The movie deepens as Nelly, destined for the gossip columns and a peripheral attachment, becomes painfully aware of her own fragility (Jones’s performance is devastating).

The film is a string of dawdling sitcom scenarios and saccharine messages, cobbled together with star wipes pulled straight out of a Walmart commercial.

Though Walker, in his most demanding part, does his best to transcend his characteristically bro-ish demeanor, he’s ultimately failed by this film, whose script and questionable taste hardly add up to a eulogy-worthy goodbye.

With its high-energy music and graffiti-style graphics, The Crash Reel plays like the slick promos NBC uses to repackage every Olympian’s story into a pat narrative.

The dialogue is the stuff of rapidly closing Off Broadway plays; the camerawork is flavorless and haphazard. Tucci hits every line like he’s about to break into a malicious tap dance, and Eve looks as if she was handed her script on the way to the set.

Saving Mr. Banks turns Travers’s tense collaboration with Walt and his team of Imagineers into — naturally — a schmaltzy journey of closure, climaxing in a teary screening of the finished musical.

The logic wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but García Bogliano’s unnerving mood, complemented by grungy camerawork and a shroud of sonic chaos, provides an emotional strain that makes anything possible.

As presented here (cut down from a longer edit), the film might have benefitted from more technical context related to the plant’s failure — this is a cautionary tale worth heeding. But the voices are valuable enough.

It’s a tale of lonely souls and literalized online dating, and you assume filmmaker Spike Jonze will characteristically mix high-concept absurdism with heartfelt notions. Unexpectedly, the latter dominates, thanks in no small part to Phoenix’s nuanced, open-book performance.

A dynamite crime comedy and identity meltdown that can rekindle one’s faith in movies.

By the time the beast spreads his wings to full span, soaring skyward toward a vaguely Spielbergian moon, you’re in the kind of breathless awe that so few current cinematic superproductions are able to provide.

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

Everything is tainted by a sneering sense of superiority. It’s like washing down Christmas dinner with rancid eggnog.

There are a few too many twists on this highway.

You walk away with far more questions than answers — a profile foul by any other name.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

The movie’s nagging inconsistency goes from merely grating to flat-out jaw-dropping, courtesy of late-game plot twists that squander whatever benefit of the doubt may remain.

The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. Tim’s finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim’s Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable.

Subtle performances — especially from Bale and Affleck, both growing meaner in the absence of hope — transcend any structural weaknesses. The bottom drops out early for them, but their endgame is savagely captivating.

Writer-director Laura Colella hasn’t strayed far from home (these characters are her actual housemates, rechristened into fiction), but her project feels like a casual experiment gone wonderfully right.

But mainly, it’s the film’s folk music that roots in the heart like a faraway lure.

No stranger to controversy, Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine) has always taken his country to task over bureaucratic and social issues; here, the director goes after both old-media exploitation and new-media omnipresence, and the result is less than cutting.

Though Lemmons’s parable-like intentions are clear, almost every beat of Langston’s tale, with its absent father figures and heated gun-pointing melodrama, rings false — hardly a fitting contemporary complement to the Greatest Story Ever Told.

The story — aside from a climax that plays like a too-knowing rebuke to Disney formula — goes tediously through the motions. It isn’t only Papa Walt’s head that’s been put on ice.

Why introduce two female characters — played by Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder, both excelling at trashy desperation — if the script’s ultimately going to forget them? The worst sin is visited upon Statham: Sure, those fists fly, but his poetry has become a chopped-up hash.

Bold performance or not, you can see history weighing heavily on Elba’s shoulders (in later scenes as an older man, you can see the makeup, too).

Weaknesses from the original remain, including a mustache-twirling villain straight out of a Bond film (Sharlto Copley) and a Freudian master plan that unravels the more you think about it. Give credit to Lee for staying fresh, even if this feels like slumming.

Although the film was completed too early to document Hanna’s return to music—her new band, the Julie Ruin, released an album in September and has been touring—it still offers a poignant, intimate portrait of a larger-than-life personality—one whose singular voice is still sorely needed in music, culture and, well, everywhere.