Glenn Kenny

This is a high-minded and carefully composed film about, among other things, the inability of words in any language to satisfactorily communicate states of being. There are pleasures and intellectual provocations to be had here. But its attempted effects fall flat a little too often.

The movie is relentlessly fluffy.

As much a joy as this movie . . . is to behold, its scenario is more than a little overbaked and overdrawn.

The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.

Lo wants to make a point, obviously, but I came out of this picture with some questions. And I also thought of an observation made by the music critic Robert Christgau, a metaphorical point addressing a type of artistic preciousness: “If I found a cat trapped in a washing machine, I wouldn't set up a recording studio there—I'd just open the door.”

Even if you can sense the fun Crowe is having with the camera setups in certain scenes, Poker Face is simultaneously a lot and not all that much.

The moviemakers are accomplished enough to make something coherent out of this tonal mishmash, but I was left with a "was this trip really necessary" feeling for all that.

It’s all so anodyne that the also-obligatory girl-gets-mad-at-hunk plot turn before the love-conquers-all finale feels like being shaken awake during a dream of drowning in butterscotch sunsets.

The story is not without interest, and it touches on a couple of worthwhile themes: cultural erasure and the way religious and provincial prejudices can suppress love. But its treatment of these subjects is perhaps undercut by its conventionality.

Despite Brosnan's best efforts, this is a movie with its heart in the right place and its head somewhere substantially other.

A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.

Because Eklof’s approach is formally very clean, showing some genuine, intriguing detachment, I’m apt to prefer it to Seidl’s work. But not by much.

This picture is well acted (one of the cast members, Manuel García-Rulfo, has a growing profile in Hollywood; he was seen last year in “Widows” and “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”) and maintains narrative interest without ever grabbing the viewer by the lapels.

This is, among other things, something of a fatty movie. It goes out of its way to hit “beats” that it presumes will be satisfying to a mainstream audience.

Over all, this movie is less “you are there” than “you had to be there.”

There’s subtlety, and then there’s deliberate evasion. In pursuing the former, “Chile ‘76” only achieves the latter.

It’s frustrating to see such a sophisticated cinematic apparatus used in the service of such muddled half-ideas.

The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.

The scenes of Dracula befuddled by a mobile phone were familiar; those in which the vampire’s garlic “intolerance” preludes a flatulence joke predictable. Returning a third time as director, Genndy Tartakovsky lends his usual graphic savvy, providing a not-quite-saving grace.

Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

As it happens, this movie is an expansion of Ms. Pourriat’s 2010 short film, “Oppressed Majority,” which was a punchier, and not particularly comedic, allegory of sexual assault. That picture can be found on YouTube; I don’t think it’s good either, but it’s more genuinely thought-provoking than its expansion.

Directed by Silas Howard from a screenplay by Daniel Pearle, who adapted his own stage play, A Kid Like Jake is humane, compassionate and strangely detached, almost to the point of inconsequentiality.

This consistently ridiculous movie, written and directed by Leo Zhang, does offer Jackie Chan mixing it up at a magician’s rehearsal (he pulls a rabbit from a hat) and Jackie Chan kickboxing at the top of the Sydney Opera House.

By the jaw-dropping climax (an argument over a family portrait), and the film’s not-entirely unpredictable denouement, you aren’t sure whether you are witnessing an investigative family chronicle or an act of revenge.

The filmmakers might have cleared up suspicions about their motivations and ethics had they worked them into the narrative.

Despite its best efforts, Tanna drifts into a mode of exoticism that renders it an ultimately frustrating experience.

The talented Morano, whose work on the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” shows a knack for shuddery grim realism, sometimes seems to want to subvert the espionage-action genre by bludgeoning the pleasure out of it.

Grant and Kurzel’s conceptions of the characters are so one-dimensional they seem to defeat the movie’s talented cast.