The Place Beyond the Pines

As with director Derek Cianfrance’s previous picture, “Blue Valentine,” the whole of “The Place Beyond the Pines” is less than the sum of its parts.

Ginger & Rosa

Sally Potter's phony-baloney "Ginger & Rosa," about two best friends in London in 1962 - nuclear weapon protestor Ginger (Elle Fanning, impossible to turn away from even here) and boy-crazy Rosa (nondescript Alice Englert) - never feels like anything but a director's construct.

From Up On Poppy Hill

For "From Up on Poppy Hill," Studio Ghibli scion Goro Miyazaki steps into papa Hayao's imposing shoes and let's not mince words: his new film feels fresher and more fun than dad's last two ("Ponyo" and "The Secret World of Arrietty").

Reality

Now here's a conversation piece. "Gomorrah" writer-director Matteo Garrone returns five years later with "Reality," about the fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena), a young husband and father from Napoli who, a few weeks after meeting Enzo, the most famous contestant from the Italian version of "Big Brother," at a wedding (Luciano, always the life of the party, played a blue-wigged drag queen), himself auditions for the show, arriving late to an open call at a shopping mall and talking his way into a screen test.

The We and the I

A very weak first quarter of the movie year continues with the train wreck "The We and the I," which with its diffuse and incoherent mash-up of styles demonstrates how thin the line between the winsome whimsy of Michel Gondry's "The Science of Sleep" - and the respectable rigor of his "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" - and outright formlessness.

Spring Breakers

It felt appropriate that Sofia Coppola's upcoming "The Bling Ring" had the last trailer before Harmony Korine's OMG-what-was-that "Spring Breakers." Korine's film aims, I think, for the unexpected truthfulness of Coppola's great "Somewhere," teasing out the layers of humanity in four co-eds who steal their professor's car and rob a diner at gunpoint to get the money to get down to Florida for Spring Break. (Selena Gomez, charming in 2011's "Monte Carlo," continues to show promise as Faith, the most introspective and godfearing of the girls.)

Olympus Has Fallen

90 minutes of eye-rolling and more "Come on"s than a Lleyton Hewitt match give way to 30 minutes of out-loud laughter in the mildly amusing but dark, claustrophobic, overlong and totally preposterous "Olympus Has Fallen," with Gerard Butler as the anguished Secret Service agent who singlehandedly thwarts the efforts of an army of North Korean terrorists to detonate the entire ensiled U.S. nuclear arsenal.