It’s the directing debut of Angus MacLachlan, who wrote “Junebug” and thus gave Amy Adams the perfect introduction to the world. “Goodbye” displays the same canny ear for human interactions, both comical and confessional.

Even with all this sparkle, the film staggers through its third act. By then, the script has rubbed the rough edges off the villains and made whatever point it was going to make several times over.

It’s the best film of this trilogy, but truthfully, none of the “Hobbit” thirds have been any better than middling “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” installments. Considering the vaunted reputation J.R.R.Tolkien enjoys, this overdone “There and Back Again” never quite got us there.

A handsome production, its few settings (indoors and outdoors) painterly and period-perfect. It’s entirely too long for a filmed chamber drama of such limited stakes. But Ullmann’s adaptation reminds us that the gap between “those people,” now called “the one percent,” and the rest of the world will always be ripe for conflict, drama and tension, no matter how much we evolve.

It all adds up to perfectly banal kids’ entertainment, with just a single decent plot twist, a few cute lines and a tried and a couple of trite and true messages — “Trust yourself” and “stop polluting” stand out.

Get Santa is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce.

For all its stunning and stark wilderness settings (Spain and the Canary Islands), its stunning effects, technical proficiency and scriptural cleverness, Exodus is a chilly affair... It’s still an exciting, entertaining epic.

Rock is more a genial presence here than an actor playing an addict tested by a bad day. He never lets us see the strain that could make him fall off the wagon. He scores laughs, but generously leaves the outrageous stuff to his legion of supporting players.

Anderson loses his way, failing to thin out the novel and its overload of characters, piling scene upon scene that neither amusingly complicates the plot, nor advances it. Phoenix, however, is never less than fun.

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But Beside Still Waters there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”

Moore makes us root for Alice, not for a cure, which still seems a reach, but for a completion of her life’s goals, a chance to control her fate as long as she has the wherewithal to do it.

And as long as it is, it would be a pity to cut one moment of Spall’s immersive, utterly convincing portrait of this common man with an uncommon gift.

The setting and old fashioned structure of the story won’t be to every taste. But The Physician is quite good at recreating its era and reminding us that once, long ago, it was the West that was backward and always looking East for enlightenment, education and a way out of the Dark Ages.

As he did with “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” director Jean-Marc Vallée covers this inner and outer journey with a minimum of fuss. The flashbacks and their revelations, filling in the puzzle, are sparingly doled out. The stunning scenery Cheryl hikes through is barely noticed.

A slight and somewhat demure romantic comedy/friendship comedy built around two mildly interesting characters.

Take Care manages, more often than not, to rise to the level of pleasant time killer, a rom-com with just enough surprises to justify getting those New York filming permits.

It does a poor job of showing the tragedy of Turing’s hidden life but a better job at making a bigger case — unconventional people make unconventional thinkers.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a great name for a documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and his animation house, Japan’s Studio Ghibli.

Your enjoyment of Horrible Bosses 2 is almost wholly dependent on your tolerance for clusters of funny actors, babbling, riffing — and in the case of Charlie Day, screeching — all at once.

As “cute and cuddly” as ever, and often downright hilarious.

Manages to pop the hairs on the back of your neck more than most repetitive, predictable and gory Hollywood horror films these days.

Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil. And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.

It’s no surprise that a Child of Mamet should have a clever way with a line and wicked sense of when to drop some tasty profanity. But Two-Bit Waltz is amateur theatrics committed to celluloid, a cast of “adorable” eccentrics performing scenes with the precious, remedial chapter titles.

An indie comedy whose primary virtue is its cast, well-known actors who took small roles on a lark — a chance to play against “type.”

It’s not a bad film, this first-half of the concluding chapter of “The Hunger Games.” But it is, from first scene to last, just a tedious good-looking set-up for what one might hope would be a more lively, and perhaps better lit and ventilated finale.

In a cinema recently overrun with combat documentaries, Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot manages a first. Here’s a film that captures the romance of war amongst today’s young and testosterone-fueled. Want to know why young men from all over the world have flocked to fight for ISIS? Point and Shoot explains it.

A bloody, violent and yet grimly comic tale.

Truth be told, I was never a fan of the first “Dumber,” but the stars made it endurable and convincingly stupid. Here, they’re sometimes funny, and sometimes just sad. They’re better than this, no matter how good they are at hiding the fact that they know it.