The three actors excel in their roles, and director Matthew Saville gives additional insight into the men through small yet informative details.

As a storyteller, Amalric is a master of manipulation, first leading the audience in one direction and then another. The Blue Room is a hall of mirrors, reflecting every detail but making it hard to know where you stand.

Rudderless is a competent, well-acted melodrama, yet in scope and ambition it has the modest and serviceable scale of the small, not silver, screen.

The dynamic between Fletcher and Andrew makes for highly pitched drama, which strains for credibility during two climactic scenes.

Even as characters are tweaked and actors bring a slightly different energy than his other movies, The Best of Me is still the same mushy Nicholas Sparks adaptation with drama so overwrought audience members can’t help but laugh — at least until they’re sniffling during the closing credits.

As a showcase for Murray’s proven rapport with his audience, St. Vincent occasionally threatens to become a self-congratulatory victory lap. But as a celebration, it’s a chance to revel in the Murray personae — wiseacre, hipster, humble man of the street and hell of a nice guy — that has allowed him somehow to reach mass-media stardom while retaining his own idiosyncratic niche.

The Book of Life may use state-of-the-art animation, but it derives its strength from the wisdom of antiquity. It only looks new, but it’s as old as life (and death) itself.

It’s true that satire is the perfect weapon of reason, and Justin Simien deploys it with resourcefulness, cool assurance and eagle-eyed aim.

It’s engaging and watchable, even as it marches toward a seemingly suicidal climax. Yet the complex dynamic between Wardaddy and his men is far more fascinating.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

In the wake of numerous documentaries and a big-budget film, writer-director Clare Lewins can find little fresh material.

One of the delights of the documentary is hearing Terry tell stories. Watching the movie feels as if you’ve sat down in someone’s living room to hear tales of other legendary jazz musicians, such as Count Basie or Miles Davis.

The movie is inspiring and tragic, and, directed by street artist One9, it’s captured in an artful, emotional way that will speak to an audience beyond rap fans.

Despite the story’s familiarity, its star manages to turn its many tropes into a winning formula.

Even if at times its structure feels overly complicated and the B-roll seems silly, the movie makes compelling points. More important, the film suggests both long-term and short-term solutions.

"Him” and “Her” make for a remarkably powerful film experiment, retaining the insights into relationships of “Them” while filling in many of its invisible storytelling fissures.

In viewing the same tale retold from two mutually exclusive vantage points, we become aware of how “Him” and “Her” deepen and enrich certain aspects of the story, adding contrast and, at times, contradiction, to the whole.

Details count in this movie, whether it’s well-executed camera work or the affecting score.

Even when it skates recklessly close to shopworn cliches, Pride manages to navigate around them with vigor, as well as disarming, even wholesome, open-heartedness.

To its credit, Men, Women & Children seems to allow for a rational middle ground between technophobic Luddites and the lamentably over-wired. It never turns down the moral panic entirely, but neither does it let it completely boil over.

The film isn’t awful. There are moments of handsome cinematography and occasional effects that both frighten and impress.

Arteta keeps the pace fast and frenetic and doesn’t mind spotlighting potty jokes... but even the bathroom humor is forgivable when the end result is a crowd-pleasing comedy and a surprisingly entertaining treat for the whole family.

Despite the film’s heavy-handed effort at vindication, Renner manages to deliver a performance that is complex and satisfyingly contradictory.

20,000 Days on Earth isn’t so much a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, looking back on his life, as it is a meditation on the art of storytelling.

It’s a funny, fascinating look at why Landis became an art forger, how he got caught and what he plans to do in the future, which may be more of the same.

The film is amateurish on almost every level.

In a bait-and-switch worthy of its title, The Good Lie may lure in viewers eager to see a Reese Witherspoon movie, but they’ll fall in love with something else entirely.

Despite its deficiencies, Annabelle is not without a modicum of verve. It has its unnerving moments, but they’re outweighed by the sheer stupidity and predictability of the story.

Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.

With strong performances, plenty of chemistry between the leads and pithy dialogue, the movie is fun until things get serious — which is to say, until things get unbelievable.

In Myers’s capable hands, and with a powerful, vanity-free performance by Monaghan, Fort Bliss joins “Coming Home” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” as a movie deeply in sync, not just with the military characters it depicts, but also with the civilian world that awaits them with such confoundingly mixed messages.

This adaptation of Agota Kristof’s 1986 novel is impossible to take literally, yet too obscure to read between the lines.

There are no surprises here, only blandly reassuring homilies.

Liberated from playing the hits, Benjamin eloquently captures Hendrix’s emerging style without having to succumb to jukebox-musical opportunism.

The story of The Boxtrolls, in lesser hands, might have turned out only so-so. Under Laika’s loving, labor-intensive touch, it takes on a kind of magic.

For all of The Equalizer’s overkill, Washington retains an admirable air of seriousness, embodying McCall as a believable figure of purity and protection, even when he’s going after his opponents with methodical, thoughtfully choreographed sadism.

The whole thing is so inconsistent, with intermittent slow motion and curious motivations, that you have to finally just accept things like a disappearing narrator as par for the course.

For all its simplicity, Tracks the movie is a poignant, deeply emotional story.

The shadow of its past informs the latest incarnation of “Rigby,” a deeply moving, beautifully acted and ultimately mournful meditation on the gulfs that open between people, especially when tragedy falls like a cleaver.

For a movie that lasts longer than two hours and is made up solely of talking, it’s impressive that the story never seems to drag. But with all of the possibilities of movie magic, it’s a shame that the characters keep us at arm’s length.

[An] aimless but oddly charismatic film.

Take Me to the River includes just enough history of the civil rights era to lend it gravitas. The color-blind recording practices of studios like Stax were an anomaly at the time and are well worth noting. But it’s the music people will want to hearken to.

For all its savagery and hopelessness, Starred Up manages to be sympathetic, not only because of O’Connell’s galvanizing turn, but also Asser and director David Mackenzie’s unwavering commitment to portraying his character with as much compassion as brutal honesty.

The Zero Theorem doesn’t fully earn the elaborately conceived scaffolding on which its relatively tame ideas are hoisted.

Tusk seems to harbor no grander ambitions than to create a gross-out gag.

With a bench this deep, This Is Where I Leave You should have been a comedy of contemporary manners as wickedly funny as it is poignant. In the hands of Levy, it’s become just another forgettable example of low-stakes Hollywood hackwork at its most bland, banal and snipingly belligerent.

The look, style and smarts of A Walk Among the Tombstones seem like such a refreshingly toned-down departure from the outlandishness of Neeson’s “Taken” franchise that it’s all the more dismaying when the film shifts radically into a sadistic tableau of blood and gore.

As incomplete as the narrative is, The Maze Runner delivers on almost every other level.

Horovitz may have made a questionable decision in adapting this particular play for the screen, but his casting was flawless.

Wetlands has only a sketchy plot, based largely on Helen’s dreams, fantasies and childhood memories. It isn’t terribly clear where the movie — or its hedonistic heroine — is going, but getting there is one wild ride.

“No No” performs the valuable service of elevating Ellis’s legacy beyond one game, reminding viewers of a career during which he was almost always, as one observer notes, “a chapter ahead.”

Pay 2 Play makes no new revelations... The difference with this movie is that it actually means to inspire hope.

The tone is all over the map, switching from fantastical one moment to naturalistic the next... It all gives God Help the Girl a disconnected, haphazard feel.

Sometimes a great story is enough to overcome mediocre storytelling, and that’s the case with the documentary The Green Prince.

In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.

It’s a credit to Lehane’s screenplay, director Michael R. Roskam’s restraint and a superb cast led by the masterful Tom Hardy that “The Drop” earns every sad-eyed glance and heart-tugging whimper.

The gentle pacing of the film is too laid-back at times, particularly in a few overlong underwater swimming scenes that start out lovely but conclude as apparent filler material. But that’s a small quibble with a movie that’s this sweet and cheesy.

There’s a fundamental problem here. The movie relies on the instinctual human fear of death, but its message is that dying is a promotion.

Snow Zou’s directorial debut does have a few noteworthy attributes: attractive stars, sun-dappled cinematography and an audacious payoff.

It’s a lazy piece of work, even by the low standards of Hollywood horror movies.

The music is catchy and sounds sufficiently Elvis-like, and The Identical occupies a neglected niche as a family-friendly movie that isn’t geared just toward kids. But living up to a legend is an uphill battle, and the movie doesn’t ever reach those heights.

Duplass and Moss are so good, and their reactions to the frankly nutty circumstances of the film are so plausible, that the preposterous premise of the story hits home both conceptually and emotionally.

Ultimately the movie feels like an empty exercise. Sure, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. But when the one figure most worthy of our sympathy is nothing more than a beautiful blonde robot, what’s the point?

“Thunder” doesn’t boast a distinctive look or a cast of famous voices. But its characters are engaging and its action sequences exhilarating.

As Above, So Below is inherently absurd, but it would be somewhat less so had it fully committed to just one of its ridiculous premises.

Jealousy is less cynical than it sounds. While certainly no love story, this dry-eyed tale feels achingly, maybe even exhilaratingly alive.

A Letter to Momo is unquestionably lovely to look at, but viewers may not be able to shake the feeling that they’ve seen much of it before, and done better.

It’s diverting to watch and has moments of brilliance, but even with all its refreshing female characters, May in the Summer doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

Attention is duly paid in this tender and touching film; the strangest thing about Love Is Strange is how completely un-strange it is, from its familiar family dynamics to its exquisite honesty and compassion.

The wine Coogan and Brydon are opening this time may lack some of the novel fizz of the first one, but The Trip to Italy is like most vacations: a few bumps here and there, but over all too quickly.

In its second half, “Kundo” becomes robust and exhilarating. The filmmakers stage cast-of-dozens battle scenes and one-on-one showdowns with equal brio.

Life of Crime feels like a rambling car ride through the countryside with friends. The scenery is great, and the passengers are diverting, but you keep wondering where the driver is headed.

The film is ambitious and heartfelt, with pressing concerns about the virtualization and fantasization of reality. But it’s a blunder, one interesting mostly for what it might have been.

The November Man turns out to be the classic August movie: a triumph of competence over imagination and schlock over taste. Its highest value lies in reminding filmgoers that fall can’t come too soon.

Rich Hill doesn’t just make you feel like you know these boys; it makes you care about them.

The Kill Team is expertly edited, at one point overlaying interviews with the men who participated in the war crimes with B-roll of infantrymen milling about, weapons in hand. And it’s all set to a brilliantly spare and evocative soundtrack. It’s a beautiful way to lose faith in humanity.

The promise of its premise is squandered all too soon in what becomes yet another tiresome exercise in the way-overworked zombie genre.

Ironically, When the Game Stands Tall isn’t about keeping gridiron glory in perspective, but about blowing it out of proportion.

Beneath those puppet-headed antics, and true to its title, Frank is improbably, disarmingly honest.

Even at its most wrenchingly painful, the film readily delivers generous dollops of pleasure.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is as visually imaginative as its predecessor.

In addition to “pervert” — which Wojtowicz makes sound like a badge of honor — the film offers many other seemingly contradictory assessments of Wojtowicz, mainly from his own mouth: troll, Goldwater Republican, McCarthy peacenik, crazy man, crook, romantic. He was all of those things and more, as The Dog makes vividly obvious.

Like most stars of road movies, they’re an odd couple; unlike most, both the friction between them and their underlying loyalty feel real, not contrived to supply a movie’s dramatic arc.

The story itself never wavers when it comes to portraying the truth.

In the taut, emotionally gripping documentary Dinosaur 13, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller meticulously re-creates seven eventful, tense and finally heartbreaking years.

Johnson and Wayans are both gifted comic performers but are given way too little to do in a film that wends its way from set piece to set piece, not with antic glee but desultory and-then-this-happens randomness.

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

In its own way, the movie version — handsomely directed by Phillip Noyce and featuring an appealing, sure-footed cast of emerging and veteran actors — aptly reflects The Giver’s pride of place as the one that started it all, or at least the latest wave.

First-time director Trish Sie, a music-video veteran, is more interested in spectacle than character, as she demonstrates even when nobody’s dancing.

If the movie’s universal themes don’t impress, its specific details do.

[A] captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney.

As pungent as McDonagh’s writing is, it may be his too-easy pessimism that makes Calvary engrossing and thought-provoking, but not great.

The plot is so similar to “The Big Chill” that it almost could be called a remake, except that it isn’t nearly as funny, it follows millennials instead of baby boomers and the characters tweet.

If you can suspend your incredulity for a moment, What If has its bright moments. And that’s thanks in large part to its leads, who manage to do what Radcliffe has always done well: conjure up a little magic.

It’s a movie about exploring the vast, “dark continent” of the ocean’s deepest places (to quote Cameron, who produced and narrates the film) that ends up feeling claustrophobic. Much of it was shot inside a metal sphere the size of a fitness ball.

Perhaps seeking to retain something of the book’s rhythm, Knight and Hallstrom let a very simple story meander for two hours and include episodes that serve no dramatic purpose.

While this reboot is fun, it’s also forgettable and occasionally infuriating.

For all the movie’s grandiose annihilation, there also is action so absurd and emotion so saccharine that the likelihood of involuntary laughter is high.