Better to have a film with a reach that exceeds its grasp than a movie with no ambition in its pretty little empty head beyond regurgitating the same tired old pabulum. 

“The Place Beyond the Pines,” director-cowriter Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to his 2010 corrosive marital drama, “Blue Valentine," is plenty ambitious. If, in the end, it collapses on itself from trying to carry too heavy a symbolic load, one can still admire its attempted reach and several of the performances.

The focus of “Pines” is fathers and sons and how the relationship between the two, or lack of, leaves a lasting legacy. The film is...

Growing up is hard to do, as countless coming-of-age movies have shown, some more affectingly than others.

With “Ginger & Rosa,” British avant-garde filmmaker Sally Potter (“Orlando”), offers up a strong entry into the field with what is by far her most appealingly mainstream film to date.

An intimate character study, “Ginger & Rosa” is set in England in 1962. It’s told mainly from the viewpoint of Ginger (Elle Fanning), a 16-year old budding poet growing up in post-WWII England alongside her best friend, Rosa (Alice Englert, the daughter of director Jane Campion). The two were born on the same day, in the same hospital, and have been BFFs ever since.

Now...

Fee-fie, ho-hum.

“Jack the Giant Slayer” is only incrementally more fun than a spate of other recent action-fantasy movies based on classic fairy tales. It has too much of a whiff of the familiar to stand very tall.

This 3D “Jack” follows in the once-upon-a-time footsteps of “Red Riding Hood” (2011), “Snow White and the Huntsman” (2012) and last month’s “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” as well as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012).

It, too, offers a variation on an oft-told tale and peoples it with a mix of live actors and computer-generated digital monsters. (“Jack” was originally slated for a June 2012 release but was pushed back to 2013 early last year.)

...

One either sparks to Nicholas Sparks, finding his melodramatic love stories to sigh over, or one doesn’t.

Sparking to “Safe Haven,” the latest film based on one of the bestselling author’s swoony novels, requires a high tolerance for a mighty sappy love story and the ability not to see a mile ahead for the supposedly surprise plot points, though they’re as obvious as bright red buoy markers bobbing in the water.  

None of which seems to have hurt the box office appeal of seven previous film adaptations of Sparks’s books, including “The Notebook,” “Nights in Rodanthe,” “A Walk to Remember.” There’s a reason this movie is opening on Valentine’s Day.

...