Glenn Kenny

This movie, as it happens, is a comedy, but it’s a frequently grisly one, and one that makes rollicking fun of a lot of dark Swedish preoccupations.

A Love Song is a companionable movie to sit through. It’s well-photographed, unobtrusively edited, full of wondrous sights, and acted by a couple of masters of warm underplaying.

While The Great Debaters' intentions don't lead it to movie hell, this picture is far more diffuse, commonplace, and predictable than the surprisingly convincing "Fisher."

If there was ever an example of a movie's visual language leaving its verbal and narrative components in the dust, this, unfortunately, is it.

Though not without its entertaining moments—the cast, led by Sandra Bullock, is energetic, sharp and gets a fair number of juicy bits to rock out with. But as a whole, Our Brand is Crisis is a messy affair that sputters along when it should be humming with assured cynical momentum.

Proves more irksome than moving.

Confounding. But not without its thrills.

The movie’s quirky setting pays off dividends where you least expect them. At such moments, the movie’s humanism finally seems unforced, and everything is the better for that.

Panahi’s latest act of defiance is entirely commendable on a number of levels, but I regret to say that from my own perspective, Taxi is the weakest of the films he’s made since he was enjoined from making them.

The overall feel is Hong Kong to the core…which means CJ7, like the first 25 minutes or so of "Shaolin Soccer," doesn't make many allowances to Western sensibilities.

The movie builds up enough steam, and has a sufficient supply of jolts, to make Old Man stick to the ribs at least a little by the time it’s over.

The new perspective Scott and Zaillian want to bring to this material never gels convincingly, and despite some effective set pieces, a cast of memorable faces and attitudes, and evocative cinematography by Harris Savides, this would-be epic feels tired and rote.

It's been well-publicized that Affleck, going for as authentic a feel as possible, cast many genuine South Bostoners in both extra and speaking roles, and, while that's salutary, in some scenes his strategy backfires, yielding caricatures that are merely more vivid than the ones turned out by Central Casting Hollywood productions.

Problem is, every time the movie gets near an authentic emotion, it barely pauses before making a run to the next Katy Perry song cue. (Seriously, both “Roar” and “Firework” are featured herein.) Given the care that the adult and teen actors invested in trying to honor their real-life counterparts, this feels lazy. If you like Katy Perry songs that much, you may feel differently.

Allen’s direction, with Vittorio Storaro lensing, is typically fluid. If you’re at all inclined to view this movie, you’ll find it’s very easy to take in.

There’s a compelling cinematic story here, perhaps, but Ricciarelli’s movie is too diffused and scattered and, especially in its first hour, too reliant on commonplaces.

This reasonably engaging picture is being pushed as a kind of diversity-prioritizing indie comedy as opposed to the YA film it really is, for reasons not entirely clear to me.

The insights offered from the almost two-dozen show biz luminaries are not always commonplace, and Gottfried is always an interesting screen presence, even when he’s far removed from his persona.

Scarlett Johansson looks lovely and hasn't much to do besides that, McGregor only starts having fun when he's playing the "original" of his clone.

I wish it had been a lot more fun, frankly. The movie’s tone never quite gels; it’s too outlandish and cartoony to convince, but not so outlandish and cartoony that it takes off into a realm of over-the-top exhilaration.

As much candy as the movie encourages the eyes to gorge on, Tale of Tales is 135 pretty minutes of empty calories.

Filmmaker Waller is here trying to have things both ways: to pay a sincere tribute to the classic Japanese samurai movies in the widescreen frames and spurting blood it borrows, and also to make a genuine thing, a samurai qua samurai picture. He eventually gets there, or almost does.

Its punchline, imagining the worst that could happen to Auteuil's slimy exec, is weak and kind of dumb, but the rest of the film is genial, appealing, and brisk.

I wish the long-gestating dream had resulted in a better film. I don’t want to read too much into things that I only know second or third hand, but in a sense Peterloo shows the pitfalls of the dream project.

Yeah, it's pretty funny. And it's a pretty accurate depiction of a certain feature of male romantic humiliation. But it's also a little -- and this is one of my two misgivings about the movie -- expected.

Despite being well shot, confidently written, and acted with a surfeit of commitment by most of its cast (Mendelsohn, who not for the first time reminded me uncomfortably of Trivago pitchman Tim Williams, is director Forrest’s ex-husband), I found the world it presented both smugly insular and overfamiliar.

This documentary directed by Lydia Tenaglia is a conspicuously imperfect movie that turns more compelling after trying your patience, then yields a final half-hour that’s as engrossing as a finely-wrought suspense drama.

Unfortunately, the reach of The Return exceeds its grasp, and so this film of gruffly beautiful images didn't put a hook in me the way Zvyagintsev so ardently seems to want it to. [March 2003, p. 27]

If the resultant wreckage is a little underwhelming, and the film's coda useless and trite, the getting there is pretty absorbing.

A handsomely mounted, never-less-than conspicuously intelligent but ultimately too-conventional historical drama, The Liberator shoehorns the epic life of early 19th-century South American revolutionary Simón Bolivar into two hours of intermittently powerful cinema.

The whole cast (which also includes Oliver Platt as a simpatico family solicitor) sinks its teeth into the material, which is reasonably meaty.

Perhaps paradoxically, it’s when the film is at its most quiet that it’s also most persuasive.

This sometimes rewarding but also bothersomely uneven comedy is Julie Delpy’s sixth feature film as a director; she also co-wrote.

The bag of ensuing twists in “Bring Him to Me” may not entirely redeem the clichés that made them possible, but they do keep one alert.

Remember this name: Aksel Hennie. If Pioneer, a mixed bag of a conspiracy thriller, works at all, it largely does so because of him. Hennie, now into his second decade as an actor in Norwegian film (he’s also written and directed a feature) gives a spectacular performance as Petter.

Hobbled by weak argumentation, a character who winds up a complete muddle, and Sayles’s inclination to romanticize Latin American revolutionary types, Casa is as mixed an effort as the filmmaker has essayed in some time. [October 2003, p. 18]

Add to this a “What Are The Odds?” plot twist that’s so preposterous it’s practically offensive and you have a movie that seems fit to go off the rails. And yet. Arterton, Mbatha-Raw, and the child actors — Lucas Bond as Frank and Dixie Egerickx as his school chum Edie — bring such commitment and integrity to their characterizations that one is inclined not just to hang in there but to root for them all.

A spectacularly foursquare “family is what you make it” redemption story. The kind of thing that film critics like to dismiss as “looking like a made-for-TV movie,” as if that comparison/analogy even holds as a dismissal anymore.

Compelling and exasperating in pretty much equal doses.

Writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer is clearly a movie-mad soul, and if he can get a little further out from under his influences he may concoct something a more consistently geekily transportive.

The filmmakers do seem frequently flummoxed by the scale of the narrative, and you get a sense of them trying to cram a lot into a two-hour running time.

A modestly scaled film on every level, but Hedges and company manage to ring true on almost all the material's sweet and sour notes.

It’s in trying to locate the — for lack of a better term — heart of the movie where problems emerge.

It's a decent comic-book movie that delivers its goods with good humor and a minimum of bloat.

This is a surprisingly old-fashioned disaster movie. In point of fact its old-fashioned-ness is really the only surprising thing about this eye-popping 3D spectacle.

The film itself falls short on two crucial levels: it’s neither sufficiently profound nor intoxicating enough to justify or transcend its self-seriousness. As good-looking as the movie and its stars are, Ardor, whose title refers to a literal state of burning, never manages to catch fire.

This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.

Time is more than reasonably diverting.

It does move along at a nice clip, and delivers exactly what belligerent action fans on both sides of the political aisle want -- a wholly admirable figure blowing up a lot of bad s---.

Northfork feels like the work of a couple of ardent art students who, for whatever reson, are very keen on pleasing their teacher. [July/August 2003, p. 23]

You don’t have to be a Green Day fan to find this movie interesting, but you’ll definitely be more inherently invested in it if you are.

Understanding what McGrath is trying to pull off is not the same thing as McGrath pulling it off; as ambitious as it is, Infamous falters in execution too often to create a lasting impression.

There’s a resemblance here to both the story and the movie adaptation of the story told in “The Perfect Storm.” The characters involved are making a good faith effort—but good faith efforts by humans can only go so far.

Tucci is wonderful, but Timlin comes close to eating him up almost as thoroughly as her character does his.

A melodrama with an interesting trick in its tail, but I don’t think that director Garcia pulls the trick off as well as she might have. The movie is sumptuously shot by Christophe Beaucarne; every frame is robustly picturesque. But the story could have used a little less “Under the Tuscan Sun” and a little more “All That Heaven Allows.”

By no means watch this if you’re looking for a nourishing cinematic experience. But if your idea of a cozy rom-com is an old Hugh Grant one, this has some cine-comfort-food-carbs for you.

The movie gives pretty good showbiz lore but not much depth.

Swartzwelder, going for “thoughtful,” instead achieves “glacial.” A romance wants to sweep viewers up, not bog them down. Still, Old Fashioned is both unusual and intelligent enough that, despite it not being entirely MY cup of tea, I’m hoping that it’ll succeed at doing at least a little more than addressing the converted.

Director and co-writer (with Boris Yutsin) Atsuko Hirayanagi has a knack for staging scenes in a way that makes them intriguingly uncomfortable, but that doesn’t succeed in elevating Oh Lucy! from some of its more commonplace features.

On the plus side, there are these super-scary mechanical octopus-type things with a billion eyes and metal tentacles that fly in great awful swarms and look like the non-organic versions of the flying-brain-and-spinal-cord monsters that made the otherwise laughable '60s sci-fi flick "Fiend Without aFace" so cool.

It’s all pretty effective but in the end, somehow empty. Not to make an unfair comparison to a classic, but the movie “Deliverance” actually followed through on all of the themes that its storyline suggested, while in Backcountry, we end up with a storyline in which all but the most elemental stuff winds up as window dressing.

For this viewer, the formal element and the narrative never quite cohered, and I wound up admiring the movie for its ambition while unsatisfied with its achievement.

While 1408 is no classic, it is refreshing to see a horror picture that just wants to do its job rather than prove to its audience how ruthlessly nihilistic it is.

Nighy is, of course, exceptional in fleshing out what could have been merely a set of irascible tics and traits. And the Andersonisms, while not particularly exhilarating, are not thematically inapt. But this is a film best consumed by those who don’t mind “slight.”

Raboy manages to pull off several galvanic cinematic effects even as his scenario yields little more than exasperation. There’s enough raw talent on display here that I’m looking forward to his next picture nevertheless.

The director carries out his ultimately banal aims with commendable dispatch, and it’s always interesting to see Moreno play a character who’s not a living saint.

There's much visual inventiveness and a good sense of fun here. But I was expecting something more spectacular.

While White’s direction is atmospheric, the sense of tension never gets crucial; the movie’s got more of a mood of resignation than of conflict. For all its respectful and respectable qualities, it also suffers from a certain inertia.

A tart, funny, moderately over-the-top hijinks-and-snafus yarn.

Phantasm, gnarly as it could get, always had an impish side, just as the monumental power of AC/DC is leavened by the sight of its elfin lead guitarist in a schoolboy uniform. Meander has no such sense of fun. But it offers some newish sights and shocks.

The movie’s not a barn-burner or future classic, but new Westerns are thin on the ground these days, and this ultimately is a better-than-decent one.

To his credit, the writer-director maintains a pretty decent balance between his disgust with this Business We Call Show and the movie’s thriller mechanics, which are not entirely well-engineered but do chug along to a not-unsatisfying climax.

As a meditation of American life, Greendale is anything but coherent, but it is fluidly free-associative and shows bizarre wit, as when Young himself shows up to play Wayne Newton. [March 2004, p. 27]

Surprise! One doesn’t want to damn the movie with faint praise by saying “it’s not that bad,” but that’s kind of the most objectively accurate description of it, in all honesty.

For my money, if I'm in the mood for the kind of aesthetic and emotional experience Saints is selling, I'll just blast Jim Carroll's more concise (and rocking!) "People Who Died" out of my iPod.

What follows is all handsomely shot and not without some general interest — but the movie’s only really going to play for you if motorcycles and those who ride them are subjects to which you’re somewhat sympathetic.

Though this new Hills is both scarier and smarter than 95 percent of the other horror product out there, it's also indicative of everything that's wrong with horror movies today.

The performers continue to exhibit those qualities forty years after the fact, reuniting in the evocative, sometimes puzzling, and sometimes moving Valley of Love.

The movie itself, overall, feels kind of bloodless. Scenes in which Pearson is called upon to defend his new vision kind of fizzle rather than catch fire.

This picture reminded me of one of the things I like best about "All the President’s Men": It doesn’t give a good godd--- about Woodward and Bernstein’s personal lives.

One of Cruise's most deeply cherished ambitions is to be a great actor, and this movie goes to great lengths to let him do that--sort of. You'll understand what I mean during the sequence in which there is more than one Philip Seymour Hoffman on the screen.

If you’re a scholar of comedy, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, a concise doc about the founding, life, thriving, and death of the '70s-defining satirical magazine, is likely a must-see. It’s an engaging and entertaining film, filled with funny anecdotes expertly related.

While brisk, informative, and entertaining, feels frustratingly sketchy.

Speaking strictly for myself, Vin Diesel, here coming back to play Xander Cage, the James Bond of skateboarding character he originated in 2002’s “XXX” is the least exciting component of this 3D slam-bang fest.

As a fan and well-wisher of Coppola's, I wanted very much to like this movie, and I'll probably give it another shot once the DVD comes out. But, at first sight, Youth Without Youth's striving for exuberance reveals an almost desperate effort too much of the time.

A tidy and nasty and often effective thriller that doesn’t quite blossom into full horror.

Starting Out never builds to the explosive climax it seems to be heading for, which I suppose is a good thing for its overall integrity, but maybe not so good for its motion-picture value.

It could be that Franco and Hudson, while not phoning it in, bring personae that are just too familiar/conventional to spark a high level of viewer involvement.

A slight but not-unengaging Young Person’s Romantic Comedy.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

But the movie is, for all its accomplishment, sketchy, tentative. And there’s something about the conception of Yoav that smacks of self-aggrandizement.

One casting wild card is the country singer Tim McGraw, and he's very solid in the role of Katie's horse-rancher dad, the kind of guy whose hard-headedness can't mask the size of his heart.

This is not my favorite kind of documentary filmmaking. Eugene “Gene” Cernan, the subject of this film, who’s also the older fellow watching the bucking bronco, is a man deserving of a tribute such as this movie aspires to give him. The filmmakers, attempting to jazz up their material, get in the way a lot.

The movie is at its most engaging when examining the near-monopolies controlling chicken farmers in the United States.

It’s all pretty predictable . . . This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.

Some of the details about female characters that Silver and the screenwriter Jack Dunphy choose to foreground...indicate that the filmmakers share with their male characters a strain of artsy-bro misogyny. The movie is nevertheless striking and stimulating in some respects.

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

Despite the performance’s credibility, few things are more irritating, artistically and historically, than the stranger-in-a-strange-land interloper who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing.

In the shift from comedy to drama the movie goes wobbly.

The realization that Jayanti is using these things to buttress a fiction — albeit a fiction that could perhaps become true in the blink of an eye — is disquieting in a way the filmmaker might not have intended.

The movie is most effective in detailing how disinformation campaigns work.

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.

If the movie doesn’t go more than skin deep in interrogating questions about interventions both military and journalistic into the Middle East, it does succeed in opening up Mr. Hondros’s contradiction-filled world.

Curtis shows up late in the picture, and her grounded presence helps Powter’s hard-luck story resonate more sympathetically. The documentary ends not with the promise of a comeback, but with a resolution to restore some, well, sanity to Powter’s life.

Directed by Charlie Hoxie, "The Grand Unified Theory" is a moderately engaging documentary that credibly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability.

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

That Summer, a new documentary directed by Goran Hugo Olsson, sheds further light on the Beales with footage shot before the making of “Grey Gardens.”

The performances are conscientious and earnest.

The interview sections are fascinating, and scenes of the pope’s travels, during which he frequently washes the feet of those who come to him, are moving.... Less welcome are Mr. Wenders’s brief attempts at depicting the life of St. Francis himself.

It’s loud albeit harmless japery, best appreciated with your air-conditioning cranked to movie theater levels.

In the final half-hour, things start picking up, not just because of the impending surprise victory of Donald J. Trump and the way these players react to it.

This new cinematic imagining of Carlo Collodi’s classic fantasy tale is alternately enchanting and befuddling.

For patient or forgiving fans of idiosyncratic thrillers, “Disappearance” may deliver satisfactory spills and chills.

River of Fundament is often a commanding, engaging and certainly challenging experience. Nevertheless, by the end of the piece I felt deliberately alienated, and to a nearly infuriating degree.

The keen affinity the actor David Oyelowo has for his fellow performers is the best thing about The Water Man.

[A] hardly epochal but largely pleasant documentary.

Clay Tarver, a veteran of the TV series “Silicon Valley” (and a founder of the postpunk band Chavez) directs with an eye and ear that’s a cut above what one usually gets with this sort of fare.

The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales

It’s never boring but a trifle diffuse. If you’re a Miyazaki fan, you’ll want to see it anyway.

The movie’s grave commitment to its own quirkiness is admirable, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to recommend it.

The movie, written and directed by Hailey Benton Gates, wants to be a lot of things at once, including a satire and a dark rom-com. It bites off more than it can comfortably chew. However, the cast, also featuring Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny and Channing Tatum, is charismatic and at times piercingly funny.

When the movie isn’t straining, the go-for-broke performances of Dyrholm and Lindh give it a specific, unusual tension — like the feeling you get when you’ve over-tightened a corkscrew and know the matter around it is about to crumble.

This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to.

Mr. Pearce is also well-versed in staging and shooting decent action scenes, and building suspense enough to keep Hotel Artemis diverting in its overstuffed ambition. Add to that Ms. Foster’s welcome return to big-screen acting after a five-year layoff and you’ve got a movie almost worth seeing.

The performances are excellent, and Ingelsby’s dialogue largely rings true. But while the movie is indeed considered and conscientious, it’s also careful. It doesn’t risk going over any edges itself. And it shows more than a few instances of fussy and telegraphing Conspicuous Direction.

Directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, it’s a predictable comedy of reconciliation. But it boasts substantial pleasures, largely on account of the performers.

The superb cast provides mild pleasures, as do some aspects of the elaborate mystery itself. And that’s all, folks.

If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.

Jodorowsky’s patients express gratitude and relief. But there has to be an easier way to alleviate stuttering than rubbing red dye on your genitals, putting on gold lamé hot pants, being body painted and walking the streets of Paris talking to oneself.

Kim’s Video, co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin and narrated by Redmon, is less a retail history than a shaggy dog story. One that actually appears to be true. Go in knowing that and you might get a kick out of it.

This is an undeniably fascinating film despite, or perhaps because of, the repellent actions Mr. Zahedi depicts himself taking.

The film is worth seeing because it’s a moving and remarkable story and it represents a great cause. Mr. Carlson often puts a directorial foot wrong.

Mr. Collet-Serra’s busy visual style, which uses a lot of fast-cutting, willy-nilly variations between slow and fast motion, and illogical but vivid point-of-view shots, seems at least somewhat apt under the exhilarating circumstances.

In the Company of Rose is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to.

Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.

The script by Nicole Jefferson Asher toggles between sharp observations about wordcraft and some “Dynasty”- or Tyler Perry-level soap operatics. RZA’s direction lacks visual personality, but he keeps the narrative moving and elicits strong performances from his cast.

Liberation Day, a documentary of preparations for the concert directed by Mr. Traavik and Ugis Olte, is a consistently understated chronicle of Westerners who are very carefully playing with fire.

Her insistent imagery and sometimes oblique narrative approach don’t always deliver the dividends sought. But the movie identifies Ms. Shortland as a talent to watch.

It’s hard to settle on what’s more bombastic: Carrey’s admittedly virtuoso double act, or the teeming computer graphics gadgetry of death and destruction spilling out of every corner of the screen.

There’s some grim stuff here, but very little of Willeford’s mordant humor. A small and potent quantity of this quality is delivered by the larger-than-life rock star Mick Jagger in the role of Cassidy. Jagger shows a refreshing lack of conventional vanity by allowing both Bang and Debicki to tower over him.

Ms. Wells is appealing onscreen and is a smart writer. She gives Emily some good zingers.

Devoted Feifferites, not to mention fans of Mr. Rash and Mr. Koechner, who get to flex their muscles nicely here, will be well sated.

The movie’s depiction of age — specifically, age as it affects movie stars — has real potency. This extends beyond its ostensible message, delivered by Kal: “We live and die by the stories we tell each other.” The stronger statement Last Words ends up making is that we die no matter what.

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.

The movie depicts Mr. Ducasse’s sweeping streak — he prepares food for the homeless in Brazil and concocts a deluxe restaurant at Versailles — competently if not brilliantly. A screening of the film accompanied by a tasting menu afterward, though — that would be something.

While Mr. Reybaud has exemplary artistic confidence and an interesting vision, this is a movie that in many ways defines or justifies the “not for everybody” critical hedge.

There’s some comedic value here.

The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching.

While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much.

The result is dramatically wonky — and eccentrically thought-provoking.

Potter delivers her vision here in a form that’s perhaps too raw, too undistilled. There’s precious little lightness negotiating with the dark. Her lack of compromise is, as always, admirable — as is her way with actors.

To this viewer, it is a spectacular whiff.

Grabinski has both wit and energy, and these qualities, along with a game cast, help keep “Happily” afloat for far longer than most made-in-L.A. dark domestic comedies. But the movie wants to do too many things, and grows diffuse.

The movie doesn’t always work, but it’s never boring.

It’s an earnest account of a religious movement that still resonates — Whitefield’s practice was instrumental in the growth of the Methodist church, and his sermons and lectures are still in print today.

The Death of Dick Long, until it meanders into a semisincere dramatic dimension, manages to pack in a good number of laughs for a significant amount of time.

There are a good number of funny and pointed individual scenes and bit parts here (Alec Baldwin is droll as an inept therapist).

The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.

Given the aesthetically confrontational nature of the piece, one can understand why Mr. Rossi did not attempt an undiluted cinematic translation of the complete Bronx Gothic. But something about his approach (which I assume was approved by Ms. Okpokwasili, as she is one of the movie’s executive producers) feels, finally, like an evasion.

A repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.

Peirone’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink directing does tend to head butt her thin writing, but the movie eventually coalesces as a sly, bitter parable against chasing-your-dreams optimism.

But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.

“Hockey will teach you what you need to know about life” is a cliché, and while Underwood’s delivery of the line almost redeems it, James’s work makes you believe it.

Mr. Lindon, who carries his powerful masculinity with canny reserve, is superb as a man inquiring into a faith he had previously thought had nothing to do with him. But Ms. Bellugi is a real find; she inhabits her character, who, even as she hides her secrets, is so genuinely beatific that you can hear it in her breathing.

Mueller’s direction is patient and sensitive, the cast is accomplished and committed, and the picture’s comedic aspects sometimes earn a chuckle. But Small Town Wisconsin is not sufficiently distinctive to rise above the standard-issue cinematic contemplation of the arguably poignant state of the white male American screw-up.

Its story line is clean; the live-action actors, particularly Rose Byrne (as Bea, an artist who paints portraits of the bunnies), bring their onscreen-appeal A game; and the computer-generated animals are charming, albeit lacking in the particular gentle winsomeness of Potter’s originals.

Burr is skilled at this, for sure. And Woodbine and Cannavale, who are better actors overall, slide into Burr’s mode with ease. The results will prove satisfactory and maybe cathartic for his fans.

Adam Wescott and Scott Fisher, Ms. Lazzarato’s management team, are executive producers for the film, and to a great extent “This Is Everything” seems to follow an agenda set by them in tandem with the movie’s subject, which is largely commendable in its pitch for acceptance and against bigotry.

There’s some fascinating and provocative material in The Capote Tapes that is diluted by the director Ebs Burnough’s insistence on teasing a question that, arguably, has a self-evident answer.

There’s much historical material here that’s of high interest, and Ms. Swinton’s performance of Bell’s letters convey Bell’s skills as a writer, but the movie is ultimately too conceptually labored for its own good — or that of its subject.

If Billie gives short shrift to its subject’s artistry while underscoring her life’s squalor, it still offers pockets of valuable insight.

The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.

Only intermittently stimulating.

The most interesting thing about Ibiza, not to get too highfalutin, is its positive treatment of female desire.

In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey. The movie toggles between those two states throughout.

The whole enterprise is so fundamentally good-natured and fluffy that it’s sometimes hard to stay annoyed by it.

Harvey is detail-oriented, good-humored, intimately involved and encouraging of her fellow musicians. The tunes she crafts for the resulting record are intricate and eclectic, but still honor the raw directness of her early work.

Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists.

An energetic, visually attractive but ultimately irritating comedy-drama.

Kier is unfailingly captivating in the film, which makes it all the more bothersome that the film itself doesn’t match him.

The narrative conceits of Nine Days, while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.

Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.

Because it is a French film, or rather the kind of French film that wants to serve its sentimentality with a dollop of prestige, The Midwife doesn’t offer an entirely shameless version of the “dying free spirit imbues uptight caretaker with a new lust for life” scenario.

At the end Ms. Maclean forsakes all the unsettling subtlety and nuance she has had so clearly in her command to serve up a finale that I found frankly confounding, despite its having been foreshadowed.

The movie is written and directed, with undeniable sincerity, by Todd Robinson. While its story mechanics are creaky, the valor of Pitsenbarger is evoked cogently, in well-executed battle sequences

This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.

As this pleasant but ultimately inconsequential movie’s narrative thins out, it emphasizes again and again that there is, as of now, only one operating Blockbuster store in the world. Luckily its proprietor is the warm and ingratiating Sandi Harding.

It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry variety.

This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.

Hoss’s work is impeccable and illuminating, and the movie’s foursquare, frank, brisk approach is salutary. But its final scenes lean into triteness and frustrating evasiveness, which makes the picture a less than entirely satisfying experience.

This stuff is best appreciated by rock mavens. Many of the other bands telling their stories (including the Boo Radleys and the Charlatans) didn’t have much of an impact in the States, so Anglophilia helps, too.

While the whole thing is ruthlessly well done, it also sometimes seems to lean into a kind of moral relativism.

[A] friendly and entirely uncritical documentary.

Beyond the personal stories, the movie frames the tour and Truth or Dare as landmarks in the push for gay rights and awareness, and makes a convincing case.

The movie is, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient enough in delivering its crowd-pleasing bits that truly starving suspense genre hounds, at least, won’t necessarily mind.

The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.

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.

As a musical biography, this comes up short; it plays substantially better as a story of recovery and recovered integrity.

Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here.

This is a straightforward story that Mr. de Los Santos Arias, making his fictional feature debut, tells in an ever-changing style, shooting in color and black and white. He also alternates the shape of the frame, mostly toggling between a boxy frame and the wider one most mainstream movies are shown in. Whatever effect was hoped for, this viewer just saw affectation.

Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance.

The movie percolates enough that even when, at its climax, it shamelessly recycles a grisly punch line from 1987’s “RoboCop,” it’s kind of endearing, not least because Mr. Anderson and company make it work.

The movie insists on a breezy optimism that skirts glibness, then doubles down on it with a having-it-all finale that’s as ridiculous as it is nervy.

The spy-versus-spy scenario set out by the screenwriter Ward Parry isn’t going to give the maestro Mick Harron (“Slow Horses”) any sleepless nights. But as a vehicle for Statham’s bone-breaking escapades, it’ll do. And the story avoids some of the expected clichés.

Franco practically dares the viewer to call his conclusion far-fetched. And for better or worse, the director’s dynamic filmmaking makes some of his projections stick.

This picture is not as ridiculous as a “Sharknado” movie — Harlin is out to make a genuine nail-biter, and he largely succeeds, maintaining interest even as the two-hour mark approaches. But it’s not enough to make you genuinely afraid to go into the ocean this summer.

For Kubrick enthusiasts, this picture will provide a fun and sometimes moving fix.

This is a Hong Kong action picture in the classical mode, balancing mayhem with sentimentality, offering up bone-crunching and jaw-dropping set pieces, and pulling out all the stops for a finale teeming with stressful twists and turnabouts — not to mention kicks, punches, gunshots and explosions.

The director is Michael Sucsy, who is not always up to the challenges of the knotty material — we live in a world of mainstream movies with clumsy edits, but this one has more conspicuously bad cuts than most.

The beauty and absurdity (things also get harrowing) don’t entirely compensate for the overheated romanticism in which the movie is grounded, but they do make Two Lovers and a Bear a nearly singular cinematic trek.

The music itself is exciting enough that it washes out some of the unpleasant taste of the film’s early “white people discovering stuff” tone. And Chanda himself is incredibly winning, especially when he takes the stage.

Uncle Kent 2, directed (for the most part) by Todd Rohal from Mr. Osborne’s script, is a funnier and more imaginative film than its predecessor, but it’s still what you might call a niche proposition.

“That is the meaning of tribute. Not showing myself at all. There is no ‘me’ to begin with,” Sakurai, who is now 59, says at one point. This is a terrifying notion, but the movie doesn’t choose to run with it.

De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision.

Directed by Ritesh Batra from a screenplay by Nick Payne, The Sense of an Ending maintains intrigue and emotional magnetism as its mystery unfolds.

Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. . . . But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.

There’s a reason that “Road Trip” is premiering in the middle of Black History Month. While expansively anarchic to a fault, the movie’s anger, and its pride, is convincing.

The scenarios and their attendant psychologies are utterly conventional, but the characters and cast are appealing in equal measure.

Portals is something of a bait-and-switch. While the concept suggests mind-bending alternate-reality stuff, the not terribly cerebral reality of the movie offers more in the line of eyeball-gouging, blood-spurting, face-melting shock horror.

The reason I’m rating this movie higher than I would otherwise, is Christopher Walken. His commitment to making Caleb as thoroughly unlikable as humanly possible yields a character who’s kind of terrifyingly off-putting even when his words and actions are ineffectual. A piece of acting alchemy of which only few are capable. I can’t imagine how powerful it might have been in a better movie.

Just when you think you’ve got the movie pegged, it pulls a daring switch of perspective. While the thrill of that little coup is short-lived, it suggests that Mr. Williams may come up with something more substantial with his next feature.

The movie is shamelessly manipulative on several levels, and the cast members do their respective bits effectively.

Mr. Lawther is sympathetic and appealing as Billy, but Ms. Styler seems to mistake broad strokes for stylistic daring, and her colorful but diffuse movie never jells.

This putrid but at times oddly amiable exercise raised questions of an esoteric nature to this reviewer’s mind, such as “Why do all the female extras look as if they’ve been kidnapped from the post-punk club Coney Island High, since that club closed over 20 years ago?” If you too are apt to be diverted by such concerns, you might be amused by this.

The movie does pretty well as a treatment of identity and selfhood in a social landscape that grows increasingly alienating as it becomes more transparent. But it somehow fails to wholly satisfy.

The movie does gain in stature just by letting Cage be Cage. When he’s riding in a car right after his release, Frank rolls down the window feeling a breeze on his face. Cage puts on that “shine sweet freedom” expression he used at the end of “Con Air.” If you’re a fan of the actor, this is a moment when all is right in the world.

It’s very colorful, for sure, but the dialogue is lead-footed at best.

The image of Gwyneth Paltrow looking anguish-stricken has become such a cinematic meme that it hardly bodes well for Proof that it opens with this sight.

Tolkien manages several scenes of credible emotional delicacy.

If The Locksmith offers anything new, it’s in neutering the genre.

I have to give Morgenthaler credit for what we used to call “moxie” — whatever the hell he’s doing, or thinks he’s doing, he’s fully committed to it, and while he doesn’t really pull off the unhinged apocalyptic fireworks he’s reaching for at the end (and I don’t think any director save Andrzej Zulawski, who’s clearly an influence, could pull them off), I give him credit for trying.

Bad Therapy is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water.

The movie never builds enough momentum, emotional or narrative, to get the viewer on its side.

The star of the movie is a compelling figure, and Mr. D’Ambrosio presents quite a few people from Mr. Serpico’s past who have a similar draw. But the director’s filmmaking instincts are not always salutary.

The visual effects are decent, the cast is better than decent, and that’s all, folks.

What Mr. Gibney uncovers is grave and shocking and could make a viewer concerned for the safety of the filmmaker. But its presentation is flawed.

When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There’s certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that’s why there’s “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

The fact that the film’s most resonant and likable portions are those in which nothing actually happens almost too nicely encapsulates why The Looking Glass falls sadly flat throughout much of its running time.

I did admire this movie’s near-lunatic genre-hopping.

I like a good flying, fire-breathing dragon as much as the next fellow. Beowulf's excesses, though, are such that the film ought to carry the subtitle …But This Is Ridiculous.

The period spy thriller The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is only intermittently engaging and amusing, and those portions of the movie that succeed are also frustrating. Because they’re cushioned by enervated, conceptually befuddled, and sometimes outright indifferent stuff.

Ms. Demeestere’s direction winds up frustratingly splitting the difference between thoughtfully detached and just plain vague.

This sentimental, nearly genteel movie demonstrates there’s a world of difference between invoking magic and conjuring it.

A twist whipsaws the movie into a darker place, one in the vicinity of Patricia Highsmith. But no murder takes place, and the movie’s resolution confirms what one may have suspected all along: Its dominant room tone is kinda-sorta that of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”

Is this all well-acted? It certainly is, especially by Langella. But all things being equal, I’d prefer to see him in a revival of “The Man Who Came To Dinner.”

Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.

Eventually the movie paints itself into a corner then sinks into grisly sludge. Stevenson’s technical skill can’t save him from a trite worldview.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

The title Military Wives is plain to the point of blandness. This good-hearted comedy-drama, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, deserves a little better.

The documentary elicits some viewer indignation on her behalf, but overall, it’s not a very inspired piece of work. While it depicts M.I.A.’s bristling at being called a terrorist advocate, it never wholly clarifies her specific political aims.

The aggregate effect is like aesthetic insulin shock, albeit from an artificial sweetener.

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.

The movie is not entirely my cup of tea, although it is refreshing in its depiction of diverse, older female characters.

As ridiculous as it gets, and that’s plenty, A Dog’s Way Home manages to serve up a one- to two-hankie finale, depending on the extent of your dog-person-ness.

The movie doesn’t quite make it to two hours, but my patience was tried pretty much any point at which the movie went a long stretch without a song.

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.

Hence, the movie lumbers its way from intriguing to frustrating. But Berham does manage to keep your attention, even as his vision tends to irritate in the wrong way.

The movie’s strongest feature is its depiction of a male-female friendship that matter-of-factly abjures any romantic component. Temple and Pegg, when their characters aren’t falling apart (and even sometimes when they are), convey intelligence and mutual regard with refreshing straightforwardness.

Throughout, the filmmakers live up to the movie’s title. But as the story comes to a close, they opt to wrap it in comforting cliché, and they turn a miserable but credible viewing experience into a confounding one.

Clean has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.

Watching it with a demonstrative crowd in a Times Square theater proved to this former grindhouse devotee that sometimes you can go home again, at least momentarily.

The sub-90-minute run time isn’t an emblem of concision; the movie simply ends too soon.

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.”

Life struck me as several cuts above “meh” but never made me jump out of my seat.

Ultimately, this is one of those movies where it seems okay if you like this sort of thing for a while, but after it crosses the 90-minute mark, it seems irretrievably a little much even if you like this sort of thing.

What fascinated me most about the movie was its likely inadvertent depiction of the comfortable bubble the band and its fandom seem to have created for each other.

I’m all for a juicy, action-packed Gerard Butler movie. A Gerard Butler movie that wants to have its geopolitics taken seriously is a different matter. And honestly, it’s an even more different matter when the movie is not particularly juicy or, you know, action-packed.

A classic, and classically lamentable, good-news/bad news proposition. In the good news department, it’s largely a sturdy, enjoyable domestic comedy drama.

For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.

The movie is well put together, enough so that if you’re not entirely tired of its clichés, it might constitute a tolerable entertainment. I’d rather watch “Double Indemnity” for the 15th time.

Constructing the narrative (made up mostly of dramatic reenactments, although given the static nature of many of the scenes, the word "dramatic" is pushing it) obliquely, Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede weave in the thread concerning the individual referred to as "Mr. Hands" into the film almost casually.

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.