A.O. Scott

The movie he (Josh Peck) is in, The Wackness, written and directed by Jonathan Levine, makes a good-faith effort to steer clear of such clichés, and succeeds and fails in roughly equal measure.

Probably the worst thing you can say about Hollywood Ending is that it has one: it turns out that Mr. Allen wasn't being ironic after all, he just made a comedy that feels ironclad.

The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant.

Mr. Perry, a New York University graduate whose second feature, "The Color Wheel," provoked passion and puzzlement at several festivals, has a natural eye, an offbeat sense of rhythm and no great interest in conventional storytelling. This is both intriguing and a bit tiresome, as Tyrone stumbles and mumbles his way through a series of inscrutable encounters.

Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.

Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. Moving On takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars.

Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.

The star does his patented shtick, supported by a handful of blue-chip supporting performers, as the story lurches through contrived, seminaughty comic set pieces toward a sentimental ending.

The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.

The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination... The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment.

The ghastliness of this damp and squishy comedy is the byproduct of a confused and earnest sentimentality, a willful devotion to wide-eyed wonder that confuses simplicity with simple-mindedness.

For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.

The film is intriguing, but ultimately opaque, a lovely, inert object that offers, in the name of movie love, an escape from so much that is vital and interesting about movies.

Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.

Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed.

Cindy and Dean remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings. Mr. Cianfrance's ingenious chronological gimmick, coupled with his anxious, clumsy plotting, leaves them without enough oxygen to burst into breathing, loving life.

Mr. Gomes has a tendency to revel in his own cleverness and to indulge in self-conscious cinematic jokes. He also has a penchant for obscurantism, a habit of confusing ambiguity with depth.

Mr. Weitz lines up a target placed at the explosive intersection of class, race, region and every other source of societal anguish, and then does not so much miss as aim in another direction — or several — letting fly a volley of darts that land as lightly as badminton birdies.

Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.

Comedy is in a weird place right now, and The Hustle deserves some credit for fulfilling its own modest, escapist ambitions. Unlike a lot of what we see these days, in movies and elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like a rip-off or a scam. It’s downright innocent.

Cousin Jules is in many ways a wonder to see and hear, but there is less to it than meets the eye.

A bad-taste comedy with a heart.

Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.

Some of this is affecting, some of it tedious, and the film's inconsistencies of tone are made more glaring by its peculiar look.

Shamelessly stirring, brandishing Mr. Gibson's anguished masculinity like a musket. It may be effective, but you leave the theater feeling used.

Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.

What wildness there is in this Madame Bovary belongs to Ms. Wasikowska, an actress who is frequently more interesting than her material.

There is a fine line between delving into the mysteries of life and engaging in mystification, and Mr. Gomes lands on the wrong side of it. There is something disingenuous in the way this movie disowns its own ambitions and scorns the possibility of clarity or coherence. Maybe its opacity is a matter of principle. Or maybe it’s just an excuse.