Andy Webster

Despite its sense of mission, the film suffers from soapy excesses and narrative disjunctures.

For all the healing here — the revived include a bird, an ailing uncle and a blind man — The Young Messiah performs no miracles.

It is a competent if sometimes heavy-handed affair, a mosaic of fictitious and underexplored characters who hear the assault but are too self-preoccupied to act.

It’s depressing to see Ms. Moretz — so spirited in “Clouds of Sils Maria” and the “Kick-Ass” movies — reduced to constant mooning at Mr. Roe.

The Rambler...feels like a slender plot with additional scenes pasted on.

Despite Mr. Ransone’s goofy charm, Sinister 2 can’t claim the same finesse, substituting pedestrian plotting and a more graphic gore for the original’s restraint.

The movie benefits greatly from Mr. Amoedo’s largely steady direction and the uniform acting skills of its Chilean cast (performing in English).

Best of all, Mr. Law doesn’t skimp on wide-screen compositions; this is one movie designed for the theater, not the couch.

A “EuroTrip” with balance sheets, the slick, innocuous comedy Unfinished Business fails to seal the deal.

Penélope Cruz is an Oscar-winning actress we don’t see often enough in prominent leading roles. So how disappointing to find her having to carry Julio Medem’s florid Ma Ma, a melodrama only glancing at profundity.

[A] disposable comedy.

The Paranormal Activity movies have always been about carnival-ride sensations, the narrative through-line secondary. That’s fortunate, because those seeking closure to what continuity there has been will go home mostly disappointed.

It has little story to tell and few ideas to offer. Just a great deal of product to sell.

The film is about exotic locations (including a volcano), garish humor (often at the expense of Mr. Chan or women), fisticuffs, stunts and frenetic visual bombast.

You’ll find beatings, shootouts, car crashes, awkward analogies and a measure of buddy badinage in “Bright,” but true enchantment is in short supply.

The problem here is Mr. Long’s Adam, a twitchy knot of tics and self-pity. He invites our sympathy — especially when contrasted with the smarmy Aaron — but doesn’t really deserve it.

As with other staples of the screen-parody genre, the comic bull’s-eyes arrive only intermittently.

A spare trifle carried largely by its leading actress.

Limp pacing and countless shots of Washington’s skyline plague the narrative. Ms. Smollett-Bell exudes an earthy appeal, but it’s the charismatic Mr. Jones who steals the picture. Given all the stifling preachiness, that’s to be expected.

This isn’t activism; it’s by-the-numbers suspense.

It is Ms. McAllister who is the brightest light amid the talky, often sentimental exchanges. She lends charm and conviction to a character who might otherwise have proved insufferable.

The sophomoric humor may be absent, but in its place is only a soufflé of whimsy, seasoned with soot, that fails to rise.

Bad Kids of Crestview Academy traffics in exploitation movie flourishes.

Disappointing plot twists ensue in a climactic brawl starved for snappier choreography and editing.

It’s not the derivative scares and rudimentary effects that keep this low-budget effort percolating but the improvisational energy of Mr. Santos and Mr. Villarreal, whose ease, chemistry and humor never flag.

This is pap, plain and simple: scattered raunch-lite devoid of emotional resonance. At best, it sells itself on the spectacle of a TV show’s cast reunion — and even then it disappoints.

A modest effort only fitfully attaining its aims.

Already the franchise displays a sputtering exhaustion.

The Offering, a muddled horror film, falls over itself incorporating as many genre elements as possible. The result is the cinematic equivalent of combining every paint color on a canvas: a murky mess.

You won’t find much offensive in Kevin James’s slick, innocuous vehicle Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. You won’t find much prompting an emotional reaction in general, so familiar are the jokes and situations. If Mr. James’s character thinks of safety first, so does this movie, to its extreme detriment.

The familiar special effects are not the most disappointing element here. It’s the squandering of the talented Ms. Heche, who is given top billing but almost nothing to do.

An entwined triptych of sorts unified by invective, slurs and characters demanding that others shut up, Run It is a very patchy affair.

The enchantment is irresistible in Judd Ehrlich’s documentary Magic Camp, a spry and revealing examination of Tannen’s Magic Camp.

A movie of modest means that nevertheless offers a fairly cohesive story and at least one standout performance. It may underplay an idea laden with potential, but at least that notion is present.

This tale of a yuppie couple (played by Ayushmann Khurrana and Sonam Kapoor) flirts with intriguing notions of recessionary struggle, though strained, contrived humor bogs it down.

In her pursuit, Shivani pistol-whips perps, performs a flying tackle on a criminal astride a motorcycle, shoots an assassin at point-blank range and stabs an assailant through the hand. Her final confrontation with Walt is a sweaty aria of hand-to-hand martial arts combat.

It’s all high-end flash, but less romantic than wearying.

Anne Hathaway made a splash in Disney’s “The Princess Diaries,” and the rangy Ms. Kapoor (who descends from a Bollywood dynasty) shares some of her early incandescence, along with a Julia Roberts-like smile.

Mr. Payet, who is one of the film’s directors and screenwriters, is a comedy star in France, and this movie is facile with its comic rhythms and dramatic flow.

It’s all very solemn, convoluted and a bit bloody, but not engrossing, despite impressive cinematography by Jasmin Kuhn and Mr. dela Torre and the best efforts of a hard-working cast.

Shah Rukh Khan’s seasoned authority is a steady anchor amid the frantic contrivances.

The emotional dynamics in domestic violence, for the abuser and the abused, are often too disturbing and complex to be treated as superficially as The Living does.

The film may leave you hungry for deeper insight into some its most renowned purveyors.

Ms. Hammer’s gauzier sequences notwithstanding, the film’s most commanding image is the housekeeper’s description of the ruthless monasticism Bishop maintained and the compulsive writing she practiced in her studio. Amid excesses and entanglements, that concentration ensured her place in literary history.

Overabundant diffuse lighting and wide-angle perspectives only compound this horror movie’s deficiencies in plot and dialogue.

The movie may suffer from a surfeit of excesses, but it does have arresting, if overwrought, things to say about domestic abuse in India.

Mr. Chi, making his feature debut with Tentacle 8, lavishes attention on his characters at the expense of the through line binding them.

For all the movie’s flashy pyrotechnics and pulverizing techno-ish musical numbers, gleaning an emotional pulse can be challenging.

Only You is served very well by Ms. Tang (a star of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”). Whether playing elated, sorrowful, coy or petulant, she consistently provides the spark the movie could use more of.

As directed by Henry Barrial, there is solid ensemble acting, particularly by Mr. Bonilla, who dependably anchors a movie that is almost too busy.

[A] brutally powerful documentary.

The ideas in this densely packed but enlightening film can be challenging, but must be heard.

Offers mild youthful rebellion and even milder youthful ardor.

The biggest offender is the director, Imtiaz Ali, who, also again collaborating with Mr. Kapoor, actually celebrates two love affairs: Ved and Tara’s, and (given Ved’s universal adulation) Mr. Ali’s with his own self-aggrandizing vision of his calling.

Relationships unfold with a bright, glossy and antiseptic sentimentality in Park Hyun-gene’s Like for Likes, which brings abundant social media usage to shopworn rom-com contrivances.

Ventura Pons’s stagy drama Virus of Fear tries to walk a thin line about its volatile subject — child sexual abuse — as it weighs a man’s possible innocence against a mob’s rage. But its attempts at ambiguity work against it.

Quiet, graceful, stately and infused with slow tension, Dana Rotberg’s White Lies unfolds with inexorable weight.

One notion underlying Shalini Kantayya’s winning documentary, Catching the Sun, is that solar power is not only a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels but can also effectively curtail unemployment.

There are heroic adults here.... There is also deft editing, artful camerawork and effective music in abundance.

The director, Joey Kuhn, making his feature debut from his own script, has created fairly credible and sympathetic characters, despite the 1-percenter milieu.

The Japanese have a term for a certain type of character in manga (comic books) and anime: bishonen — pubescent in appearance, devoid of facial hair, sensitive, unthreatening. That would be Mr. Espinosa.

In marriage and parenthood, one size doesn’t fit all. Marcia’s words at the wedding about surmounting differences speak volumes about love’s adaptability.

Zhou Shen and Liu Lu’s bleak farce Mr. Donkey, adapted from their play, has a sentimental streak, and, as farce can, a tendency to overheat. But beneath its mild staginess and intermittent mania lies a cynical, piercing parable about China’s past and perhaps its present.

Iron Moon has a slowly mounting, but lingering, impact.

Mr. Lal, making his feature directorial debut, clearly understands the camera and special effects. But working from a script by Anvita Dutt that reaches too far in too many directions, he is undone by his own ambition.

Yoshinari Nishikori’s period action film Tatara Samurai does not skimp with its swordplay, but its narrative arc takes you to a resolution uncommon for its genre.

What “Can’t Stop” mostly leaves you with is a sense of Mr. Combs’s success.

The film offers an enlightening glimpse into how the gay experience informed Mr. Maupin’s art.

The Icelandic director Oskar Thor Axelsson is clearly fluent in horror conventions. But he has commendable restraint, and his latest film, I Remember You, transcends genre pyrotechnics even as it incorporates elements of Nordic noir.