Every superhero movie faces a choice: the man or the mask? Sure, there’s interplay, but ultimately, one feeds the other, storywise. Judging by the either goofy or nonsensical nature of the (admittedly balletic) fight scenes in he Amazing Spider-Man 2, you might be tempted to say that this sequel to …

Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (Horror of Dracula, et alia) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite …

A commanding title with a game cast, slugging their hearts out to bring a fascinating, seldom-told story to life. But all first-time writer-director John Krokidas can spoon up is detached melodrama. In 1944, Lucien Carr (Leo DiCaprio’s eerie "evil twin," Dane DeHaan), one of the forgotten members of the "Beat …

Another behind-the-scenes, semi-biographic glimpse into Hollywood’s past, along the lines of My Week With Marilyn. Up-and-coming Life magazine photog Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) is prescient enough to sell his editor on a layout featuring a relatively unknown, yet divinely dynamic youngster named James Dean (Dane DeHaan). (Stock thinks the youngster …

A rare exception to the old line about the book being better than a movie, The Place Beyond the Pines is a small-scale epic that might have been better as a novel. In a novel, we might not have minded the sudden loss of major characters, the 15-years-later epilogue that …

Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) tries his hand at another period drama, this one set 17th century Amsterdam and starring Alicia Vikander as a young woman trapped in an arranged marriage who falls for a struggling painter her own age. Christoph Waltz and Dane DeHaan star as the husband …

Utterly unreal space story from Luc Besson (he of The Fifth Element fame), who seems to have watched James Cameron’s Avatar and decided he could make it sillier, more scattered, and less emotionally engaging. (Score one for Cameron’s brand of painfully earnest sentiment?) So once again, we are treated to …