.) The draw here is watching a careful process unfold, regardless of the outcome.

Bellocchio counters these flaws with an energetically combative aesthetic (he makes you feel like you’re riding out a sociopolitical tempest, careening between perspectives) and an overarching humanism that gives equal weight to the many feelings stirred up by this hot-button situation.

Leavened by an attractive soundtrack that includes the Carter Family’s well-placed “Single Girl, Married Girl” (and the Paul Simon song that gives the film its title), Obvious Child has a loud agenda that will be off-putting to some. Still, it’s a welcome counterpoint to the likes of "Knocked Up" and even "Juno," where the abortion route is an apparent no-go.

It’s a portrait that’s equal parts shtick and soul — in other words, exactly what "The Love Guru" should have been.