Director Jack (Room at the Top) Clayton, sensitively seconded by Cameraman Freddie Frances, has filled every coign and corridor with a dangerous, intelligent darkness. Moreover, the main performances are most capably carried off.

The lumpiness of The Good Lie’s progression – from infancy to adulthood, and from the horrors of war to gentle social comedy and back again – proclaims a respect for facts and truths that can’t be molded into a smooth narrative.

In a movie of subtle tones and wild swerves, Pike expertly mixes a cocktail of hot and cold blood. She is the Amazing Amy you could fall for, till death do you part.

The movie has its political-parable aspect, with malevolent forces convincing both the 1% and the 99% that they have reasons to fear the other. But The Boxtrolls is mainly a delight for the sharp eye and the capricious mind.

If The Equalizer is the hit it should be, it will give this veteran action star his very first movie franchise. In the sequel, Denzel-McCall could make things right in Ukraine as Obama’s Secretary of Defense and one-man army.

So put it this way: If the Altmans were a real family sitting shiva, I’d drop by to commiserate and give a cheek-kiss to a few of the mourners (Bateman, Driver, Fey, maybe Fonda). I enjoyed seeing them, but I’d hate to be sentenced to being with them for the full seven-day stretch.

The cluttered climax, in a Mother Bates cellar, explains little of the killers’ psychology; for that you have to read the book. But it does let Neeson assert his primacy as the cinema’s most graven, grieving, grievous senior citizen — a figure who doesn’t so much star in his films as haunt them. This ghost of a movie star is never more at home than when walking among the tombstones.

Gaudily entertaining, occasionally wearying sequel.

Studying the topography of decay in a veteran actor’s face is one of the few worthy pursuits for moviegoers sitting through the epic-length, belligerently inconsequential The Expendables 3 — a picture whose very title proclaims its redundancy.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is on a mission to make you cry. Whether you oblige will depend on your fondness for, or immunity to, the gentler stereotypes of movie romance.

It’s a bit of a botch.

In 2007, Jamie Foxx won Best Actor for his subtle performance as Ray Charles. Boseman exceeds that solid standard. Incarnating James Brown in all his ornery uniqueness, he deserves a Pulitzer, a Nobel and instant election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A home movie of a fictional home life, an epic assembled from vignettes, Boyhood shimmers with unforced reality. It shows how an ordinary life can be reflected in an extraordinary movie.

The summer’s best, coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

Massively stupid: preposterous yet boring.

When it gets going, it’s a pretty fine movie.

This one is bad — a little comedy that flops in big ways.

Nothing coheres. Movies usually try to come together at the end; this one falls apart. If that's Bay intention, then cinema has finally entered its Age of Extinction.

So why is the Jersey Boys film a turgid botch? Eastwood’s résumé hints at a reason. His affinity is for American standards as improvised on piano or guitar by indigenous artists in smoky nightclubs, not for the tightly wound, impeccably pounding songs that Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe wrote for the Four Seasons.

The best comic turns are by the Afro-Asian twins Keith and Kenny Lucas, whose timing is eerie and superb.

A furiously time-looping joy ride and the smartest action film of the early summer season.

Hazel and Augustus will live in film lore because of the young actors who play them.

This one starts at the level of lunacy and keeps on escalating. Next to Filth, "Trainspotting" looks as sedate as "The Polar Express."

Except for Angelina Jolie, exemplary as the fairy badmother who laid a narcotic curse on an infant princess, this pricey live-action drama is a dismaying botch.

Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film... It’s a concept lacking a magnetic story, a package without a product.

Tries anything for a gross-out laugh — but feels oh-so-familiar

Frantic and rote by turns, mislaying the power of the central love story and piling on the mutant adversaries. For at least this installment, Spider-Man is Amazing no more.

And yet, all three women are less watchable and amusing that Nicki Minaj as Carly’s legal assistant Lydia.