Richard Kuklinski was a killer for hire who once claimed that he had, during the course of his lethal career in the New York and New Jersey underworld, sent more than 100 victims to their final rest.

He was convicted for five of those deaths in 1988 -- he pleaded guilty to yet another killing in 2003 -- and was sentenced to consecutive life terms. He died in a prison hospital in Trenton, N.J. in 2006 at age 70.

His story has now been brought to the big screen in “The Iceman,” a somewhat confused, brutal film that’s nonetheless compelling, mostly because of a mesmerizing performance by the gifted Michael Shannon (“Revolutionary Road” and HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”) as Kuklinski and evocative period details.

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Wonders never cease. Director Michael Bay has made a movie that’s more than just loud.

His latest, “Pain & Gain,” is an entertaining moral spoof about three lunkheads pursuing their own twisted version of the American Dream. The film is fun, fast and funny, but also a bloated 20 minutes or more than it needs to be.

Bay, whose box-office crushing oeuvre includes the loud and proud “Bad Boys,” “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and the “Transformers” trilogy, keeps the volume and action at full throttle in “Pain & Gain.” But -- and it’s a big but -- he has the advantage here over his earlier movies of working with a way smarter script, by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who previously collaborated on the “...

This is an art-house movie with a capital "A." And you might as well capitalize the "R" and the "T," too, because films don’t come artier than this. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“Upstream Color” is the eagerly anticipated second film from Shane Carruth, an engineer turned self-taught filmmaker. His first movie was 2004’s "Primer," an intriguing, geeky time-travel thriller made for a reported $7,000 -- and which won the Grand Jury Prize for drama at the Sundance Film Festival.

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It is extraordinary how smoothly the Aussies do American accents.

Liam Hemsworth (“The Hunger Games”) and Teresa Palmer (“Warm Bodies”), two of the young actors holding down leading roles in this banal drama about love and friendship during the Vietnam War era, never once vocally betray their Antipodean origins.

That a viewer is paying more attention to the accent in which they say their words than the words themselves is indicative of the wan appeal of “Love and Honor.” Just as the war it depicts was known as the “living room war” because it was the first major conflict that most Americans watched unfold on their TV sets during the evening news, so this lightweight film will play better, and seems more suited, to the small screen at home than the large one at the multiplex.

Dalton (Austin Stowell, of TV’s...