Farran Smith Nehme

Beat by beat, it’s exactly what you’d expect, right down to the camera’s prurient interest in the dewy flesh of Stefanie Scott as the 17-year-old daughter.

The film can be rough going for those who know little of Berger’s work. That’s especially true of the second part, a stupefying collage about Berger’s home in rural Quincy, France.

The film is impeccably shot and paced, but the radical real-world implications of Wise’s agenda are never fully explored.

Blair has a colorless, weirdly teenage delivery that doesn’t convey Hesse’s vivid, brilliant personality. It is odd to watch a documentary where the subject becomes more interesting when she is discussed by other people.

Most of the film, while handsome to look at, doesn’t rise above this level of obviousness.

A sudden lurch into trippy abstraction at the end simply doesn’t work, but for the vast majority of the time this is a strong and original film.

The crime and aftermath (based on a real story) are the best parts by far, but these come well after many overextended scenes of selfish, squalid people treating one another like dirt.

Tilda Swinton narrates this oddball, meandering essay film.

There’s a nice candor and sweetness about the players, especially Butterfield and Sally Hawkins as his mother.

Israeli director Nadav Lapid uses a well-worn concept — a lonely little boy is taken under a teacher’s wing — to create a slow, creepy movie.

The swooping shots and the way the lack of dialogue amplifies ambient sounds are stunning. Story-wise, The Tribe is yet another art-film wallow in cruelty, not nearly as unique as its looks and its world.

The seething passions of Flaubert’s characters are absent, except when Rhys Ifans (as a greedy merchant) or the splendidly ruthless Marshall-Green are in the room.

Agreeable this film certainly is, but the shagginess never seems to take shape.

In the last half-hour, themes start to gel. The final scenes are so good, even moving, that they make the earlier stuff look better. But a film concerned with the nature of emotion needs human engagement throughout.

Seeing this great actress, age 84, draw real feeling and laughs from such mediocre material is worth the watch.

The single theme is “Isn’t this cool?” And if your response is, “Well, it’s certainly loud,” then On Any Sunday probably isn’t for you.

The cast, so packed with talent that Jean Reno and Cherry Jones barely register, is stuck with stagey dialogue. Juliet Rylance, in the Nina part, has a particularly hard time. But there are good points, including Janney’s obvious pleasure in her part.

The photographs on view are dazzling; the way they are shown here is somewhat less so.

More a tribute to youth and its discontents than a fresh exploration.

Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly overload their too-long film with subplots. Yet the actors — including a terrific Aiden Gillen (“Game of Thrones”) as Casper’s no-good father — perform as though unaware that any of this is a cliché.

As reactions to budding sexuality go, it’s a little extreme. And it’s also contrived; Isabelle’s decision never makes any emotional, let alone logical, sense.

Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.

The filmmaking style is practically nonexistent: interviews and static shots of the performers onstage. They are thoughtful and often funny, especially Mat Fraser, a British man whose arms were damaged by Thalidomide, and Julia Atlas Muz, the off-stage partner with whom he often performs.

It’s a slickly plotted ticking-time-bomb thriller with a crisp look and one standout debut performance, by Hitham Omari as a ruthless leader of a terrorist cell.

The New Black often feels like a polished but uninspired op-ed.

The densely plotted Generation War sweeps past implausibilities and offers the can’t-put-it-down qualities of a superior airport novel; its last third is affecting. But a bold confrontation with the past? Not so much.

It’s a mildly interesting thriller — Paris through the eyes of a director who doesn’t know how to make its beauty menacing.

The second half is therefore much more interesting than the first; even so, the whole movie suffers from a lack of narrative momentum and a surfeit of wordless shots of men exchanging deep, meaningful glances.