Ben Kenigsberg

If the 2019 Black Christmas is not nearly as chilling as the original, it is genuinely barbed as gender satire, and it cleverly pre-empts obvious outrage.

There’s little in “Underrated” that comes across as spontaneous. That may be because Nicks didn’t discover much that feels fresh. Or it may be that the project, like Curry today, doesn’t have anything to prove.

The scenery, nicely shot by Giles Nuttgens and covering a wide swath of the country — Amritsar, New Delhi, Jaipur and Goa — is always great, and Patel and Apte’s chemistry approaches scalding levels as their characters grow closer.

What’s missing from the movie, for all its technical skill, is simply inspiration — that extra touch of wit or imagination that might elevate it from a pleasant diversion to a rare sighting.

The droll, shape-shifting Two Shots Fired, the newest movie from the Argentine filmmaker Martín Rejtman (the subject of a current retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center), accomplishes the strange feat of constantly thwarting expectations without ever varying its tone or moving the needle of excitement.

The film is transparently derivative, but it has enough visual panache and a feel for the rhythms of a laid-back summer evening that it’s tough to dislike.

If Mr. D’Ambrose doesn’t quite earn his pretensions, it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker thinking so far outside the box.

The movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.

Old Henry makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.

Throughout, first-time director Teona Strugar Mitevska (the sibling of the lead actress) demonstrates a keen eye for off-center compositions, a striking visual depiction of a world out of balance.

In Land and Shade, the setting holds more interest than the plot: a fable-like, elemental story that sketches its characters too faintly to develop much power.

The film has a powerful sense of place, with details that feel authentic and, in some cases, lived through. Yet Rapman’s civic-minded lyrics (“There really ain’t no winners when you’re playing with them guns”) have a habit of reducing the drama to tidy morals.

Documentaries about innovative figures don’t always offer correspondingly innovative filmmaking. But even coloring within the lines of conventional biographical storytelling, Jim Allison: Breakthrough provides an accessible introduction to James P. Allison.

There’s a morbid fascination inherent to documentaries like A Gray State, which is engrossing for the reasons it’s also unsatisfying: As Adam Shambour, a friend of Mr. Crowley’s, says, it’s a mystery that answers all the major questions except “Why?”

It is gorgeous and suspenseful, and it rushes heedlessly into dangerous terrain.

Those Who Remained leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word “Jewish” is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.

Close observation can illuminate contradictions, and Lombroso, semi-edifyingly, catches his subjects in moments of opportunism or hypocrisy, even if those aren’t much of a trade for spending 90 minutes in this company.

Is Banana Split an empty indulgence or a comfortingly familiar confection? Probably both.

To be fair, Craig is still the best Bond since Connery, and a Man Who Knew Too Much–style set piece at a Vienna opera house momentarily offers the fleetness and wit the rest of the film lacks.

While the film ends at a logical stopping point, it feels incomplete. It probably could have used a few more years of filming.

Haguel builds this brief but densely structured film in an interestingly modular, rhythmic way, thanks to a percussive score by Zoe Polanski and occasional, abrupt cuts to black following key scenes.

As family entertainment, it’s fine.

While My Rembrandt poses heady questions about the difference between acquisitiveness and appreciation, it mostly plays like a straight art-world documentary that itself would have benefited from a more vertiginous, obsessive approach.

Escape From Kabul is a short-term recap. A more robust movie, following these witnesses over several years, is still waiting to be made.

For better or worse, Grou has a knack for staging brutality, and for having his movie rock out to a Joy Division track or two.

The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.

A study in denial, American Anarchist may be illuminating for being unilluminating.

Way too much of LA Originals has that overly chummy vibe, but the shambling, yearbook quality of the film is also its reason for being.

Its main virtues are a wild story and a stealth sense of outrage. It argues that these so-called assassins became political pawns and had to face the courts without witnesses who might have aided their defense.

At its most enjoyable, Valerio Ruiz’s rambling profile cedes the floor to Ms. Wertmüller, who recalls her creative partnership with her husband, the production designer Enrico Job, and her cultural importance in representing Italy’s south onscreen.

Bloodshot runs out of meta tricks before it is over, and David S.F. Wilson, who borrows his visual vocabulary from Tony Scott and Michael Bay, delivers action sequences with such choppy continuity that viewers may be as confused as Ray. He deserves bonus points, however, for embracing silliness.

What Scoop offers is the modest pleasure — to which any journalist is susceptible — of rooting for a reporting team to get a story.

However nutty its geopolitics, Hunter Killer does its job as popcorn thriller with brisk efficiency.

Viper Club falters with mawkish flashbacks of the mother and son, and with its ham-fisted, repeated emphasis on the smarm of government officials. But it is mostly gripping.

An energetic, ingratiating dramatization of the GameStop stock craze of 2021.

The lack of labeling only raises questions, slightly marring what otherwise plays like a thorough, outraged exposé.

The idea that a charlatan might offer more solace than a real priest is a trite concept, but it’s one that Corpus Christi portrays with conviction. The movie rests on the shoulders of Bielenia — or rather, in his eyes, which photograph as a chilling gray.

The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.

It’s made watchable by an appealing cast.

Mr. Pailoor (who wrote the screenplay with Anu Pradhan) shows a taste for blunt metaphor... It’s hard to find fault with the performances, though, particularly Mr. Seth’s.

As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones.

Driven by mostly Spanish-language folk music, the movie provides a potent if piecemeal counterbalance to the sensationalism of “Breaking Bad.”

Olive weaves these stories together with fluidity and purpose, but the ideas of Always in Season sometimes crowd one another out.

The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.

The individual stories are powerful, as are the visual comparisons between present-day and historical locations. A few animated sequences effectively evoke the evanescence of memory.

Ms. Wang delves further into Dylan’s past. If by the end she probably still puts too much trust in Dylan’s aphorisms, give her credit for recognizing the shortcomings of her footage and correcting course.

There is much to admire in the fluidity of Girard’s storytelling, in the music (Ray Chen did the violin solos) and in the complicated questions raised about social obligations. Still, the movie never quite justifies the contrivance of its puzzle-box construction.

While Mr. Burns hasn’t fully digested his influences, he has learned from them. Our House distinguishes itself with its purposeful pacing — the first real jump scare arrives more than a third of the way through — its use of sound and crosscutting, and its wit with household objects, from a turntable to a mechanical calendar.

The lessons — for stutterers and non-stutterers — still hold.

Often has the feel of a film-school exercise in which the object is to wring maximum suspense from rudimentary tools.

Powerful material doesn’t automatically yield a timeless or artistic documentary, and for better or worse, Trapped is an op-ed aimed squarely at the present moment in an enduring national conversation.

Happy Face dares to be distinctive, and that’s something, even if the behavior — particularly Stan’s — isn’t always convincing.

The Operative, directed by Yuval Adler, doesn’t offer much distinctive, but it does deliver a few suspenseful sequences, some interesting nuts-and-bolts details of espionage work and a good lead performance en route to an unsatisfying ending.

A derivative but efficient chiller that cribs from “Solaris,” “The Shining” and “The Amityville Horror” yet also shows glimmers of imagination.

Penn scores a coup by getting an on-camera interview with Zelensky on the first day of Russia’s invasion, and he films him on two additional occasions, in a video interview and in person on a later visit.

Despite an oddball taste for wide-angle lenses, the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. Still, neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario.

Like Romeo + Juliet (1996), Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby emerges as a half-reverent, half-travestying adaptation that’s campy but not a betrayal, offering a lively take on a familiar work while sacrificing such niceties as structure, character, and nuance.

As in "Contraband," Kormákur offers a hint of a political statement, in this case about the inherent potential for corruption whenever competing government agencies are operating in international territory. But it doesn’t quite make it. On almost every level, 2 Guns is content to be as flavorless and forgettable as its title.

Knotty and tense for most of its running time, Omar becomes muddled in its closing minutes, conflating personal and political treachery.

Abandoning its more original elements, the movie opts for a banal carpe diem conceit that turns Mitty into a globetrotting bystander.

It’s not so much a mangled movie as it is an unfulfilled, forgettable one: unnecessary for anyone who’s seen the play, yet sufficiently watered-down that newcomers won’t be able to tell what all the fuss was about.

Giving the kind of mannered performance that seems predicated on careful mimicry of 60 Minutes, Cumberbatch impresses without ever coming across as more than an abstraction.

While it’s heartening in one sense to see this youthful, offbeat take on two men’s determination to stay eternally fresh, there’s something about the ease with which the characters reorder their lives that makes Land Ho! seem both a little slight and a little precious.

The end of Le Week-End reveals it to be the thoroughly ordinary melodrama a description suggests — a portrait of former ’60s fire-starters who are perfectly happy to settle for embers.

Firth and Stone are terrific, but they’re cast as screwball leads. Given only intermittent opportunities for levity, the two end up serving as mouthpieces for Allen’s dubious self-justifications.

The film largely lacks the urgency its subject demands. It’s an extended news segment in the form of a feature film.

Like adolescence itself, Teenage is educational, scattered, and over much too quickly.

Part of the point here is to stake a claim on a genre that’s traditionally been a boys’ club, and in that regard, The Heat delivers: In a bonding moment, this odd couple goes on a bender as epic as anything in "The Hangover." Their enthusiasm with weapons should alarm viewers across all demographics and species.

Alternating scenes of the psycho-as-family-man with an increasingly grisly and desperate series of hits, it makes for a surprisingly monotonous sit for a movie that also features a killer named Mr. Freezy.

Seyfried expertly balances the girl-next-door star power that made the real Lovelace an unlikely casting choice with a more subtle strain of fear; Sarsgaard is as terrifying and hiss-worthy as he’s been since "Boys Don’t Cry."

In short, Seven Veils offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form.

The Price of Free is interested in spreading the word about Satyarthi’s work, both in India and globally, and in getting consumers to approach what they buy with a critical eye, so as not to support child labor. That’s an important message, and it’s not essential to watch the movie to receive it.

The King’s Choice maintains a sense of intrigue when it sticks to the king’s dealings with the government, but the movie drags when it moves outside of back rooms and deviates from setting up the Bräuer-Haakon showdown.

In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.

Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.

As ever, the paradox of Mr. Verhoeven’s style is that it seems to wallow in tastelessness and transgression even as he remains one of the most classical movie craftsmen.

The movie itself, directed by Herb Stratford, is so dull and unimaginative in its presentation — talking heads, an overused score that might as well have been downloaded from a free database — that it makes for an unfortunate match of subject matter and form.

Arguments over whether the documentary’s existence honors Mr. Vishner’s wishes and spirit — and whether continuing to film was appropriate — lead in circles.

The movie finally punts on grappling with its ambiguities. The finale feels functional rather than haunting.

Mr. Gutierrez keeps the viewer in the same state of confusion as Elizabeth, but each surprise, paradoxically, makes the movie less and less surprising as a whole.

The ambience doesn’t register with full force, or do the heavy lifting entrusted to it. Monsoon finally tips over the line that separates minimalism from a not-fully-developed movie.

Melding “Saw” with “The Hunger Games,” Triggered wins no points for originality or distinctiveness, not least of its cookie-cutter characters. But its relentlessness, and the gusto with which it embraces its mandate to make a mess, is tough to resist.

At the Devil’s Door is reasonably absorbing but never scary or satirically sharp (despite references to mortgages and foreclosures). It mostly settles for inducing sensation.

A hodgepodge of boosterish arguments for blockchain technology, Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain, directed by Alex Winter (Bill of “Bill & Ted” fame), is not always a model of clarity, but it does a decent job of explaining the basic concept.

Sherlock Gnomes offers more variety than its predecessor. Although still laced with glib pop culture references (wow, a skinny latte) and scored with Elton John tunes in a way that plays like a concession to adults, it has occasional fun ideas, such as rendering the inner workings of Holmes’s mind in hand-drawn black and white.

Ironically for a movie about the ratings value of shock, Évocateur suffers from its own lack of red meat.

Loud and annoying? Occasionally. Funny? Sometimes. Likely to be noticed by filmgoers six months from now? Not really.

Whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.

A good example of how a charismatic figure doesn’t automatically generate a deep or compelling documentary.

It’s hard to escape the sense that Plastic is itself a cheap knockoff, but the point is not to look too closely.

While the ethical issues of the property situation add complexity, the film’s efforts to balance the arguments on both sides aren’t convincing.

Although the first hour of Bitter Melon is a spiky and absorbing story of repressed feelings, the movie grinds to a halt in its final third as the characters talk things out, which might be helpful in life but in drama tends to belabor the obvious, as well as offer an easy exit.

When our hero finally does get his moment in the sun--c'mon, would someone have bought the movie if he didn't?--My Date With Drew offers the surreal spectacle of pursuer and pursued pleasantly gabbing, obliviously immersed in a mutual PR stunt.

This creature feature from the director Fritz Böhm is functional but lacks flavor, an imaginative spark that might distinguish it from any number of other I-was-a-teenage-monster movies.

Ferdinand, the new computer-animated adaptation from Carlos Saldanha (the “Ice Age” movies), speaks to its own time in a different way, dutifully adhering to the template for contemporary children’s films while avoiding much personality or distinction

Exist is prone to posturing. Demonstrating a noble if wishy-washy faith in activism's power to save the world, the film amounts to a brief, earnest howl against apathy--easily dismissible for those unsympathetic to its views and basically useless for everyone else.

Step Up All In, directed by the dancer and choreographer Trish Sie, signals a slight retreat from the bonkers, protest-themed “Step Up Revolution."

The more Chapman reveals, the less seems to be going on, and the more its quirkier developments... play like independent-film clichés.

Its Saul Bass-y credits suggest an Almodóvarian flamboyance, but this impotent '70s-set comedy mostly skimps on discoteca stylishness.

The film ultimately lands uneasily on the line between inside and insular, recalling an old saw about universities: The fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small.

In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.

Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.

It finds a few moments of sweep and suspense in between grand speeches and reprises of a swollen score.

It’s hard not to root for this couple — and, more to the point, these actors — to get together again.

The progressive wrinkles...are both the fascination and the frustration of Strangerland, which strains credulity with its secrets and revelations to facilitate its surprises.

Dagg’s thriller is slow to get going and hampered by an inexpressive leading man.

Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.

Lightness of touch is missing from the film, which features animated graphics and an ominous score.

It’s inspired enough to draw attention to ways that it doesn’t realize its potential.

It is easier to like Feast of the Epiphany as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.

The Son of Bigfoot, an English-language production from Belgium, more or less does what it sets out to do, which is to offer enough visual activity and bromides to keep the very young interested. To all others: There is no Bigfoot; there’s nothing to see here.

The main drawback of Inner Demons, no matter how skillful the presentation may be here, is the overriding sense that this has all been done before.

The shot-calling undermines the movie’s pro-psychedelics argument, because there is no way to control for the psychosomatic effects of starring in a documentary. Nor does Dosed do much to counter or even address objections to mushrooms or iboga as treatments, although it does include firm warnings about the need for supervision.

If evacuating cinema means engaging with the medium’s properties in only the silliest ways — mismatching subtitles with images and voices with speakers — Price certainly does that.

We don’t need to hear about Herbert’s party years after his first marriage faltered. But he still had a cool idea, and his explanations of printing technology and color chemistry are almost enough to carry the film.

Even the sitcom stylings might not matter if the movie were funny, but in spite of the potential for Guffman-esque comedy, The English Teacher boasts few surprises—except perhaps its message, which seems to be that selling out isn’t so bad. Chalk it up to a case of “write what you know.”

While the leads are credible, the filmmaking (including a hacky score) adds a sheen of macho familiarity to a narrative that was eerily matter-of-fact in doc form.

The film, accompanied by a percussive score from Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer (both wrote the music for “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which Mr. Zeitlin directed), has a wandering attention span and grows monotonous even at barely more than one hour.

Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark’s uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn’t always succeed in getting inside the character’s head.

Denis Côté’s Boris Without Beatrice appears to have something to say about the hubris of the modern business tycoon, but it never coalesces into more than a self-amused goof.

While The Naked Room may raise awareness, it often feels voyeuristic in less productive ways.

Half of a Yellow Sun, adapted from the 2006 novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, emerges on screen as a well-acted, finely wrought epic that nevertheless struggles to balance the requirements of melodrama with its drive to capture a historical moment.

Tigerland falls into a common trap of advocacy documentaries, which is to inform on an urgent issue — preserving a species — without a particularly urgent cinematic narrative to match it.

A road movie of sorts, it steers clear of melodrama or sentimentality, but it also never risks hitting anything.

The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.

The storytelling economy (small cast, one main location) is welcome, but none of the four characters is the sharpest tool in the shed, and whatever insights Hodierne intends on the cutthroat world of crypto remain elusive.

If it weren’t for the costumes, the basic plot could be mistaken for a 19th-century version of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" or "Double Indemnity."

The film is well-paced but often strains credulity.

Mr. Auteuil’s passion project is sincere but not successful, honorable but not alive.

The setup promises more intrigue than the film ultimately delivers.

It’s hard to think of another movie in which Jesus’ followers are so clearly shown as Jews themselves. There’s a quietly powerful post-Crucifixion scene in which the disciples say Kaddish for their fallen leader.

Jordan makes a sturdy enough action hero, but the character as portrayed doesn’t give him any contours to play.

Shot Caller effectively conveys the vise grip of Jacob’s options, but that doesn’t make it less ludicrous from scene to scene.

Interjections from perennial second bananas Kathryn Hahn (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and Kal Penn (winning even when not conjuring vivified bags of pot) generate the only sparks.

Preposterous as it is, The Calling remains stubbornly suspenseful until near the end.

The finale enlivens an otherwise staid biopic, but whether the film has earned a moment of uplift is unclear.

Like many biographical documentaries, it resembles a lengthy highlight reel of crucial events from its subject’s life, without much in the way of style or perspective.

By the Time It Gets Dark has clearly been thought through, but it’s so cryptic that it cries out for, if not perfect explanations, perhaps footnotes. It’s so conceptual that it offers little for those not in sync.

A mockumentary that exhausts its best joke with its premise.

It’s possible to admire the four directors’ unflinching depiction of the dying process, but the film is mostly unilluminating and grim — not least because almost all of the deaths discussed are untimely.

By the time it is over, Disco has crossed the line that separates being productively ambiguous from being simply cryptic.

To the extent the film has appeal, it is of the tabloid variety.

While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor, the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.

Visually, The Critic is polished enough, despite some splashes of apparent digital lacquer. But Marber hasn’t supplied an incontrovertible motive to bind Nina to Jimmy. And there is something arguably troubling about the way McKellen’s character has been conceived.

Time hasn’t made it more than a cryptic curiosity. Dialogue is sparse, and it takes some time for the threesome’s dynamic to come into focus, to the extent that it ever does.

This Is Not Berlin so wants to evoke a time and a place that the backdrop engulfs the characters like a supernova.

On the Way to School never wavers in its bland uplift.

While the interviewees speak of Sherpa with sincerity and affection, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” never locates a satisfying big-picture idea or formal approach that would make it more than a straightforward tribute.

Is this an allegory against blind deference to fascism? It might be, but the root-for-the-Aryan-jock dramatics seem mildly fascist themselves.

As the plot clogs up with foreseeable reversals, wisecrack duties go to Mr. McShane, whose oracular character keeps wrongly predicting his own death. Like Hercules, the movie is plagued by a split identity: It’s half-slog, half-Mel Brooks.

The appealing Mr. Corden manages the not insignificant task of maintaining interest in a story whose climax has already been passed around on YouTube.

It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.

This fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.

There is something to be said for a thriller that rips along with no regard for anything other than its own pace, coasting on Mr. Brosnan’s blunter-than-Bond suavity and Ms. Kurylenko’s beauty.

Lacking a formal script, the actors struggle with a plot so elemental that it might have played more persuasively as a silent-screen melodrama.

This is a huge subject, and the film, which favors anecdotes over a macro treatment, doesn’t have much structure to speak of. It consists of one brief profile after another — a strategy that is efficient for delivering information, but that leaves Myth of a Colorblind France dry and disarrayed as filmmaking.

Like a boxer who doesn’t know when to quit, Bayou Caviar goes on a bit long, then rallies — in this case with an agreeably cynical closing image.

No doubt subtleties have been lost in translation, but the film is best viewed as an overripe, noir-tinged tragedy.

The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.

The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all distractions from a story that doesn’t make much sense.

Seen with or without foreknowledge of its methods, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is only fitfully engaging — suspect as documentary, insubstantial as fiction.

While the results are more creepy than charming — too childish for adults, though not necessarily too dark for children — it is hard to fault Mr. Goodwill for trying.

Somewhat gratingly, King Otto treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head.

To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.

[An] endearing muddle, which flails in search of an identity.

A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.

Magazine Dreams bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity.

Farewell to Hollywood is moving yet queasily unsettling, even if Ms. Nicholson’s enthusiasm mitigates the veneer of exploitation. Watching it feels like judging a last will and testament. The movie is an intimate dialogue from which viewers may prefer to recuse themselves.

It is possible to admire Mr. Kalman and Ms. Horn’s ambition and at the same time have no idea what they were trying to achieve.

While "Room 237" sought evidence for its most outlandish conceits, The Nightmare declines to delve. As the testimonies grow repetitive, the strategy suggests willful ignorance.

A grim social-realist drama from New Zealand that labors to twist its narrative into a redemptive arc, The Justice of Bunny King has an unsteady tone to match its ungainly title.

Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.

Johnny English Strikes Again has a few more laughs and far fewer cringes (and stereotypes) than the two films that preceded it. Plus it knows where to steal from. Watching it is like having a good time by proxy.

You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don’t sound rehearsed.

Formally lively, The Nowhere Inn is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point.

A satire of overamped gamer culture that is itself too overamped to be much fun, Guns Akimbo takes a while before it stops showing off its virtuosity — shots that turn cartwheels, frantic cutting, an onslaught of graphics — and finds a groove.

Just because Nobody Speak has a timely message doesn’t make it an ideal messenger.

Early screen depictions of World War I, like “The Big Parade” and “All Quiet on the Western Front,” show more passion and visual invention. A rattling sound design and the cinematographer Laurie Rose’s excellent use of low light aren’t enough to make the experience immediate.

Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.

It’s less a social history than a commercial for alternative healing.

Cold Case Hammarskjold is finally poised unsatisfyingly between an explosive exposé and a self-conscious put-on. Even a full acceptance of its assertions doesn’t do much to illuminate Hammarskjold’s death.

It’s not entirely clear what this faithful, slightly creaky new rendering, adapted and directed by the actor Daniel Auteuil, has to offer.

How The Last Shaman came to be isn’t discussed in the film, but this documentary might be less disquieting if it had been.

In 2015, Bel Powley stole Sundance with her performance in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Carrie Pilby poses a tougher test. Might she single-handedly redeem 90 minutes of contrived nonsense?

The movie’s snap and affection put other recent zombie-related entertainments to shame, and the in-jokes...are a Dante signature. But the freedom of the director’s best work is missing.

If Mr. Fields’s contributions to pop music deserve more fame, the movie plays like an overcorrection, a spirited but repetitive testament to one man’s excellent taste.

Paradise is a strikingly shot Holocaust drama that ultimately seems confused about whose story it’s telling or to what end.

The director, Oren Jacoby, who made the Oscar-nominated short “Sister Rose’s Passion” and the feature “Constantine’s Sword,” doesn’t give My Italian Secret much structural or chronological organization. The anecdotal presentation sometimes seems more suited for museum browsing than for viewing in a theater.

Most egregiously, Gabrielle Union plays a TV news reporter determined to portray the protest as a hostage situation. At the film’s nadir, Stuart, on the phone with her during a broadcast, stops making his case and begins quoting from “The Grapes of Wrath.”

As an absurdist suspense film, Jackpot mostly hits its marks. As a comedy, it’s less successful, stronger on sight gags than on the detective’s sarcasm.

The story of dependence and excess is sadly familiar — and as with most of its material, I Am Chris Farley doesn’t find a fresh way to tell it.

The movie is consistently tougher to resist than it might seem.

Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars

Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.

This low-key drama so insistently resists epiphanies that it verges on bland.

The director, Klaus Haro, films the proceedings involvingly enough.... But the movie is almost relentlessly predictable and formulaic — a story of one man’s refusal to conform that dutifully hits all its marks.

Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.

Absent fathers and mothers, building bridges with children — Moscow Never Sleeps could easily have unfolded in a much darker register. That it doesn’t is both refreshing and deflating.

[Roberto Sneider's] movie is erratic, jumpy (thanks to a needlessly affected editing style) and not entirely in control of its message.

It offers tonal whiplash for viewers, with several potentially great ideas that don’t settle into a coherent whole.

It reduces the randomness of real-life bloodshed to the slick thrills of a popcorn movie. And after the mosque attacks in Christchurch, which led the film’s distributor in New Zealand to suspend the movie’s release there, its savagery is especially difficult to take.

No one could accuse these adventures of being conventional.

Carlitos’s sole reason for living is moving from one transgression to the next. The same might be said of the movie, which superficially probes his amorality while exploiting it for slick thrills.

Every minute Erskine isn’t on screen is a minute wasted.

What We Started appears to have been conceived with contradictory audiences in mind. On one hand, it tries to present an accessible history of electronic music, starting with its outgrowth from disco, house and techno and continuing through its commercialization and fusion with pop. On the other hand, a subcultural cliquishness creeps into the movie.

The nuances of Ali’s relationship with Louisville — where Ali faced discrimination as a Black American and controversy for his refusal to be drafted — tend to get lost in the celebration of civic pride.

The director, Tom Harper, seems less interested in allegory than in monotonous, conventional goosing, the kind that involves flickering lights and a creaky rocking chair.

Some wonderful actors add class to the material, which struggles to find a consistent register of cartoonishness.

Even seasoned defenders of cryptic formalism may find it amorphous. The characters are never named, the camera work is static, and little that’s conceptually interesting materializes.

This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.

By conveniently exempting its protagonists from ideology or culpability, Generation War feels less like a reckoning than a dodge: Yes, your grandparents may have been Nazis—but they could have been these nice people, too.

This is a puff piece of a documentary, eager to spread a message and go down easy.

Boone is slightly monotonous, and familiarity may be one cause.

The diffuse filmmaking style muffles the story’s power.

Like the project itself, Spaceship Earth winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.

As if to personify the movie’s whiplash-inducing split between gloss and grit, the singer Erykah Badu appears as a prostitute — and also contributes a duet with Nas, one of the executive producers, to the soundtrack.

As the suspense slackens and blood starts spilling nearly to the point of self-parody, it almost seems designed as a test of mettle — for both the filmmakers and the audience.

Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.

The new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects.

Raiff deserves credit for an unexpectedly elliptical coda, but much of the chatter between the leads has the emo-tedium of dorm room blather.

The movie’s occasional stabs at political commentary never quite pay off. Nor can the writer-directors, brothers Yoav and Doron Paz, fully sustain the film’s novelty into the second half, when the script reverts to timeless, tired monster-movie tropes.

The franchise has proved to be a reliable if variably elegant “boo” machine; the same applies here. Specters and hallucinations appear without consistent narrative logic. Characters veer off separately when teamwork might reduce brushes with demons or death.

This movie’s earnest infectiousness is tough to deny.

Employing bursts of Bach and English-language narration, this lulling, informative documentary never fully grapples with its topic’s complexity.

For a movie trying to push back at popular perceptions of history, ¡Las Sandinistas! could stand to be more lucid.

The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.

The various excuses made for The Enquirer’s ethics undermine Landsman’s efforts to portray the paper as splashy, all-American fun.

It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character.

Mr. Palmason’s showy technique, magnetic on its own, ultimately seems like a way of adding mystery to a story that, like Emil, is content with having no place to go.

Although produced independently, this documentary, directed by Kirk Simon, plays as if the Pulitzers were presenting an award to themselves.

Those looking to learn the basic outlines of the life of the singer Chavela Vargas could do worse than watch Chavela, but this plodding documentary from Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi rarely transcends simple biography

For the Plasma is a film with no shortage of ambition, taste (Maine looks great in 16-millimeter) or ideas. It’s a shame those ideas are so incoherent.

While there are amazing anecdotes here, there is little to catch the eye or ear.

As the astronauts contend with airlocks, busted equipment and escape pods, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that this isn’t territory where more inventive screenwriters...and stronger visual stylists have gone before.

Those looking for a refresher course on the workings of the food chain should be in heaven. All others may yearn for a sushi break.

The competing agendas surrounding the case would prevent anyone from making a cohesive Hawkins documentary, and Storm Over Brooklyn never settles on a satisfying point of view.

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party feels sincere but not accomplished, empathetic but not deep.

If the movie’s points can be well taken, its rhetorical strategies are often facile.

First-time writer-director Richard Ledes's mystical tone and pervasive swipes from David Lynch tend to suffocate his satire, and stunt casting doesn't help.

The movie is obviously heartfelt, but the directors, Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein, never turn this motley crew into compelling characters.

Instant death lurks around every corner, and the movie doesn’t shy from killing off major characters. But it does play like an odd match of form and content: a story of single-minded humanitarianism framed as a relentless action spectacular.

The Great Museum, in comparison, feels like a cursory guided tour.

A perfectly serviceable entry in the young-adult dystopian sweepstakes.

The movie is an object lesson in how a remarkable subject can be turned into a less remarkable film.

In the case of The China Hustle, a documentary may simply be the wrong delivery mechanism for a byzantine exposé that cries out for detailed news reporting.

As the full picture comes into focus, the narrative can tend toward the trite. The chief pleasure of the movie is the 35-millimeter cinematography of Jean Louis Vialard.

Imperiously wringing his hands at both sides of the conflict, Hare never brings his observations together in a satisfying conclusion (not that any was likely, in just 80 minutes).

This documentary goes heavy on the schmaltz, in all senses.

However great Gund’s influence on other collectors and philanthropists has been, and however progressive and righteous her advocacy for racial justice, Aggie doesn’t match her originality with an accordingly innovative approach.

Mehta’s elaborate long takes contribute to the general sense of tumult, but the film never fully shakes the sense of stating the obvious.

Mr. Collins doesn’t shed light on what makes his subject tick, and the arty shards never cohere.

The movie pulls the rug out from under the audience several times, but in the end there is not much underneath.

Private never reconciles its conflicting impulses, and consequently, the human impact of the struggle--so powerfully explored in "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride" --never acquires the emotional weight it should. The semi-absurdist closer amounts to little more than a knee-jerk declaration of hopelessness.

Adults will be restless as stabled bucks, but even children may need unusually high Ritalin doses to slog through the visual and dramatic indifference on display.

The director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Kung Fu Panda 3”), keeps the pace fast and the exposition flowing; the movie is almost comfortingly watchable. In her first live-action feature, she shows a flair for natural light and doesn’t lean too heavily on effects.

Cast with winning actors (particularly Molly Blixt Egelind as Dyrholm’s daughter) who seem determined not to distract viewers from the coastal backdrops, Love Is All You Need proceeds in all the expected directions short of actually including The Beatles.

It seems less a full-fledged movie than a trailer for a book.

Showing Buttigieg at one public appearance after another, “Mayor Pete” more often plays like outtakes from the trail than an inside glimpse.

A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.

The Miracle of the Little Prince seems to have been made from the supposition that too many discussions of grammar or syntax might bore viewers. Even so, the platitudes are worse. A stronger movie might have dug more deeply into the languages it wishes to save.

The director, Levan Tsikurishvili, never reconciles the movie’s competing impulses. It’s part promotional video, part backstage doc and — in retrospect — part tragedy.

The movie has a nationalistic, didactic flavor and a tiresome devotion to spectacle. Even the climax is staged two ways.

Tidiness isn’t crucial, but watching Planetarium often feels like making contact with fragments of a great three-hour movie.

If The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%! helps people, its deficiencies as a movie don’t matter much.

Develops into a lively but simpleminded valentine to liberal tolerance.

The film is stronger with its moment-to-moment tension than with its cynical, shallow media satire.

An environmental documentary that consists of roughly one-third doom-and-gloom to two-thirds wide-eyed optimism, and that is more potent in individual scenes than it is as a sprawling whole.

Ms. McAlpine’s purple musings in voice-over (“the stars tell me to go on a journey in this desert”), and the decision not to identify subjects formally until the closing credits, give the film an unnecessary fuzziness.

Of Fathers and Sons is ultimately more impressive for its access than it is revealing of drives or beliefs. If Derki’s goal was to capture what causes ideology to spread, he and his camera look without seeing.

The movie, itself somewhat torn in sensibility, permits itself an easy out.

Some tragedies defy conventional representation. Unlike the play it documents, this documentary shows few signs of thinking outside the box.