On paper, it sounds like a misguided collaboration between the Lifetime network and the Playboy Channel -- a 36-year-old paralytic who spends most of his time in an iron lung hires a sex surrogate to help him lose his virginity. Based on a true story, to boot.

Miraculously, “The Sessions” avoids the kind of squickyness that Hollywood usually drizzles over its uplifting movies about the physically challenged, mainly because its subject, poet and journalist Mark O’Brien, was in real life far too smart and self-deprecating for that kind of sentimental head-patting. (Just watch Jessica Yu’s extraordinary Oscar-winning short “Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien” for a sampling of the actual guy’s wit and forthrightness.)

In this fictionalized film, we see some news footage of O’Brien zipping through a...

The people behind the “Atlas Shrugged” series of films have things they want to tell you, and just to make sure that you know what they are, the movies tell you, and tell you, and then tell you again. Whether or not you’re amenable to author Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, the declarations run pretty thick in “Part II.”

Still, despite the fact that screenwriters Duke Sandefur, Brian Patrick O’Toole and Duncan Scott make nearly every scene either a monologue in which a character defines his or her view of the world or a conversation in which people tell each other information they already know, this sequel marks an improvement...

Filmmaker and historian Mark Rappaport once observed that a big chunk of Hollywood history is about who almost made what movie, and we’ll forever have to wonder what would have happened if Pedro Almodóvar had made his English-language debut with “The Paperboy,” the Pete Dexter novel he had in development for eons.

Seeing what Lee Daniels has done with the material only confirms that Almodóvar may be the only living filmmaker (except maybe John Waters) who could do justice to this lurid, purple tale of sex, scandal, secrets and perspiration in late-1960s Florida. The legendary Spanish auteur could have pushed the melodrama to the limit and made us take it seriously, and he would certainly know how to choreograph the scene in which the leading lady urinates on the besotted protagonist after he’s been attacked by jellyfish.

But let...

After scoring a hit with the implausible, ridiculous, jingoistic and undeniably entertaining “Taken,” screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have decided to cross the line into sheer stupidity with “Taken 2,” barfing out a script that defies logic and common sense and handing over the directorial reins to the colossally untalented Olivier Megaton.

Megaton, the former graffiti artist who previously sank one Besson franchise with “Transporter 3” before giving the world the ludicrous “Colombiana,” does to action sequences what a food processor does with an onion, to much less appetizing results. Between...