Daniel M. Gold

By the end, the accelerating plot twists and turns — love, obsession, family obligations, personal honor — become tangled and knotted; a few threads are simply ignored or discarded.

The only sketch that’s inspired is the final one.

The movie covers almost three decades choppily. But Mr. Camarago and Mr. Miguel convey the stubborn commitment that made the brothers so revered by the tribes.

The director Emilio Aragón wisely trains the camera on Mr. Duvall. A Night in Old Mexico is his baby, and he rocks it.

The Rooftop is frenzied, funny and knowing, drenched in lavish, often surreal, imagery.

Refreshingly free of jingoism, that detachment unfortunately winds up working against the movie, which doesn’t engage emotionally.

As entertainment, this is vintage potboiler fare. But the movie is also revealing as fantasy, an artifact of 21st-century China’s youth culture transfixed by its rising fortunes and Western ways.

A chronicle of obsession ought to provide some insights.

The sensibility is more grindhouse gore than spaghetti western, perhaps hoping to mine the same vein as Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” but lacking Mr. Tarantino’s lively dialogue and wicked sense of humor.

Directed breathlessly by John Erick Dowdle (“As Above/So Below”), the movie is filled with jittery shots from hand-held cameras, and hurtles along at a pace that is especially helpful in racing past the holes in the paper-thin plot.

Some of this seems like stoner’s paranoia, and some of the film’s talking heads, mainly comedians, don’t make the best advocates. Over all, though, its experts... argue forcefully for decriminalization.

In touching lightly on themes without committing to any of them, the movie falls flat. What should be sweet is saccharine, what might be profound seems trite.

Hôtel Normandy is a confection spun differently from the typical Hollywood rom-com.

Acting chops are occasionally on view — Mr. Sorvino and Mr. Proval play well together — but the plot is weak, the subplots tacked on.

The title of this biopic, Paulo Coelho’s Best Story, is apt: His own life might well be his greatest work. A pity, then, that the film, directed by Daniel Augusto, doesn’t chronicle his evolution better, leapfrogging among decades instead.

Ostensibly about a walk in the woods, this slight, uncertain film spends most of its time off trail.

For a would-be skin-and-horror treat, though, Cam2Cam is surprisingly prudish. It doesn’t really traffic in sex; the camera mostly averts its gaze from the murders, preferring blood spatter patterns; and the acting is predictably wooden.

Mr. Nadjari, who wrote the screenplay with Geoffroy Grison, may have been intending a minimalist character study, but even so, he has abdicated his responsibility: Too much of this family drama is left to the audience to fill in.

Chloe & Theo is surprisingly amateurish in concept and execution. There’s a line between a narrative that’s deliberately simple and one that’s painfully childish, and it’s not all that fine. But it’s one Chloe & Theo crosses repeatedly.

The Ultimate Life is hampered by a predictable story, stereotypical characters and wooden acting.

A bit too true to a frugal indie philosophy, where winging it beats reshooting, the film gets more woolly and unfocused; many scenes feel improvised and only occasionally hit their marks.

United Passions is one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory, a dishonest bit of corporate-suite sanitizing that’s no good even for laughs.

Unfortunately, “Ghastly Love” is a fallen soufflé, a spoof enormously pleased with itself but only occasionally entertaining.

A documentary should give audiences insights they can’t get elsewhere. Otherwise, it’s just one more tumble in an endless media churn.

The Time Is ... Now is a well-meaning if congenitally flawed bit of uplift about how to endure catastrophe and violence in a world that has no shortage of either.

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird skillfully introduces this pleasant man with the demented visions and delves into how he got them.

A labor of love and respect.

If the film at times seems only a tender profile of a quiet and quirky individual, it is also a meditation of a private life at its end.