Ben Kenigsberg

Some deviations are inevitable, but the expository dialogue — and the convention of having Russian characters speak English, with British accents — are distractions. Even so, Politkovskaya’s bravery, and Peake’s commitment to honoring it, is enough.

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

Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.

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

It’s sweet, personal and tedious.

Whether it’s the scene-setting blast of Donovan (“Zodiac”), the low-height Steadicam work (“The Shining”), the red-suffused hallways (David Lynch) or “Night of the Living Dead” playing at a drive-in, the movie takes from the best.

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

This feel-good profile barely touches on the political and cultural ramifications of Emmanuel's work. Narration by Oprah increases the aura of a civics lesson.

Past Life is a page-turner that transforms into a clarion call: always compelling, but slightly stifled by noble intentions.

Brightly lit and anchored by Mr. Stevens’s infectious, live-wire performance, the film, directed by Bharat Nalluri (“Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”), nevertheless proceeds like a television holiday special, designed to distract children while winking at their parents.

While the sights and sounds here are unique, the movie seems frustratingly torn about whether to buy the futurism and mysticism it’s selling.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The contemporary in-jokes are kept to a minimum (O.K., Tigger says “let’s bounce”), and the movie as a whole feels pleasingly old-fashioned.

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.

At times, the film’s demand for teamwork precludes satisfying payoffs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s made watchable by an appealing cast.

The movie, directed by Karey Kirkpatrick, has just enough wit and visual invention to get by. (The “Bad Santa” team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra are among those credited with the story.) But for all the hints of darkness around its edges, the film is ultimately like its heroes: cuddly, cute and harmless.

As a late-summer caper movie, it hits the spot. The film offers the intriguing contrast of actors and a director (Daniel Schechter) taking a different approach to known material.

This absorbing account of the first recorded summit of the world’s highest mountain is a rare documentary for which re-enactments make complete sense.

The movie maintains a relentless grip all the same. Unlike the junior kingpins who bear witness to the film’s big blaze, audiences won’t watch in a passive state.

Davis strives to keep himself out of the film, favoring a harrowing yet compassionate you-are-there aesthetic that underscores the hardship of the migrant workers' struggles.

Reviewing Lemon feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.

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

How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.

Basic sympathy is where the usefulness of The Rachel Divide ends. Ms. Brownson hasn’t figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past. Anything Ms. Dolezal says has to be taken with such a large grain of salt that it’s not clear why it’s worth listening.

The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is the latest product off the crime documentary assembly line to raise the question of why it exists and what it ever hoped to achieve.

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.

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

Inspired by a 1997 "Voice" article on ex-members of the Satmar sect, Mendy is cast largely with Orthodox or former Orthodox actors, who are utterly credible with dialogue that necessarily teeters between the candid and the offensive.

Mostly, the documentary is a fond portrait of how one man nurtured his artistic temperament and risked being misunderstood — sometimes by his own family.

The first two-thirds are an extraordinary slow burn that provides ample time to admire Mr. Zvyagintsev’s talent with the wide frame. The movie is marred by an unsatisfying resolution, which has a coyness better suited to literature.

New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.

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.

Working with a shrewdly limited setting, Mouaness skillfully gives the film a near-real-time feel, conveying a sense that the war is approaching through small-scale details like radio broadcasts, Wissam’s observation that pigeons have flown unusually close to the school and the volume and frequency of aerial noise.

The story is invented, and not particularly exciting as such.

Mr. Klapisch lingers his camera lovingly over shots of grapes being harvested and stomped, all the while employing story mechanics and flashbacks indelicate enough to suggest the churn of a factory juicer.

Although independently funded, it was directed by a longtime collaborator of Mr. Kamen’s with the clear purpose of getting the word out about the product.

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.

This sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.

This proudly derivative genre exercise will not be to every taste (or stomach), but the director, Can Evrenol, shows a certain knack for tension and for framing viscera in wide screen, even if his cutting is sometimes too quick.

Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.

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

For the right age group, though, the film hits its marks: It’s wholesome, engaging and rife with impressive aquatic photography.

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.

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

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.

The landscape and painstakingly trained wolves are the true stars.

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.

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

In Uncle Frank, the writer-director Alan Ball (“True Blood”) combines several overworked genres — the coming-of-age picture, the road-trip odyssey, the angst-filled family-reunion movie — and mostly steers clear of the obvious pitfalls.

Come Play feels secondhand in its overarching conceit, its scare tactics and even its sentimentality.

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

A contemplative tone, a zigzagging narrative, superb widescreen black-and-white cinematography and an infusion of dry humor make it feel genuinely fresh.

The director, Richard Lanni, whose biography also cites work as a battlefield tour guide, manages a fair amount of wit, particularly with a postcard montage of Stubby’s first trip to Paris.

It’s a pleasure to spend 80 minutes in Mr. Berry’s company.

Lighthearted foray into the world of competitive eating.

Not quite a romance by numbers, Prime is nevertheless a movie we need like a hole in the head.

It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.

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.

As the geological, financial and personal barriers the cousins face grow increasingly absurd, the movie works up a satisfying sweat.

Fading Gigolo is not an entirely coherent film. It is, for the right and wrong reasons, a distinctive and memorable one.

Mostly The One and Only Ivan consists of fairly standard Disney lessons, about the hardships of losing parents (real and surrogate) and how difficult it is to embrace change.

Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.

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

It is just as awash in murky computer imagery, stupefying exposition and manipulative sentimentality as the average Hollywood tentpole.

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.

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

Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.

If this earnest and forgettable road movie represents a meaningful tribute to taking pictures, we ought to go back to cave drawing.

An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.

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

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

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

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

A case of excellent actors’ straining to elevate a contrived screenplay.

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.

The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view.

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.

Ironically, Leiner's two monuments to pothead delirium seem vastly more coherent than this hazy attempt to mine the zeitgeist, a film every bit as pointed as its nounless title.

The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.

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.

Three Peaks has a placid surface, but Zabeil uses abstraction — with edits that elide information or play tricks with spatial perception — to deepen a trite scenario.

With shadowy imagery that pushes the boundaries of visibility and a mumbly lead performance from Ben Foster that strains the limits of intelligibility, Galveston goes past film noir and lands at film murk.

For a film rooted in a personal story, Salvation Army feels awfully remote.

Leaning in to the style its patchwork of source material requires, Combat Obscura, is an eye-opening dispatch from a conflict mired in confusion.

The hand-wringing and revelations are familiar from many wedding movies, but May in the Summer gains added potency from its cross-cultural tensions and the drama the characters face in reconciling tradition with modern life.

The movie goes beyond alarmism with solutions that on the surface would seem to find common ground between environmental advocacy and unfettered capitalism.

This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.

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

Although the documentary makes clear how some accusations proved false or overblown, perhaps its biggest flaw is that it’s too eager to hand-wave any actual mistakes that Acorn made.

While Derham banks on the surprise factor of seeing taxidermists acting as stealth conservationists, the film leaves the impression that she could have scalpel-dug into deeper layers.

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.

When it’s showing its sensitive side, the film, scripted by David McKenna (“American History X”) and directed by Nick Sarkisov, unexpectedly shines.

Through interviews with Israeli politicians, and Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, West of the Jordan River gives voice to peace-seeking residents on both sides of the conflict.

While Mr. Laaksonen devoted his life (1920-91) to challenging conventions, the film is committed to honoring them.

To say that it unfolds like a play is both accurate and undersells how gorgeously it has been rendered for the screen.

It is a summer sequel worth its salt, a brisk exercise in suspense and high-gloss mayhem.

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

Even in this would-be subversive comedy. Success means getting the guy. Getting good grades (as Bianca does) is not enough, nor is writing the front-page article in the school paper.

While being cynical about a wise-octopus movie is probably unfair, being bored by it isn’t great, either.

A computer-animated feature of bright hues, hectic action and only occasional charm.

Paradoxically, the movie’s energy ebbs as the proceedings turn more antic.

Lucha Mexico often plays less like a character study than like a simple promotional effort, with repetitive platitudes.

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

Despite the film’s syrupy sweetness, it takes some risks ... and its relentless earnestness is tough to resist, even as the film sugarcoats intimations of real danger.

After establishing a jaunty tone with its candy-colored, Saul Bass–style opening credits, the film racks up a high strain-to-laugh ratio; there’s a sense Almodóvar can’t quite keep track of all his gags.

La Bare takes its title from the club it chronicles, a male strip joint in Dallas. The name proves unfortunately apt for a rambling, superficial documentary that straddles the line between exposé and infomercial.

Life’s a Breeze is ultimately about as cutting and memorable as its title.

As a documentary, One of Us is a small act of portraiture, but each portrait captures the pain of having a life upended.

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.

Werner Herzog's "Wheel of Time" was, in a sense, the Buddhist equivalent of this film, as well as a more illuminating look at the power and transience of ritual.

Each narrative fissure further thwarts meaning. The most you can ask from a movie as nullifying as this one is that it offer wit and visual panache, which it does.

Outside of the Jordan inner circle, this family-versus-business parable comes across as slight, familiar, and in dire need of seasoning.

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

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

This too-chummy documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse sensation of having 90 minutes of your life taken from you. By the time it’s over, you will be older, a progression that if anything the movie feels like it hastens.

The real good liar is whoever convinced Mirren and McKellen to class up such thin and arbitrary material.

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.

There’s so much great vintage footage of Ali... and he’s so charismatic, it would be hard to watch the movie and not take something from it.

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.

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

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.

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.

The most counterintuitive enviro-doc of the year, Pandora’s Promise makes the case that nuclear power may be the closest thing Earth has to a sustainable, realistic supply of energy.

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.

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.

It shows how the lingering disputes of war ripple through lives after guns have ostensibly been laid down.

The Paris Opera feels at once sprawling and insufficiently patient.

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.

Content to be yet another great-man biopic, the movie would rather sanitize than probe.

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.

An endorsement of milquetoast vigilantism that’s not nearly as knotty as it presumes to be, the French thriller “My Son” is so reserved in its storytelling and vague in its details that all it elicits is a yawn.

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.

The Skyjacker’s Tale could stand to lose its gimmicky re-enactments. Why supplement a story this crazy?

The sheer derangement of its plot and a bizarre casting gambit make it more interesting than standard straight-to-streaming schlock.

As a filmmaker, Mr. Baxter often tends toward needless force-feeding.

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.

A mockumentary that exhausts its best joke with its premise.

The issue of national atonement is a sprawling topic, one ill served by the film’s unfocused and amateurish presentation. At times, the movie seems less like a full-fledged documentary than like a pitch session.

The sensations that Strangers on the Earth means to evoke are not well suited to the cinematic medium, at least not to a documentary that barely runs more than an hour and a half.

Nothing concrete emerges from this haze of oblique editing and barely written scenes, acted by cast members who are not up to making the dialogue sound convincing or filling the voids left in place of their characters.

By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.

This vague, arty horror film from Jason Banker (“Toad Road”), who shares a story credit with his star, Amy Everson, is at once underwritten and overconceptualized.

The impression is less of calculated ineptitude than of seasoned professionals (director Tod Williams made The Door in the Floor) playing dumb, as a checklist of household items-frying pans, endlessly shutting doors, a pool cleaner with a mind of its own-test viewers' reflexes.

More of a poem or a city symphony than a documentary, it drifts freely, sometimes frustratingly between captured and fictionalized moments.

"Life Is Beautiful" may or may not have set a benchmark for tackiness in Holocaust cinema, but The Book Thief offers a hypothetical way in which the former might have been worse: At least it wasn’t narrated by Death.

My Art invests far too much in the conceit. (The re-creations look like unfunny “Airplane!” parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene-stealing Parker Posey.

Slick production values can’t disguise the lack of imagination.

The decision to focus on the series’s comic relief has resulted in the loosest and perhaps funniest film of the brand.

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

Richardson, previously wonderful with good material (“Columbus,” “Support the Girls”), here cements her genius status by finding depths beyond the contrived screenplay.

This is 1 hour and 44 minutes of Pikachu short-circuiting your brain.

The film plays as if it’s been smothered under a pile of rocks.

The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica’s work as a music teacher. But several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic.

The film carries a trace of the sweep of a great screen epic along with the straightforward, explanatory qualities of mass-audience TV, and is never less than absorbing.

If Approaching the Unknown isn’t entirely satisfying, Mr. Strong reaches high with his portrayal of the unraveling of a man who believes survival is a matter of engineering.

Occasionally, the nostalgic back-patting makes way for a few good jokes.

It’s contrary to the movie’s spirit to judge Bert, but the evasive treatment of his wartime experiences plays like a dodge: His past exists as a kind of amorphous trauma, reduced to shorthand in shamelessly placed flashbacks.

As a relationship movie, not just for the pair but those around them, Four Good Days is more complex than its outward trappings and preachier scenes — like an anguished Molly addressing a high school class — suggest.

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

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?

In essence, Marmalade pretends to be more dunderheaded than it is, then acts as if it’s been smart all along, in a shift that takes it from insulting to incoherent.

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

The North Korea scenes are often very funny, with many of the jokes coming at the expense of the fish-out-of-water visitors.

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.

Farming is a mystery movie in which the author investigates himself — and doesn’t fully share the answers.

Is Bullet Head good? In truth, it’s drab, derivative and more than slightly silly, but it’s tough to dislike like a movie that proceeds as if the 1990s cycle of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs never ended and that uses the prospect of gory canine violence in service of loud and persistent pro-dog cheerleading.

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.

Both the martial arts and the slightly dull narrative patchwork are too choppily edited to gain much of a foothold.

What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.

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.

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.

The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.

There is something admirably perverse about a movie that treats the killings of Hitler and Bigfoot as secondary to a character study of a crusty old man and his regrets, but that doesn’t make the film less dull or deflating to watch.

Watching Izzy’s frenzied pratfalls often feels like watching a documentary of Ms. Davis — always great — running a hamster wheel that powers uninspired comic material.

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.

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

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.

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.

Barbaro and Boneta’s charm offensive never amounts to much, though. The eagerness this film has to please could never match how pleased Feingold clearly is to be making a movie like it.

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.

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."

Casting Cassel as a ruthless villain might seem like a cliche, but Kleiman uses him counterintuitively, locating an avuncular, calming quality in the actor.

This is crudely mounted, earnest advocacy, getting its points across at any cost.

The director, Wes Ball, knows how to move his camera around a futuristic medical compound, and the filmmaking brio — especially the sights of Earth’s last city, shot in Cape Town — mitigates the eye rolls prompted by the plot.

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.

Rapid editing leaves little time to absorb vocabulary (such as “deadstock,” a new shoe that has never been worn) or intricacies of design.

A case in which a production designer and prosthetics team showed up for work but the screenwriters might as well have crowdsourced their ideas from fanboys.

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

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

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.

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

In keeping with his apparent ambition to play each character more berserk than the last, Pacino can't discuss wine choice without sounding on the brink of aneurysm.

While the film may speak to viewers with a spiritual investment in these events, it does little to bring them alive for others.

The dispiriting experience of watching Champions is slowly realizing that, notwithstanding an off-color line here or there (a player with Down syndrome introduces himself as “your homie with an extra chromie”), it’s exactly the sort of formulaic crowd-pleaser that just about anybody might have directed.

Clearly well-intentioned, The Devil Has a Name means to deliver an inspirational lesson about the depravity of big industry and the power of the little guy. But it’s mostly a muddle.

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.

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.

Because the metaphysics driving it are so fuzzy, this is the rare horror film where even sludgy viscera elicit only yawns.

It would be easy to dismiss the movie’s perspective as limited and jingoistic, but “The Road Between Us” never pretends to offer more than an in-the-moment chronicle of a violent clash. The bigger problem is that its slickness cheapens the most harrowing recollections.

The movie has no apparent destination in mind; it ends with a complacent shrug having barely reached feature running time. Ms. Tomei, Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Geraghty get stray laughs, but “Loitering With Intent” mostly plays like an excuse for its makers to hang out.

While What Men Want starts off as a stinging critique, it undermines that message with one of Hollywood’s favorite idiotic subplots.

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.

The film is generous with action and twists, even if some don’t track. For January, a month Hollywood reserves for dogs, this is an admirably weird movie.

This is a concept in search of a movie, and an academic exercise that doesn’t give observers much to work with.

The actors — the deft Mr. Brühl and the charming Ms. Herzsprung — add what levity they can.

While the plot is absorbing, the movie continually has characters voice their motivations, leaving little to subtext.

The philosophical window dressing — would you rather your loved one live a better life if it meant living without you? — doesn’t play to Vigalondo’s strengths.

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

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

They Remain, directed, edited and scripted by Philip Gelatt, from a short story by Laird Barron, shows that it’s possible to a make an engrossing genre piece on limited resources.

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.

Spiral is best in smaller-bore moments, showing how everyday lives are affected by prejudice.

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.

Cooking that makes diners uncomfortable hasn’t inspired comparable creativity of cinematic form. “Stage” makes you want to eat, not watch.

The frat house atmosphere eventually gives way to tedious bloodletting. In that regard, The Predator hasn’t evolved at all.

While “Videofilia” is tough to absorb in one viewing, it is hard to escape the sense that Mr. Molero has employed his relentless formal invention in service of some fairly banal moralizing about the dangers of strangers and the internet — a warning that seems late for the here and now.

While the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.

In 3-D, the firefighting scenes are visually striking — with plumes of smoke and chemical dust — though the backgrounds, like other aspects of the film, lack dimension.

The usual pop-culture jokes, disco tunes, and sarcastic narrator are on hand to prevent atrophy, but by the time the sky really does start "falling"--courtesy of an alien invasion-- Chicken Little's frantic efforts to stay farm fresh have started to wear on the nerves.

In trying to build a smarter Chucky, the filmmakers have assembled something unfathomably dumb.

A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.

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.

An exploitation film that proceeds as if it were a solemn memorial, The Secrets We Keep doesn’t do right by the Holocaust history it invokes — or much else.

The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.

The look of Freud’s Last Session could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer.

This “Call of the Wild,” however defanged and updated, doesn’t lack for exciting canine brawls or tense rescues from frozen waters. It also doesn’t lack for an almost soothing corniness.

The finale, in which blood rivalries are redressed in an absurdly literal manner, fatally strains credulity.

While the movie makes a winning case for the passion of its subjects, it bears hints of smoothed-over complexities.

Other than product placement, the movie’s primary goal seems to be delivering 1990s nostalgia.

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.

Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.

It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

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.

At a time when the current president routinely dismisses the accuracy of reporting, Shock and Awe feels more timely than it might have. It also captures an aspect of journalism not often portrayed: the fear of being wrong when the conclusions of your reporting break from those of your competitors.

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.

The climax quickens the film’s pulse but doesn’t exactly grow organically from what’s proceeded it.

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

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.

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.

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 director Adam Rifkin wrote this showcase for Mr. Reynolds, who, like Vic, was a college football player. The Last Movie Star effectively allows the ever-assured actor to score a touchdown on an empty field.

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

If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honor its source material.

The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.

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.

The fantasy sequences are duller than the campy images from the present action.

Digressions involving suicide, child abuse, immigration and unions muddy the film’s meaning rather than illuminate it.

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.

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.”

Back in Action has a better cast than its (often mawkish) writing earns. Mostly, the familiarity takes its toll.

If this documentary celebrates a crackpot, Mr. Friedkin is his match. The director’s blabbermouth tendencies and wry manner make him an enjoyable M.C.

At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.

A high school send-up more gleefully incorrect than "Heathers" and considerably less articulate than "Election," Pretty Persuasion is a hand grenade lobbed at no place in particular.

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.

It’s hard to imagine other performers bringing so much to this setup. They give a true impression of two people who have spent their lives together and know how to talk each other.

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.

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

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

Question the film and you’re a chump, it implies. But anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump of a different sort.

While the film aspires to a clipped complexity, it comes across as gimmicky and amateurish — a chain of miseries passed off as tough truths.

The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when Lansky turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.

Most of the movie’s pleasures come from Ms. Kull, a better actress than the one she plays, and the convolutions of the plot, which has a few good feints and dodges.

"The Fugitive,” to which “Angel” owes perhaps even its rooftop finale, is a template against which this movie inevitably falls short.

The insight that social media fosters false intimacy is old news. The film shows only a half-formed sense of how careers have changed in 30 years.

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.

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.

Viewers unencumbered by nostalgia will probably see this zippy, occasionally funny movie as no more frantic or pop-culture-addled than the average multiplex fodder.

There is less to The Bay of Silence than meets the eye.

Less a self-contained movie than a pilot for a show that already exists. The quality of the acting can only improve.

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

That The Miracle Season is based on a true story makes it tough to endure and to review, because it’s no pleasure to report that filmmakers have turned real-life tragedy and tenacity into a manipulative weepie.

The movie doesn’t credit any source material, but it plays like a poorly dramatized magazine exposé.

This is not a perfect film, and features maybe one wild night too many. But its outlook — optimistic about human nature yet cynical about the times — lingers.

The gimmick is that The Union, in addition to being an action film, is also a sort of comedy of remarriage for Roxanne and Mike, except that the screenwriters, Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, haven’t brought much in the way of levity to the relationship. Nor have they applied much ingenuity to the big set pieces.

12 Mighty Orphans is a plodding football drama in which the characters talk to one another like folksy social workers.

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.

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

Visually, Walking With the Enemy resembles a TV mini-series, a sense enhanced by the director Mark Schmidt’s habit of cutting away from bloodshed. Constant title cards introducing historical figures suggest the work of a completist rather than a filmmaker who has focused the material.

As these things go, Mortal Engines offers a fair amount of fun.

Whether the material is “Much Ado About Nothing” or “When Harry Met Sally,” if your story requires keeping true loves apart, it is often polite to pass the time with a steady flow of comedy.

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

While the carnage demonstrates some imagination (can ice cauterize wounds? Did a hat just turn into a table saw?), the rules, extending even to whether death is permanent, are so arbitrary that nothing matters. Test … your patience.

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.

The look is drab, the action is barely coherent.

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

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.