Farran Smith Nehme

It’s a brief movie, and perhaps all that preamble is meant to justify the ticket price. The best advice is to walk in about 25 minutes after the lights go down. You’ll still get all the laughs, and you won’t have to hear about Hart’s YouTube hits.

There are a handful of moments to entrance a non-fan. When the musicians and singers assemble to sing “Proserpina,” the last song McGarrigle ever wrote, with its haunting refrain (“Come home to Mama”), the effect is transcendent.

The film shows how quiet exteriors can mask deep interior lives, and how art feeds those lives. The view of art is richly intellectual, sometimes enthralling. But I confess, I liked Museum Hours best for answering a question I’ve always had: What is that guard thinking?

At nearly three hours, it’s entirely too long, needlessly padded out with an intrusive interview-framing device.

This film is best when arguing that drugs should be treated as a multibillion-dollar commodity business in need of regulation, and not as a moral failing.

The two leads spend a lot of their time doing static interviews, in a format familiar from TV shows like “The Office.” This glorified narration gets old, fast.

Winter hits his stride detailing how the music bigwigs hung Napster out to dry, but couldn’t do a thing about their industry’s permanently altered business model. This exercise in recent nostalgia (the original Napster went bust in 2002) might have been better if the tart cynicism of that section had shown up earlier.

Despite a remarkable performance by Suliman, who’s almost never off-camera, events become increasingly pat and implausible, with one explanatory scene played like a shadowy variation on Kevin Spacey’s monologue in “Se7en.”

A Hijacking is Lindholm’s second feature as director; he’s also worked with such austere Danes as Thomas Vinterberg of Dogme 95 fame. What he’s learned, it seems, is how to strip away distractions, and let character become suspense, as well as destiny.

Set in the drab suburbs of Paris, The Stroller Strategy doesn’t even offer pretty backdrops.

If the movie has a star, it may be cinematographer Oleg Mutu, the Romanian who lensed “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.” Even when the pace wanes, the images are still gripping.

Without any preachiness, this magically beautiful film urges us to take better care of the bees, and honor the irreplaceable things that they do for us.

Time has robbed Blume’s subjects of shock value, but her perceptiveness hasn’t dimmed. The movie’s sincerity carries it along, and makes this story endearing despite its filmmaking clichés.

Here’s a movie that will test the limits of your ability to watch other people having a good time.

There is something both mischievous and moving about a world-famous director who, closing on his 10th decade, designs a movie that celebrates his actors: their varying ages, their versatility, their heart.

The best compensation for sitting through this silliness is Alice Taglioni as the primary cop.

Sirius requires a religious faith in the notion that the same government that can barely get it together to raise the debt ceiling can suppress all evidence of aliens, via means such as engineering 9/11 as a distraction when Greer got too close to proving his case.

It’s a truly interesting slasher fest; in this one, the heroine gets to be both beauty and beast.

The Wall winds up as a captivating fable, an end-times scenario that’s more about the survival of the spirit than the body.

It’s involving, as biopics go, but the shattering debates that still swirl around Arendt’s view of the Holocaust are relegated to walk-ons.

Trouble is, while the social milieu is nicely realized, other parts of the drama are not. Too often Burshtein cuts off a scene prematurely, darting away just as the crucial moment of emotion or confrontation appears.

It is a remarkably unattractive-looking movie. I don’t know when people voted that the seasick look of an iPhone video is now a desirable style.

Making a movie this warm, funny, and rigorously truthful about lovers trying to remain partners is even harder.

Eckhart’s another matter. He’s adequate, but there is something about his raspy voice and WASPy body language that’s more in tune with being the bad guy at the board meeting than the hero racing through the train station.

Winocour skillfully films Augustine being exhibited for other doctors in several disturbingly erotic scenes, but elsewhere Soko’s stolid, one-note demeanor takes a toll. The script, which gives Augustine no background and mostly shows her either being “treated” or having an episode, doesn’t help.

Philippe Béziat’s documentary focuses on how Sivadier and his Violetta, the French soprano Natalie Dessay, fuse acting with the music. It’s an incredible view of artists at work.

The main problem is the criminal subplot, full of Aussie villains snarling “mate” at one another and landing bloodless punches on Dean. 33 Postcards is what happens when someone grafts a prison angle onto “Pollyanna” — the tough guys just get in the way.

So unspeakably dull that it can’t even offend, save when the filmmakers have the almighty nerve to quote Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Demme. It would be far better to rip off a William Castle movie, and aim for a level they have a prayer of actually hitting.