Inspiring heartbreaker of a documentary.

It's not an easy sit; we're never let off the hook with golden-hued memories or belated bits of wisdom. Maybe this is love after all.

A mesmerizing study in excess, Peter Jackson and company's long-awaited prequel to the Lord of the Rings saga is bursting with surplus characters, wall-to-wall special effects, unapologetically drawn-out story tangents and double the frame rate (48 over 24) of the average movie.

The details are gripping, presented with respect for an audience's intelligence.

Russell Crowe's pained vocal stylings (they sound more like barks) as relentless Inspector Javert can be forgiven after hearing Hugh Jackman's old-pro fluidity in the central role of Jean Valjean, hiding a criminal past.

Husbands and fathers, do not try this sh-- at home. Such "lovable" misbehavior is best left to the professional cads.

While the documentary offers some insights into the pervertion of art for ideological purposes, too much of it simply finds Fry standing in dumbfounded awe of the holy sites that populate his journey.

Director Maya Kenig's film never decides whether it wants to be a social satire, a familial drama or a parable about Israeli life during perpetual wartime; that it neither picks a route nor cohesively combines any of those strands doesn't make a fairly generic father-daughter story any more colorful.

From its flash-forward framing sequence to its glossy black and white images, the film emulates "Raging Bull" in nearly every particular, while failing to capture even a sliver of that tortured-soul sports-movie's insight or visceral power.

Rice's style is pitched somewhere between Merchant Ivory and Wes Anderson, favoring shots of sad, pretty people looking bereft in elaborately elegant rooms. But it's Jones and Treadaway, both seething volcanoes trapped behind artfully pallid faces, who turn what could've been a candy-coated comedy of manners into a complex, melancholic farce.

Director Jacob Rosenberg's approach is heavy with archival footage and interviews, yet oddly features almost nothing from Way himself; his puzzling absence for most of the film turns the project into less of a biography than a one-note hagiography.

Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) may be an occasionally interesting visual stylist, but storytelling-wise, his second English-language effort couldn't be more stillborn.

In the wake of the spunkier "Your Sister's Sister," writer-director Brian Savelson can't seem to mount a head of steam, and his chamber piece feels underdeveloped. Even Slattery's sourness doesn't redeem the banality of impending heart-to-hearts.

Lay the Favorite is frenzied without being funny. Like Judy Holliday on a particularly manic day, Hall tears from scene to scene with a bubbly effervescence that is technically impressive yet increasingly exhausting.

There are a few nicely turned moments... but they're scattered plums in a starchy, flavorless pudding.

At times, the film's lyrical drift shades into incoherence, spackled with globs of free-floating voiceover and Larry Clark-like indolent moments. It's both lovely and frustrating, at least until hard times lay bare the gulf between Skye's fractured family and the boys' more stable lives.

Even at this short running time, there's a looseness to the kaleidoscopic adventure that becomes slightly wearying.

Hyde Park could have been fawningly ponderous; that it's merely an airy trifle puts it a cut above the usual Oscar bait.

The young actors' vacant-eyed brazenness may be true to life, but there's a whiff of exploitation, matched by the script's disinterest in exploring any friction that isn't skin on skin.

Director Andrew Neel has hit upon a compelling reason for the found-footage gimmick: to indict a narcissistic generation who think their phones make them royalty.

There's not much to dislike in My Brothers' sweet inconsequence, but even less to quicken the pulse or stir the heart.

The badly miscalculated meat of the film is an endless parade of to-camera addresses by performers such as Lindsay Lohan, Viola Davis and Uma Thurman, all reading clumsily from Monroe's recently discovered letters and journal entries as if it were final-exam time at the Actors Studio.

The fact that director Darragh Byrne has laden things with a Celtic Whimsy 101 score and a sketched outline of a script makes it even tougher for Meaney to lift this film out of its social-drama rut.

The characters are flat; the voiceover is awkward.

Marshall Lewy's film functions largely as a delivery system for Carlyle's performance. Luckily, Carlyle's tough, tender turn is strong enough to carry the load.

Fortunately, there are a good number of Yen-choreographed action scenes to break up the monotony.

The way forward, both in Caouette's real-life situation and his development as an artist, remains unclear, yet that frustration makes it to the screen, in spiky waves that signal a vital personal quest.

It's almost worth wading through the wearisome setup to get to the fun stuff. But there is a reason fast-forward buttons were invented.