Ben Kenigsberg

Story Ave is marred by late revelations that appear designed, in a studio-notes sort of way, to clarify motivations. What’s unspoken — and what’s seen — does enough.

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.

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

The movie withholds a crucial bit of back story in early scenes only to drop it like an anvil later on. Since the revelation is known to the characters the whole time, the decision to deploy it as a surprise is cheap and shameless — a blatant foul in a movie otherwise filled with smoothly executed plays.

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.

In this screen adaptation, written and directed by Peter Hastings, jokes fly with the bouncy randomness of Dog Man’s favorite tennis ball, and there are so many that a fair number of them would land even if they weren’t pretty good.

They Call Us Monsters doesn’t shy from the consequences of the violence the prisoners were accused of (we meet a paralyzed victim of a shooting), even as it suggests that the system...proceeds almost mechanically.

Said to be intended as a reflection on shifts in Turkish history and identity, it is too diffuse and withholding to add up to a cogent result.

As history, The Butler’s parade of famous moments and figures is superficial to the point of trivialization, reducing years of turmoil to glib sound bites. But in its square, melodramatic way, the movie has a serious point to make.

Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.

It’s both a credit to, and a shortcoming of, the movie that it suggests an illustrated bibliography. It makes you want to stop watching and, instead, read or reread all of the pieces mentioned.

In what probably qualifies as both an accomplishment and a shortcoming, the movie makes you want to read Babel’s writing instead.

This isn’t so much a film about geopolitics or even history as it is about two lovers torn between passion and obligation.

As family entertainment, it’s fine.

While the oafish men come off poorly, the treatment of women as nothing more than schemers and monstrous Martha Stewart clones seems woefully past its expiration date.

American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel doesn’t break ground cinematically, but it is eye-opening in other ways.

If the self-consciousness can be charming, it also prevents The American Side from becoming fully its own film.

It’s invigorating to watch these interactions, even if similar filmmaking methods have been used before.

The Good Boss provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile.

A lovely ending makes up for the filmmakers’ giving this triangle one blunt side.

By the end of Good Night Oppy, Opportunity and Spirit have become no less lovable as characters than R2-D2 or Wall-E. It’s tough not to feel for their loss.

Antarctic Edge illustrates its points effectively, providing vivid evidence of how shrinking ice at the South Pole affects climates across the globe.

Magazine Dreams bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity.

Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.

Long stretches are not a personal reckoning but an overview; many details overlap with “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” from last year, although the clips here are at least as good. It is also more sympathetic to Cohn than either Cohn’s reputation or the familial animosity would suggest.

While Marcus Hinchey’s screenplay is occasionally too blunt, Come Sunday accords sympathetic moments to all its characters — a strategy that gives this chronicle of religious convictions a conviction of its own.

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

Only a mountain couldn’t be moved by True Mothers — but like Asato’s parentage, the sources of that effect are complex. From one angle, True Mothers is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears.