As compelling as Warner’s story is, Crown Heights never quite takes hold cinematically. It’s a procedural whose central protagonist remains necessarily passive and something of a cipher, despite the wellsprings of emotion that Stanfield manages to tap simply by gazing balefully out a cell window.

The story often feels like a collection of (so-so) jokes, forcibly strung together in a tenuous narrative.

About a musical genre not known for quiet contemplation, “Rumble” asks us to be still for a moment and to listen to the heartbeat — at once familiar and newly strange — that pumps the lifeblood that flows through the songs this country is known for.

The uneven tone especially undermines the ending — one that’s as tragic as it is predictable. Viewers may expect — even crave — to feel an emotional impact, but the movie hasn’t laid the groundwork.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t quite go south, but in diving headfirst into the swamp of Internet addiction, its vision gets a little murky.

What’s different this time around is how frequently these largely improvised conversations (between actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing fictionalized versions of themselves) veer into the abyss of impending mortality.

Patti Cake$ winds up being a celebration of art, enterprise and self-invention that’s as tough as it is touching. At the risk of mixing metaphors, not to mention musical genres, it rocks.

Anyone who’s ever dreamed of tutus, tights and toe shoes will likely get a kick out of Leap!

Unfortunately, despite its adorable heroes, you’d have to be nutty to sit through The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, a largely unengaging modern-day animal fable.

Hong Kong director Stephen Fung (“Tai Chi Hero”) is no John Woo, but he gives The Adventurers almost as much style as its larcenous characters exude.

The drama is a realistic and methodical meditation on family obligation, personal sacrifice and — of course — the power of architecture. That makes Columbus as lovely to look at as it is to ponder.

What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures.

Despite all the mayhem, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a surprisingly bland dish.

“Corner” is a deeply sympathetic tale, using the possibilities of animation not just to pique curiosity, but to devastate.

As lighthearted, late-summer escapism goes, Logan Lucky is an amusing if convoluted and undisciplined bagatelle. As a hotly anticipated comeback, it feels like a slightly dippy, ultimately disposable warm-up of a director whose brains, chops and judicious taste we need more than ever.

Horror works — or it doesn’t — in the flickering, moving images of the screen, not the page. Sandberg knows that. His artistry, for that’s what it is, is like that of the dollmaker Sam Mullins: to take inert material and create a living, breathing thing.

Finnish Director Klaus Haro has a sharp eye, and his shots deftly juxtapose the delicate beauty of the Estonian lowlands with the harsh reality of life under Soviet rule. But the script, written by Anna Heinamaa, gives him little more than an aesthetic landscape to work with.

The movie often undercuts itself by spelling things out rather than hinting at them, belaboring emotions and ideas to ensure that the audience understands what the characters are feeling and thinking.

By focusing on the details of his characters’ lives, Weinstein finds common ground on both sides of the religious divide.

This movie’s condensed telling is somewhat bewildering, although the essentials eventually become clear. But then they’re really just a pretext for such fairy-tale wonders as an underwater city, a living island and a hummingbird air force.

How ironic then, in a movie about wordsmithing, that The Only Living Boy in New York is tripped up not by tawdry behavior, but by terrible writing.

Although news reports presented police use of rubber bullets and tear gas as justifiable responses to increasingly volatile crowds, Whose Streets? offers a useful alternative view, with citizen journalists capturing what look like unprovoked attacks on demonstrators by law enforcement officers woefully unprepared or unwilling to de-escalate sensitive situations and engage.

Although Sheridan has approached the setting with the sensitivity and respect of his deeply empathic protagonist, the film still bears a slight but inescapable whiff of cultural tourism.

The Dark Tower isn’t frightening, or even, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting, except perhaps for viewers too young to know better, or for Stephen King fans especially susceptible to outright pandering.

“Brigsby” never ventures into the caustic simply for the sake of comedy. These days, that’s refreshing. There aren’t many movies that value sweetness over cynicism.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

From the Land of the Moon features a typical Cotillard performance, yet the romance, from French actress and filmmaker Nicole Garcia, manages to convey neither triumph nor tragedy.

A soaring, heart-bursting portrait of a group of intrepid Baltimore high school students guaranteed to bring audiences to their feet — whether out of vicarious triumph, overpowering pure emotion, or simply to pay tribute to the superheroines at the core of its infectiously inspiring story.