Ben Kenigsberg

For a film about mouthwatering cuisine, it offers only fleeting delectable sensations.

The movie has not bothered to connect its ideas.

If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse.

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

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

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

Whether it's the guitar-strum soundtrack, "lyrical" cornfield shots, or arrhythmic performances, Steal Me has at least one indie-film cliché too many.

"It is a study of the psychopathologies of perversions," co-director Federico Sanchez says in the press notes for Eternal, which is certainly one way to rationalize a trashy lesbian vampire flick.

While the movie’s morose mysticism is tolerable enough, once “Clara” starts arguing for following feelings instead of data, it puts on its own tinfoil hat.

This British thriller is a high-concept tease that slogs its way through a morass of barely differentiated characters and visuals before reaching an unsatisfying conclusion.

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 overall vibe is scarily close to what happened when “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” on “The Simpsons” added Poochie, except this time the pandering is not a joke.

It’s Jackman, whose smile appears increasingly wolfish as the film goes on (and as Frank’s face grows taut with cosmetic surgery), who ultimately owns Bad Education. It’s a plum part, sure, but also a deeply unsympathetic one — a chance for the actor to channel his charisma toward dark, mischievous ends.

An ugly-duckling fable populated with grotesques out of John Waters, Pizza attempts an unlikely mode: earnest camp.

There are a few powerful images.

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

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.”

Whoever Opus is supposed to be sending up, its aim is a bit wide of the mark. But even if the movie’s only real goal is to frighten, it bets far too much on its eventual twists.

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

Lost River ponders people and places left behind in the name of progress. Slyly political, it observes the mortgage crisis through a warped looking glass. The cinematographer, Benoît Debie, finds a perverse beauty in the decline.

Devil’s Knot is an inert exercise, visually and dramatically on par with "Drew Peterson: Untouchable."

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.

Calamy has by far the livelier part, and the energy dissipates whenever Magalie isn’t drawing attention to herself.

Pity, or prayer, couldn’t change the fact that Faith Ba$ed is abysmally unfunny.

A winning cast helps sell that familiar premise — not just Reale and Young-White, who have definite chemistry and an easy-flowing banter, but also the brassy, scene-stealing Catherine Cohen.

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.

Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but Longing strains credulity well past the breaking point.

The film is well-paced but often strains credulity.

The film is yet another ode to the restorative magic of wine country sunshine, which apparently also has the power to expose the story’s egregious midlife-crisis clichés.

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

This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.

Despite its modest proportions and chilling finale, Sal is foremost an affectionate tribute, conjuring ample warmth out of relatively little.

Mr. Young’s slapdash style, which suggests a Roger Corman movie crossed with dinner theater, extends to the clanking sound effects and flagrantly fake backdrops.

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.

The remake remains cursed by a fatally hokey concept.

Apart from a hi-def night-vision gimmick, returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman don't take advantage of either upgrade.

In its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.

Hover is reasonably resourceful for its first hour, during which it appears to have turned budget restrictions into an asset, keeping the focus on ideas instead of effects. The last act, though, is a total whiff — too rushed, too riddled with plot holes and too incongruously hopeful to take seriously.

The unrealized potential makes the rote line style and stagnant backdrops seem all the blander.

Ms. Cotillard can be magnetic even when playing an unplayable character, but when Gabrielle falls for a veteran (Louis Garrel, who has perfected the facial expression of someone looking for another conversation), the chasm between her abilities and her co-star’s is mountainous.

Looking for plausibility in a movie called Dracula Untold is as pointless as looking for humor or personality in Mr. Evans’s dour performance.

His closing dedication—“For my daughter”—turns this into something actively creepy, as opposed to merely brainless, boring and inept.

Signs of life are few. A desaturated palette makes Rodin as monotonous to look at as it is to endure.

Bell is embodied, in a commanding and versatile performance, by Nicole Kidman, who supplies a gravitas and emotional complexity worthy of the woman she plays.

The movie finally undermines all pretensions of satire with its geeky eagerness to subvert expectations.

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.

Whether it is the star power of the cast or the seductiveness of the period recreation, Three Christs has an appealing professionalism — an odd fit for a film about challenging a profession.

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.

Weather seems to exert an only intermittent influence in this insipid holiday love story, directed by Gabriela Tagliavini and set in the run-up to Christmas — at least in theory.

The Maid’s Room has much to recommend, including the versatile Mr. Camp (“Tamara Drewe,” “Compliance”) in a Machiavellian role. But it doesn’t marshal its twists toward a convincing or satisfying conclusion.

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

Tepid lesbian comedy.

Laden with references to race, class and the legacy of slavery, Spell, directed by Mark Tonderai from a script by Kurt Wimmer (a pen on the “Point Break” and “Total Recall” remakes), is stronger on maintaining suspense and a macabre atmosphere than it is at following through on its ideas, which give it a thin veneer of topicality.

Mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.

A testosterone cocktail of reactionary sound bites and incoherent action that even Michael Bay might have rejected as too amped, Peter Berg’s Mile 22 makes for an appalling referendum on the state of commercial cinema in 2018

What Ouija lacks in wit and originality, it makes up in volume — a trademark of the “Transformers” director Michael Bay, who is one of the producers.

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.

Even the profanity has lost its zing in this cut-rate retread, which mostly prompts admiration for how far Mr. Zwigoff ran with one joke.

Akin may deserve credit for not flinching from the grotesque; other serial-killer-adjacent entertainments, like “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Zodiac” or “Mindhunter,” tend to concentrate on the cerebral mechanics of crime solving. But sordid details, undermined by snickers, aren’t in themselves illuminating.

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.

New evidence for the case that computer animation is homogenizing children’s movies, robbing them of visual interest, this harmless, charmless movie plods along well-trodden turf.

The lack of energy suggests the film might as well have been constructed from outtakes.

The Case Against 8 functions as a valuable record of the nuts-and-bolts conference room side of advocacy — an aspect of civil rights work not often seen on screen.

Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.

It’s neither a secret masterpiece nor a laughable disaster.

Based on characters created by Rodriguez's then-seven-year-old son, Racer Max, the film doesn't belong in wide release. It belongs on a refrigerator door, alongside "100%" spelling tests, old lunch menus, and notices from the PTA.

The setup promises more intrigue than the film ultimately delivers.

Absent formal rigor, the “Paranormal Activity” concept doesn’t offer much else.

Gets points for originality but quickly succumbs to terminal self-amusement.

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.

Often laughably overwrought rehash of "An Officer and a Gentleman," ekes out enough of a subtext on competition to qualify as a non-fiasco.

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.

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.

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.

Depp’s turbocharged archness is basically the whole show.

Annabelle is less cluttered with creepy bric-a-brac than “The Conjuring.” (The original director, James Wan, produced here.) But Mr. Leonetti embraces the potential of negative space.

The question of whether the couple will consummate their relationship isn’t a sufficient source of tension.

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

This Nickelodeon production may be designed for short attention spans, but must the characters have them as well?

Qualifies as the most indulgent kind of homemade project, laden with tediously inspirational dialogue and visuals that seem shot through half-fizzled Yuengling. Kudos to Gores, at least, for acquitting himself as an actor.

Jessabelle is depressingly rote.

Judged strictly as a movie, Francesco comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.

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.

Not without its moments of elemental dread, Apocalypse is also obviously padded, too long on action, and painfully short on irony. The satirical element still packs a minor jolt.

There's no guiding power at work here; it's Evolution without a shred of intelligent design.

With a barrage of title-card identifications, 6 Days can feel closer to a re-enactment than a thriller. To the extent that the movie has a political angle, it’s perhaps gratuitously jingoistic.

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.

True, Johnny Knoxville gets power-hosed down a slide and catapulted into a barn for our amusement, but the inventive, stake-raising, borderline surrealist gags of the old “Jackass” are gone.

A clever but aesthetically murky remake of Haskell Wexler's scorching McLuhan pastiche "Medium Cool" (1969).

This derivative comedy, in addition to not being particularly funny, gives off a sense of telling us more than we needed to know.

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.

An "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" retread told from a postoccupation vantage point, this adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s YA romance novel unfolds in a dystopian future when alien parasites have nearly won the battle for Earth.

It’s the movie’s open-endedness and literary vestiges that sit uneasily with its repetitive goosings, which manifest in exceedingly familiar ways.

The narrative has been fashioned mostly in Mr. Pacquiao’s favor, although there are mentions of overwork, infidelity and gambling. Banal, stentorian narration by Liam Neeson (“Once victory is stolen from you, what are you left with?”) mostly gives the sense that it’s the viewer being carried around the ring.

The absence of laughs can’t be blamed on a lack of talent.

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

Alas, unlike the duo's Crank films - also about a hero on the verge of explosion - Spirit of Vengeance lacks a solid gimmick to unify their transgressive gambits.

At 83 minutes, Love Hurts falls somewhere between making a virtue of brevity and wheezing its way to the finish line.

Elements that have the potential to become running gags . . . either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals).

Part of the thrill of heist movies is in watching a caper take shape before its execution. But the director, Steven Quale, rushes through the planning stages; there’s no obstacle that can’t be overcome with a quick line of exposition.

The logistics of raising money and securing permits for the cause are not the most compelling or irreverent subject. The movie’s goal is straightforward advocacy.

The Hero of Color City cannily distills the children’s movie to its lowest common denominator: bright colors flashing on screen.

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

As an awareness tool, The Valley feels simple-minded. As a drama, it feels exploitative.

Fuu . . . cryin' out loud, this movie's dumb.

Feels motivated by envy more than anything else-it's a sour, petty act of mockery that values its own ineptitude over genuine cleverness, travestying Quentin Tarantino and others simply for dreaming up gimmicks that worked.

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

The Transporter Refueled is crass and nonsensical, but it is hard to hate a movie in which a medical anesthetic is administered with a nightclub fog machine, the weapons include a ringed life preserver, an escape from a moving plane continues by car onto a jetway and the touch-screen banking software appears expressly designed for double-crossing.

Ms. Henson does what she can with a role that keeps her anger at a low simmer until requiring her to go full banshee within basically one scene. You can’t accuse her or Acrimony of being boring, but the film falls short of a design for living.

The notion of an undercover agent with an untrustworthy mind is a great gimmick — and on a commercial level, Dying of the Light sometimes plays as just another high-concept vehicle for a comically overacting Mr. Cage. But Mr. Schrader’s vision is strong enough to rage against the hackier calculations.

In a film this hapless, it’s hardly a surprise that no one can keep Bucharest and Budapest straight.

A pastiche of western tropes too tongue-in-cheek to sell its dramatic intentions, but just sincere enough to smother any intimations of parody, The Escape of Prisoner 614 never commits to a consistent tone. Or even a consistent setting, really.

The chemistry makes the movie’s pleasures easy to surrender to, albeit fleetingly.

Despite eclectic casting and occasional experiments with objective camera, the director, David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), can’t breathe similar life into this risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.

The scariest thing in the movie is a cameo by Scott Baio.

Depending on your POV, it's either the ne plus ultra of Hollywood calculation or a comedy simply intent on pushing its crassness to the point of surrealism.

Even with a few late twists, concept exceeds execution.

Hangman is riddled with holes — blank spaces, if you will.

Blatant product placement, unconvincing bird effects and awful soundtrack selections all undermine a potentially wrenching, difficult premise with utter bogusness.

Some sports movies build to inspirational speeches; Under the Stadium Lights treats platitudes as the main event.

Come Back to Me has seamier goals, employing a quasi-religious conceit to justify its shocks of gore and sexual assault. In that regard, at least, it is grotesquely predictable.

The movie starts by noting Leonardo’s intent to leave a memory of himself in the minds of others. That’s a benchmark Inside the Mind of Leonardo won’t meet.

In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.

The movie clearly intends to send a serious message about how draconian immigration policies tear families apart. But a hard-hitting drama would be preferable to this strenuously wacky bromance.

The only thing grimmer than the material in Phil is its execution.

Jake Squared combines the most grating tendencies of meta navel-gazing with the sexism of reality television — pushing the limit of viewer tolerance to zero.

Straining to find a correlation, even metaphorical, between teenage hedonism and economic collapse, Affluenza never coheres.

It is difficult to believe that an actual first encounter with interdimensional beings would be such a complete waste of time.

Less methodical and witty than its predecessors, Patient Zero often turns its infected characters into mindless, lurching zombies.

If “Daddy’s Home” (2015) played like a distant, wayward cousin of “Step Brothers,” Daddy’s Home 2, again directed by Sean Anders, is the sort of relative you might disown.

There’s a way to tell this story that wouldn’t come across as soggy or manipulative. However well intentioned, Louder Than Words doesn’t find that tone.

The narration promises surprises (“This story may challenge what you think you know about the roles men and women play in Mormon homes”), but the movie might have started by examining its straw-man conception of the audience.

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.

Mr. Pegg, normally a live wire, makes an affable hero, but the movie often forces him into blandly earnest mugging.

It’s a testament to Williams’s energy that even in an unfortunate part as Virgil, an angry, alcoholic dad, he comes across as the most vivid member of the cast.

There’s much more dead air than laughs, despite a certain anything-goes enthusiasm from the leads.

Tourism is what it has to sell.

Even without Mr. Rice in the news, No Good Deed would be damaged goods: an inert “Cape Fear” rehash that can’t seem to choose its favorite contrivance.

Constant close-ups give the sense that the movie itself is violating viewers’ personal space, while an earnest moral suggests that online communication can’t substitute for face-to-face interaction: a topic Friended to Death doesn’t seem to know much about.

It’s possible to imagine a tight, suspenseful version of this home invasion chestnut, but Survive the Night is paced to run out the clock.

Although the internet and cellphones exist in the movie, there’s a dated quality to the premise.

This movie’s earnest infectiousness is tough to deny.

With casting this unconvincing, no one is watching to get a lesson in the horrors of war.

An honorable but dull attempt to translate a neglected literary source to the screen.

At once disarming and calculated, Strange Magic is a film of commodified feelings, evoking memories of other experiences — whether of Shakespeare, the original songs or authentic enchantment.

All Apollo 18 has to offer is endless radio crackle and visual incoherence. And what's out there, tormenting the astronauts? The answer is dumber than a box of moon rocks.

It simply does not have the budget or craft for the scale it requires.

The answers aren’t satisfying, and The Pyramid, despite an unpretentious matinee vibe, is mostly interesting in seeing how little light can be on screen before a bare minimum of suspense and coherence dissipates. There is, truly, not much to see in this movie.

There is still intermittent joy to be found in their autumnal bromance.

The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the emotionless line readings, the half-baked back stories — exudes a terse functionality.

This film is so heavy with exposition that you would think that the director, Anna Foerster, and the screenwriter, Cory Goodman, had set out to complete a dissertation instead of a sequel.

Disorientation is a double-edged sword, especially when the ostensible reorientation is as unsatisfying as it is here.

Distinguished mainly by its overqualified cast and lack of inspiration, Father Figures can’t decide whether it’s a gross-out comedy or an uplifting tale of brotherly love; it embraces the worst of both worlds.

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.

[A] preposterous ensemble piece.

The Word is never boring, though that has as much to do with the mounting absurdities and ripe acting as it does with the resourceful use of crosscutting by the director, Gregory W. Friedle.

Mortal isn’t really a movie proper as it is ponderous scene-setting for a potential sequel.

Even those inclined to sympathize with that premise politically may feel insulted by the plot hole-a-palooza offered here to support it.

[An] inert, exasperatingly proportioned phantasmagoria from Roland Joffé.

Nasty for nastiness’s sake, Kite drags to achieve its brief running time; you wonder whether the slow motion is an artistic device or a stalling tactic.

Saving Christmas seems determined to win any perceived war on Christmas through brute force.

The Apparition turns out to be nothing more than a series of feebly constructed "Boo!" scenes tacked together to achieve (barely) feature length.

Watching it means waiting for the other shoe to drop: anticipating the moment when this already tacky weepie will resolve itself in horrific, exploitative fashion.

Mr. Farina gives Authors Anonymous a sharpness it otherwise lacks.

The movie’s notion of fun comes to involve an unclean rest stop, slipped pills and an eminently foreseeable conclusion.

Cringeworthy feel-good weepie, which finds Kate Hudson's vivacious ad-pitch whiz questioning her life choices after being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.

Acknowledging Hurricane Sandy, Jersey Shore Massacre reminds viewers that it’s hardly the worst disaster to hit the region. But it gives the Hindenburg stiff competition.

Pre- credits, Date Movie runs a mere 70 minutes, which increasingly seems like seven minutes, repeated 10 times.

Among Ravens claws itself to death with sophomoric symbolism.

Vanishing Pearls is most illuminating when offering a historical perspective.

Amid the overheated, sometimes amateurish histrionics — Mr. Nizzari shoots a lengthy father-son blowout in a single, theatrical take — Grand Slammed contains inklings of a serious point about immobility in America.

Muddy sound contributes to the atmosphere of confusion, while the script (credited to the director, Nick Gaglia, along with Mr. Gallagher and Ms. Donohue) goes nowhere.

Teetering somewhere between audacious and offensive, the stylistically voracious Filmistaan only intermittently reveals any sense of danger in its comedy.

This New York shaggy-dog story from Sujewa Ekanayake is an example of extreme-makeshift filmmaking — but not, unfortunately, a successful one.

This is the kind of sleek, precisely constructed genre work that’s gone missing from American summer movies.

The exuberant staging and Ms. Balan’s sly performance are the show here.

The film is earnest, formulaic and sentimental. But, like Humpty, it has enough charm to wear down defenses.

A turgid, foursquare naval epic.

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

The only urgent message in Gringo Trails would seem to be the screamingly obvious one: Visitors should behave themselves.

Only during a brief scene of a man catching a fish outside his flooded house does the movie seem interested in anything more than raising awareness.

The film is at once overly eccentric and underdeveloped. It starts as an exercise in bleak absurdism and ends as a Frank Capra Christmas special, with little originality in between.

The fates of several of the movie’s bitcoin entrepreneurs are unlikely to send viewers rushing to exchange their dollars. But The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin nevertheless functions as an entertaining portrait of the unshakable optimism that governs what’s been called a financial Wild West.

Tiger Lily Road aims for the bleak humor of a Coen brothers film, but a jaunty sitcom score spoils the tone. There’s barely an action that doesn’t strain credulity.

Nonstop scheming and some grimy New Orleans locations prevent The Lookalike from being boring. But the movie, instead of embracing its budgetary limitations, gives off a distracting sense of trying to punch above its weight class.

In its feel for nocturnal light, this is one of the most refreshing New York independent features since Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart.” Both acoustically and dramatically, Mr. Mumin is a winning performer.

Few moments in recent nonfiction cinema are as piercing as the one in which Ms. Schwartz asks her mother if she might have settled down with Mr. Parker had he not been black.

What Touch the Wall lacks is an inventive or compelling presentation. Heavy with platitudes about goals and attitude, it could easily be a short special on ESPN.

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.

Cartoonish in its depiction of class disparities, A Little Game gains some subtlety from its performers: Mr. Abraham, an old pro, does fine work alongside Ms. Ballard, a newcomer.

Unfortunately, poor execution prevents the movie from achieving an authentic throwback feel. Although the principal cast members are Broadway veterans, here they struggle with technological and tonal issues.

Mr. Ostlund’s 2004 debut, begins as a free-floating portrait of mischief and compulsion — a cousin to Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” that comments obliquely on fascism and violence.

Hogtown plays like a find from a forgotten archive.

Mr. Nossiter’s main point is that traditional farming methods have become revolutionary in a country that, we’re told, has grown progressively less agrarian. Mr. Nossiter champions that activism in this mellow, unfocused film.

While it lacks the richness of some of Ozu’s masterworks, “The Japanese Dog” steers clear of sentimentality — an impressive feat, given that the title somewhat preciously refers to a toy dog. The movie depicts a hopeful side of Romania, peeking through even Costache’s lonely world.

Flashbacks and fantasy sequences undercut the claustrophobic atmosphere. What’s left is amateurish play acting — pointless for anyone who hasn’t seen “Portrait of Jason” and redundant for those who have.

This debut feature from the Spanish-born director Miguel Llansó can’t claim a coherent mythology, but it has a lo-fi charm and humor.

The immersive style is always fascinating. But it also seems uneasily suited to the material.

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

The Wasted Times plays like a movie carved out of a much larger mini-series, whose segments are then shown out of order.

As goosed as the drama gets...the uplift feels earned, or at least tough to resist.

An exemplar of how to make the personal political.

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.

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

Incorporating his typically arduous, slow-paced style, Mr. Wang doesn’t make things easy for viewers.

The documentary Company Town, by Natalie Kottke-Masocco and Erica Sardarian, feels fueled by pure desperation; even the rudimentary qualities of the filmmaking (cheap-looking camera work, poorly punctuated title cards) somehow add to its urgency, as if the movie needed to get its message out by any means necessary.

The movie tries to do for amateur cooking contests what “Best in Show” did for dog competitions, but the strained folksiness and tired stereotypes couldn’t be further from the snap and wit of prime Christopher Guest.

Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger’s sprawling documentary probably dives into the weeds too quickly and could have used a tighter edit. Still, drawing on a wealth of courtroom video, the film lays out a persuasive argument for reasonable doubt.

A German Life is likely to be the last new movie of its kind: a documentary that presents contemporary testimony from someone who witnessed the inner workings of the Nazi high command.

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

Chases, shootouts and showy camera moves are executed deftly enough, but given the frugal trappings, they play as overambitious — an attempt to make a storage tank of lemonade from one lemon.

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.

At two hours, the documentary is overstuffed, possibly by design. But it matches a kaleidoscopic form to a kaleidoscopic life story, honoring its subject without simplifying him.

For a movie that revolves around a notoriously violent sport, Michelle Walshe and Justin Pemberton’s profile takes a soft, superficial approach. It makes a rote installment of ESPN’s “30 for 30” look like Pulitzer-worthy muckraking.

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 film is limited by its central metaphor, but it is never less than absorbing or original.

It can be tough to say whether the movie is productively or arbitrarily baffling, but it is never boring, and it achieves a balance between natural flow and purposefulness that suits its subject matter.

"Heading Home” is not a movie with much interest in geopolitics. It roots, roots, roots for its home team — and does little more.

If anything, Moynihan leaves you wanting to watch more of the man. Perhaps too immersed in numbers for politics and too much of a dabbler for academia, he was also a showman — and therefore a natural movie subject.

Classical Period is often very funny, but it’s also poignant, imagining a milieu — part heaven, part purgatory — in which daily lives can be devoted to pondering the aggregated wisdom of the past.

The movie’s challenge is to bottle her spontaneity, which is clearly thrilling to behold in person but less dynamic in a medium that requires every move to be selected in advance, without the suspenseful bond that an artist shares with a live audience. Belmonte gets caught between two modes of nonfiction filmmaking.

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

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 erasure of the difference between propaganda and reality cuts to the heart of what is appalling about Jihadists, a terrorist mixtape that appears remarkably uninterested in presenting these men in a more critical way than they would want.

It is globally minded filmmaking that is also comfortingly familiar.

The conspiracy thriller The Gandhi Murder begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.

Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty have made a grim and haunting documentary about what it means to burn bright, then die alone.

The movie, directed by Charlie Minn, is unbearable to watch, yet its centering of first-person testimony — supplemented with floor plans of the building and phone footage from that day — makes the massacre immediate in a way that sometimes gets lost in news coverage or political debates.

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).

A tedious muddle.

Ghost Fleet hits its marks as advocacy, but editing might have put more emphasis on the individual men, added further detail about the illicit networks or tracked Tungpuchayakul’s journey in a more focused and suspenseful manner.

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.

More of a raspberry than a reboot, The Banana Splits Movie, available to buy (and later to rent) on multiple digital platforms, is far less crazy than it wants to be and far more soporific than a synopsis would suggest.

The movie looks and sounds great, but greatness and depth elude it.

A close-range film about distance, the short, poignant documentary “I’m Leaving Now” unfolds like a character study.

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.

The movie can be frustratingly deferential toward Watson, but it is never less than urgent.

The individual stories have moments of power, but 16 Bars feels abbreviated. It only sometimes transcends its role as an awareness tool and reveals the texture and detail that long-term documentary filming can produce.

The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative.

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.

As absorbing as The Legend of Swee’ Pea is, it might have been even better if May had pulled back the curtain more on his off-camera interactions with his subject

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

"Seahorse” is the sort of documentary that gains its interest less from its technique than from its subject, and from the fact that the filmmaker was present at the right time. Articulate, reflective and unhesitant about getting personal, McConnell makes for a complicated character study.

The film illustrates that being self-baring is different from being self-revealing. It inspires a vexing but welcome question: What did I just watch?

My Father the Spy doesn’t have a tidy point to make, but it succeeds at bringing a turbulent reminiscence to life.

As Shimu’s efforts ramp up and appear increasingly futile, Made in Bangladesh acquires a quiet power.

Uribe directs for sensory effect rather than context, which is minimal and parceled out as needed, and deals with the politics of the construction project glancingly, an approach that registers as alternately poetic and coy.

Mostly the movie is a drizzle of platitudes.

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.

A week is too short a time frame. A longer view might have left a deeper impression.

Even as hagiography, Soros is unfocused.

Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars

It’s possible that Baggio: The Divine Ponytail will resonate with soccer fans. But the protagonist’s reputed greatness has not made it to the screen.

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

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.

Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.

The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story

As enjoyable as their writing can be, the filmmaking around them — aerial shots, time lapse photography, cuts to the couple looking engrossed — is less inspired than their project.

The families’ stories help turn The Place That Makes Us into more than a policy proposal in motion.

Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but Queen Marie shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.

While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes Friends and Strangers so singular.

A moving documentary with generous amounts of music.

Rogue Hostage is shoddy work.

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.

Mitte, who played the son in “Breaking Bad” and himself has cerebral palsy, sells Mike’s tenacity, but the contrivances around him let him down.

The athleticism, physics and what one person calls the “bit of ballet” of the event are all stirring to witness.

“Scenes” has its moments, as any film that sits Ryan and Corrigan opposite each other in a confessional would. But even special effects near the end play more like the response to a challenge than a spark of inspiration.

It is a good primer, well illustrated.

If the convoluted history and corresponding formal conceits are difficult to absorb, that is part of the point.

While the pieces more or less fall into place, trying to solve the mysteries of Isabella may be missing the point.

What’s especially peculiar about the focus on Shulan is that, in other respects, The Outsider is an ensemble piece, distributing screen time among a half a dozen people planning for the museum’s opening.

Hodge is not always on Shkreli’s side, but he appears convinced he’s made a well-rounded portrait, as opposed to a dubious, bottom-feeding, bro-to-bro testimonial.

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

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

“Into the Abyss,” which mixes material from Juice WRLD’s tour stops with interviews and hangout and recording vignettes, isn’t particularly focused.

To a degree, Womack’s audacious career path has been shoehorned into a conventional profile format.

Gravel, in his appearances, comes across as avuncular, eager to share ideas but even more eager to encourage young acolytes.

The closing titles say Nelson “would not agree to be interviewed.” While others try to explain her perspective, her nonparticipation leaves an unavoidable hole. And the testaments to Hampshire’s distinctive academic culture aren’t especially germane.

Salt in My Soul is extremely painful to watch, especially as it shows the roller coaster of Smith’s recurring hospitalizations. But it does paint a vivid portrait of who she was and what she believed.

As filmmaking, The Conductor takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself.

In its first half-hour, the documentary The Jump brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident.

The movie gives a stimulating but standard-by-Herzog-standards treatment to a stellar subject.

There are no real answers for anyone in The Last Mountain. If Terrill never finds a clear narrative or emotional through line for this account, it’s not entirely a surprise. The material resists attempts at uplift.

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

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, directed by James Jones, does not extensively explore the history of its components. It’s less concerned with the tapes themselves than with the act of bearing witness.

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 film is sharp at illustrating how Sara is never totally safe, and how survival requires improvising again and again.

The mystery aspect is handled obliquely. The film is more of a mood piece, and much of its pitch-black humor derives from the contrast between the barren landscape and the sheer number of horrors it contains.

The past-present parallelism is provocative, but it also seems faintly superficial — a way of eliding distinctions and streamlining history.

While starchy in presentation, Exposing Muybridge makes clear that its subject’s images still have a lot to show us.

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

Matriarch opens by watching a nude figure descend into a pond of black muck, but the slog that follows in this derivative, tar-flow-paced thriller from Britain is strictly for the viewer.

Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.

InHospitable is a decent advocacy documentary that compellingly argues a couple of points that aren’t easy to make compelling onscreen.

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

Serious subject matter aside, the movie is as bogus as Alex’s prospects of being an astronaut.