Here's how surprisingly effective “Hope Spring” is: It will make you want to go home and have sex with your spouse afterward. Or at least share a longer hug or a more passionate kiss.

The Bathtub is a place of myths and wonders, a broken down teardrop of Louisiana marsh and mud in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and the setting for an extraordinary new drama whose fierceness, like its 6-year-old heroine Hushpuppy, grabs on and won't let go.

The idea of watching a movie in which a sniper methodically crafts his own bullets, practices weekly at a gun range, then waits quietly in an empty parking garage before shooting five people dead may not sound like the most appealing form of entertainment during these tragic days.

Zany, rambunctious and visually stunning, “Wreck-It Ralph” plunders the world of arcade video games to create a fantasy / comedy where onscreen avatars party like merry hell after the playland closes. Think “Tron” with belly laughs. Or “Night at the Museum” with any laughs.

“Everything has its season, everything has its time,” goes a famous song from the musical “Pippin.” Well, maybe, but for the many fans of that '70s Stephen Schwartz hit, a return to Broadway has been overdue for years.

Jack Kerouac's stream of consciousness novel “On the Road” comes to the screen more or less intact as a not-altogethersatisfying road trip into the Beat Era. The “Motorcycle Diaries” team of director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera have made an “unfilmable book” cinematically coherent, capturing the geographical possibilities, the feel and flavor of this blend of biography and Beatnik history.

For its first half, “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” is as lost and out of sorts as its title. Is it a comic romance set during Earth's final days, a dark lampooning of every If I had a week to live/Party like it's 1999 cliche you've ever heard?

Movies often tend to fulfill the destiny of their main characters. Some are made to be loved, others are made to be cursed. With a title that evokes imagery of some rapper's rise to fame rather than a foolish comedy about a cursed dog, director Lee Tian-jue (李天爵) really endeavors to disappoint.

It's a Hollywood truism that nobody sets out to make a bad movie, but how else to explain a debacle like “Alex Cross”? This overwrought, oppressively violent police thriller has not got an original bone in its empty little head. From its cliché opening — an irrelevant gun battle and chase — to its derivative climax, this is a film with decades of dust on it.

Ang Lee is perhaps the most famous Taiwanese-born film director working today. His films, from martial arts spectacular “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (臥虎藏龍) to cowboy romance masterpiece “Brokeback Mountain,” have captivated audiences across the world.