Lisa Schwarzbaum

It's just a matter of time, flashbacks, many costume and accent changes, some more jazz, and a triggering tune on the radio before the truth can set Frankie, and the audience, free.

No less sweet for being unoriginal: A guy (Charlie Sheen) mourns a bad breakup with the woman he loves (Katheryn Winnick). The execution, on the other hand, is perilously self-absorbed.

This striking, slow-building drama from Cate Shortland uses fractured, impressionistic imagery as a mirror of moral dislocation as the children make their way through an unfamiliar landscape.

The movie — the third in a trilogy of powerful political dramas from Larraín, including "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem" — uses period detail, archival footage, and '80s-era technology to create an excellently authentic, bleached, crummy-looking document of a great democratic accomplishment.

In the way of workaday flicks built around long-in-the-tooth badasses, Die Hard 5 leaves room for McClane to make a few jokes about his thinning hair and to rue that he wasn't a better father when his kids were growing up. Oh, boo-hoo.

The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off.

The film, by seasoned cinematographer Dror Moreh, is a feat — of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.

At this point in the actor's career, it is pretty well impossible to tell when Malkovich is camping it up, or just being John Malkovich. Under the end-of-civilization circumstances of Warm Bodies, he's just the right guy for the job.

The movie is a morals-free procession of bang bang bang! and blood blood blood!, and men slamming each other with blunt objects and slicing each other with blades.

Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

Dustin Hoffman, a 75-year-old first-time feature director better known as a great old acting pro, conducts at a pleasant tempo.

Struck by Lightning sticks to generic character sketches of high school student types - the jock, the goth, the cheerleader, etc. - and gives Carson the best lines. In between, some charming, buzzy talents pitch in on this short little lark.

Not Fade Away is Chase's reward to himself - a transparently autobiographical work, his first feature-length film, and one that he's said he has wanted to make for years.

The Guilt Trip is not about Rogen, bubbeleh. Streisand is her own once-in-a-lifetime trip, looking gawjuss with that divine voice and those killer fingernails, and the sight of the lady scarfing down four pounds of beef at a Texas steak joint is one a Streisand lover can now cross off her bucket list.

That Cruise fails to make a case for Reacher's allure, though, has less to do with physical dissonance than it does with the film's inability - stupefying inability, really - to otherwise make a case for the character's originality in a movie so choked with visual clichés and dreadfully moldy dialogue.

It's agony, in a rewarding way, to squirm and cringe and groan through an ordeal so realistically re-created.

This steam-driven military weapon of an enterprise is a sobering reminder of just how tinny a musical Les Misérables was in the first place.

I'm holding the filmmaker responsible for getting us all back again - to feelings of excitement and delight. Vital as they are, Gollum and Bilbo can only do so much to keep us enchanted. Is Jackson able to sustain the magic in two more installments? I peer into Tolkien's Misty Mountains and embrace the journey.

It's tastelessness like this, served up as fair-game dish to a Downton Abbey-loving audience, that sours the flavor of this tittery production.

Everyone in the cast (including Geoffrey Arend, Mark Webber, and Caplan's Party Down colleague Martin Starr) is talented enough to deserve a stronger story line than this.

Rodrigo Santoro (Paulo on Lost, Xerxes in 300, and even better, Raúl Castro in Che) is mighty matinee-idol charismatic himself in the title role, alternating between swaggering lady-killer and ravaged victim of self-destruction.

The title Addicted to Fame hints that Giancola knows enough to count himself among the hooked. But the crappiness of this documentary about a crappy parody of a crappy B movie suggests that he hasn't kicked the habit.

I will salute the deftness and intelligence with which Goldfinger observes the reactions of the living to the revelations of the dead.

There's a lovely gravity and specificity to the story that transcends instances of bumpy filmmaking.

This patient, righteous documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns recounts the story of justice undone (a serial rapist confessed) with extensive interviews, a thorough use of archival footage, and a less-than felicitous use of ominous-rumble music that unnecessarily insists, Isn't this an outrage?

Thor's Chris Hemsworth leads the pack as a high school football star-turned-Marine, while Josh Peck plays his stubborn younger brother. There's also a collection of junior guerrillas, including The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki. Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!

Lee's bigger theme isn't God or survival, but the awesome adventure of making the imaginary visible, the adventure of making movies.

Sean Baker's singular little ultra-indie is a strikingly unsentimental study in female friendship between unmoored souls in L.A.'s bleached, glamour-challenged San Fernando Valley.