Glenn Kenny

Its lively finale is heartening, given the patience that Laaksonen was obliged to exercise before he could live his life out in the open. But the insights of the movie are too scant for much of a real impression to take hold of the viewer.

The movie, directed by Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora, is quiet and quietly moving and quite different from “Hoarders” in its steady pace and poetic vérité style.

Mr. Chan is in his early 60s, and he doesn’t deliver the action pizazz here that he used to. Nor, frankly, does he summon enough gravitas to be persuasive in the role of a grief-maddened father. For what it’s worth, Mr. Brosnan, as Quon’s nemesis, sells the angry-all-the-time requirement for his character.

As is customary in Mr. Baumbach’s pictures, the acting is spectacular.

Appears at first to take a more macro perspective on gay rights. But it tells a big story indeed.

Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.

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

Overdrive has all the features of a potentially entertaining action B-movie for overgrown boys: gorgeous near-mint vintage cars, rugged male performers, seductive female performers, ravishing European locations. What it doesn’t have is a lot of cinematic adrenaline.

The scenes that leave Ms. Mara and Mr. Mendelsohn alone are, tellingly, the most interesting and effective ones. Their performances are tightly focused and unflinching; too bad they are surrounded by a lot of heavy-handed, poorly aimed cinematic showing off.

Mr. Schumacher’s movie is more a failed tone poem than a horror picture, and to its credit, this new version, with a trickier script by Ben Ripley and hyper-competent direction from the Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev improves on it — by making it behave like a horror movie every now and then.

It’s painful to watch. Not because no one cares about Adam’s heartache. But because the movie is boring, trite, sexist tripe that wants to make the viewer empathize with a guy who’s actually pretty aggressive in his pursuit of loserdom.

So, no, this is not a frivolous film. There are a few surfing sequences that provide a rush of “whoa!” adrenaline, and some breathtaking Hawaiian landscapes on display. But the movie is a character study more than anything else.

A documentary that serves a vital function. Ricky Gervais notwithstanding, this disease is no joke, and it’s not going to be addressed as the scourge that it is until a larger portion of the population gets that. This movie should help.

It’s violence for cowardly voyeurs who want to make the people who annoy them just shut up in a way that’s silent, sterile, and thoroughly humiliating to the victim.

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

Stronger takes more artistic risks than any other American-made “inspired by true events” picture I can recall.

While it’s possible that the director and cinematographer Chris Moukarbel is good at withholding unflattering material, Gaga comes off well, and credibly so: intelligent, an accomplished craftswoman, a well-mannered collaborator and boss.

There is gentle comedy here, and a real rooting interest deriving from Ms. Zhang’s committed, never-a-false-note performance. The film’s unusual perspective makes it a distinctive and potentially enriching experience.

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

Nobody’s Watching addresses immigration issues head on, but it’s more about being set existentially adrift.

While Rebel in the Rye isn’t quite as bad as its pile-of-bricks-clunky title suggests, it’s both simple- and literal-minded, less concerned with Salinger’s consciousness or sensibility than with his ostensible ontological status as a Tortured Creative Giant.

I suppose this went down easily enough for me because I grew up with this kind of stuff, and can surrender to it as a kind of cinematic comfort food. But still. For those not so inclined, the entertainment value could conceivably be derived from the brisk, no-nonsense direction by Michael Apted, and the talents of what they used to call “an all-star cast”.

One feels the filmmaker trying hard to work out the inner struggles of his sad but largely unsympathetic characters. But his movie is as miserable and ultimately confounding as it is earnest.

Birth of the Dragon is ambitious: it wants to be a character study, an explication of martial arts philosophy and an action picture.... But the film never really gets fully juiced until the climax.

The movie’s main feature is a group of long-take, moving-camera action scenes that I guess might have been more engaging had the characters on the run and in battle been figures you wanted to spend any time with. They’re not.

If this film’s directors, Valérie Müller and the French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, don’t offer much overt material on Polina’s inner life, it’s because they don’t have to: the point of Polina, and this movie, is that her dancing is her being.

Clash turns into a full-fledged horror movie, albeit one without the fake comfort of a supernatural or science-fiction pretext. It’s just man’s inhumanity to man, in full sway.

The all-live action section of this movie is lit and shot almost exactly like an episode of “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”

The moments of charm and fun are few.

There’s more going on in this movie’s 90-plus minutes than in many summer blockbusters nearly twice its length.

Mr. Trengove shoots the film in intimate wide-screen, getting in close to the performers as their characters tamp down explosive feelings, often letting the spectacular landscapes behind them break down into soft-focus abstractions. His direction is perfectly judged up to and including the shudder-inducing ending.

In a comedic bildungsroman like this one, it’s apt to have doubts about the hero early on, but you’re not supposed to want to throw him out of a high window. I did, and I never quite recovered from that feeling.

Pilgrimage is the kind of movie one fears is going out of style forever. A historical action drama, serious in tone and intent but also invested in delivering movie-movie thrills.

This is direct and frequently powerful filmmaking that doesn’t much care about meeting my aesthetic standards.

The dimension of humanity only buttresses the humor.

Not unlike an expensively tattooed panhandler, the couple elicit only a skeptical kind of sympathy.

This movie shows how Fitzmaurice was able to direct the picture — scheduling the shot so that he could efficiently marshal his energy was a big part of the process, as of course was the “eye gaze” computer.

Kidnap isn’t schlock, it’s garbage.

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.

The film’s success is directly dependent on the personalities — and achievements — of the young women highlighted. Despite the narrative gaps, Ms. Lipitz excels at putting across those personalities.

An actor before he was a screenwriter, Mr. Sheridan clearly spent a lot of his time learning about filmmaking on movie sets; his direction is assured throughout.

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.”

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.

As well meaning as this movie is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.

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.

To add to the pain and despair of the experience, The Emoji Movie is preceded by a short, “Puppy,” featuring the characters from the “Hotel Transylvania” animated movies. It is also idiotic.

None of this is particularly difficult to watch; the cinematic competence, the sincerity with which the clichés get served up, and so on, make a relatively smooth viewing experience. But they also render what would have been an at times harrowing real-life story into something safe and bland.

The movie goes down byways you might not have expected: Taboo from Black Eyed Peas makes an appearance, and heavy metal shows up via both guitarist Steve Salas (one of the movie’s executive producers) and drummer Randy Castillo, who played with Ozzy. Their stories are among the movie’s most moving.

It is reported that this movie’s scenario was inspired by the life of Schroeder’s own mother, and the film has a personal tone that is not always detectable in his other movies. It enhances a film that’s one of the most thoughtful in his body of work.

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.

Ms. Covi and Mr. Frimmel’s Mister Universo is a disarming and humane picture, an unexpected delight.

On the whole, Becoming Bond is sufficiently winning that you might even forgive its chapter titles, each one a worse-than-the-previous play on a James Bond-associated phrase

The movie is at its most entertaining when detailing the making of “Midnight Express” and the contentious personalities involved.

Santoalla ends with the mystery solved. The threads that remain hanging imbue this peculiar story of paradise lost with a tragic resonance.

Almost Sunrise presents a journey that is very much worth the time of anyone who’s concerned about the effect war has on our brothers and sisters who fight—which should translate to “everyone.”

The performers get their jobs done without leaving much of an impression. In terms of who or what Footnotes can win over, I think only hardcore Francophiles will find its charms genuinely compelling.

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.

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.

Marvel movies are not concerned with altering your precious bodily fluids. This one is a slightly better than average example of the species. Watch it in good health.

It’s a genuine achievement on an inexhaustible subject.

Despite the urgency of the situation the musicians face, when they’re not doing their work, the movie is quiet, observant, taking in the austere beauty of the land and the people.

Ms. Dorfman emerges as an artist of deep compassion, empathy, humor and wisdom.

Most of all it shows how DeJoria’s passion for doing good extends into a head-spinning variety of walks of life.

Mr. Rodrigues ultimately delivers an intriguing, daring film that is likely to surprise both his fans and moviegoers unfamiliar with his work.

This is a movie that is too frenetic and basic to make a substantial impression. I appreciated a kernel of observation here and there, but not enough for me to give it a whole-hearted embrace.

All Eyez on Me, a fictionalized film biography of Shakur, directed by Benny Boom and starring Demetrius Shipp Jr., is not only a clumsy and often bland account of his life and work, but it also gives little genuine insight into his thought, talent or personality.

This is a remarkably assured movie, through and through. Walsh and cinematographer Guy Godfree have taken care to make every individual shot a thing of beauty. But the artfulness always acts in service of the emotions, which in the end become both inspiring and heartbreaking.

If you can roll with it, the movie is both breezy fun and a pain-free life lesson delivery vehicle

The movie’s climax has sufficient twists and turns for a conventional payoff. But the movie, adapted from a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, is ultimately more concerned with the genuinely tragic dimensions of the story than its suspense angles.

One of the problems with this My Cousin Rachel is that it’s hard to come up with any issue or reason relative to its creation, I’m afraid.

Dawson City now enters that time line as an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece.

It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced.

Ultimately, Ascent is a genuinely poetic portrait of a place, and various people’s relation to it.

This is a striking and thought-provoking picture.

A movie with which it is easy to find fault, and if you’re a particular kind of person, you’ll find fault with it without even trying too hard.

The movie’s ambition is the good news. The bad news is that it is a hash, choosing to jumble the historical record and frame a Churchill bout with depression against the D-Day invasion of France by Allied forces.

The movie’s tree-falling-in-the-forest-with-no-one-to-hear-it denouement is an apt but not entirely hopeless metaphor for the condition of its characters.

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.

As sad as Garcia’s end is, Long Strange Trip remains an exhilarating and inspiring movie. For a not inconsiderable period, Garcia, Weir, Hart, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and various fellow travelers saw the possibilities that their talents and the times offered them, and made hay of them.

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.

The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.

It’s not as poetic or immediately enjoyable as the first film. But it is tougher and more analytical, with real challenges embedded in its pleasures.

If you saw the trailer, you got the best the movie has to offer.

A mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.

This is an angry, vivid, passionate film.

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.

Where The Wall excels is in the creation of an extra-untantalizing desert atmosphere. The dust is practically inhalable, the sunlight glaring, and the characters grow ever more sand-gritted with each mishap.

One need not admire Zweig’s writing to recognize the worth of this thoughtful treatment of one of the countless real-life tragedies of 20th-century history.

As an oblique examination and critique of political and art history and their various interactions over the 20th century, Manifesto is both witty and provocative. It is not, however, a motion picture for people seeking a plot.

The Drowning...distinguishes itself by applying a depth of psychological observation that yields a genuinely unsettling vision.

Directed by Pappi Corsicato and executive produced, typically, by the subject himself, the movie is never uninteresting but is often surprisingly low-energy and, even more surprisingly, visually drab.

He was a real artist and, especially if you believe that art is all about asking questions, about life and about art, he was a great one.

The wisdom of this meticulously crafted film is in its genuine irony, which amplifies steadily throughout until culminating in a moment of real heartbreak that, ironically enough, only sets the stage for a cycle of deceit to begin again.

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

Mr. Schreiber has almost no physical resemblance to Wepner, in his heyday a burly, mustachioed redhead. Mr. Schreiber is a terrific actor, however, and he pulls it off. His portrayal works partly because of its understatement.

This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.

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

It’s not involving; it’s not scary; it’s just kind of miserable.

It’s a movie that puts the viewer into a bad dream, and is very canny in dispensing the keys to unlock the meanings of that dream — and in strategically withholding some of those keys.

The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over.

If you love the music Berns made, you’ll love this movie; if you don’t, I feel for you, but “Bang!” might nevertheless entertain with its dish.

This movie won an award in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes last year, and was also Finland’s entry for consideration for a 2016 Academy Award. For all that, I should warn some readers that this is a movie that’s laid back to what many would consider a fault.

The movie hits its cinematic stride, as it happens, when events are at their worst. The Promise is drenched in production value and replete with ravishing shots of sunrises and sunsets, but it’s in the scenes of fleeing, of battle, and of horrendous loss that the film is at its most effective. The depiction of the savagery inflicted on Armenia is bracing.

As it turns out, modes of farce and fantasy enable Mr. Dumont to pull the rug out from under the viewer in a number of new and upsetting ways. Be prepared.

Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.

Only intermittently stimulating.

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.

It is grounded, and made most exemplary, by Cynthia Nixon’s performance. Every actor in this movie is wonderful. But Nixon’s precision in portraying every particular mood of Emily — for each individual scene calls for absolute specificity — is simply spectacular.

Chasing Trane streamlines the story of the jazz saxophonist, but it does so in a way that doesn’t feel like cheating. Scheinfeld’s approach is to give the viewer the forest, point out a few trees and get out, confident that those trees will inspire the viewer to spend more time in the forest.

An eccentric and lively animated fantasy.

The variable incongruities of Glory give it a queasy power uncommon in contemporary cinema. It’s the feel-bad movie of the spring.

If Gifted works for you as it did me, it’s mostly because of the cast, but also the way the story unpeels.

Because Mr. Hill is still, in most respects, Mr. Hill, a lot of the movie is more watchable than it has a right to be. But ultimately, The Assignment ends up being ridiculous even by its own nonsensical standards.

The movie’s approach is gratuitously grandiose.

“I want to make abstract art that’s funny, happy, energetic, joyful,” he exclaims at one point. That he did. This movie is a good introduction to it.

[Mr. Léaud's] riveting, and a little alarming. As for Mr. Serra, while he often enjoys playing the foppish provocateur in his interviews, his film is sober, meticulous and entirely convincing in its depiction of period and mortality.

I Called Him Morgan evokes times and places, and the sorrows and joys of the jazz life in those times and places, with real integrity.

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

A Woman, a Part mixes passion and ambivalence to create a work with ambiguities that seem earned, and lived in.

Anchored by a startling performance by Michalina Olszanska, the Czech film “I, Olga Hepnarova” is an austere, hypnotic story of sadness, madness and murder.

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.

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

The Belko Experiment is a grisly, sick-making exercise in sadism that tries to camouflage its base venality in a thought-experiment plot.

Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, After the Storm is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.

Upon taking in the gorgeousness — and it is really something; the production design of this movie, by Luca Tranchino, is exceptional (as is Daniel Aranyó’s cinematography, which shines when he’s shooting in the natural world) —Lillie observes, “It’s like being inside God’s thoughts.”

Well, if there’s one positive thing to say about Brimstone, it’s that it doesn’t lack for lunatic ambition.

The movie, shot mostly in crisp, sometimes smoky black and white, is far better, a quirky but purposeful grafting of Mack Sennett to the French New Wave. Yet it’s the soundtrack that has the staying power.

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

Replete with sometimes startling imagery...Suntan captures a set of very specific feelings: the exhilaration and embarrassment of falling, followed by the desperate denial that one has landed in a very bad place.

Director Freundlich clearly likes to dig in deep with this kind of character material, and here it pays off in ways it really hasn’t in some of his previous feature work (which includes “Trust the Man” and “The Rebound”).

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.

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.

What’s interesting about Rock Dog is just how very unapologetically a kid’s movie it is.

Kiki shows us a group of brave and beautiful souls for whom the struggle is, unfortunately, probably about to get even harder.

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

Once the movie hits its true stride it’s really fascinating. At least it is if you have an interest in its subject, which I think maybe you should, since the compulsion to stand on a stage and seek approval by telling jokes is one of the most potentially masochistic in the entire human condition

The character work here is both intimate and nicely compressed. But the movie really gets to its most sublime heights visually.

This quiet movie, shot in black-and-white and color, is an unhurried, beautiful, and pained work that through simple means resonates on various levels.

Much of the movie, from its attempts to capture the confusing exhilaration of youthful experience to its predictable progressive character dynamics, is labored.

An entirely watchable and sometimes engaging effort that serves as a great showcase for both the new and more seasoned members of its cast.

The best thing about Emily is that she’s played by Evanna Lynch. Lynch, who played the charmingly abstracted Luna Lovegood in some of the Harry Potter pictures, has grown into a young woman who looks like a rougher-edged Saoirse Ronan.

A consistently intelligent (or at least bright), coherently constructed comedy that is on occasion a rather pointed critique of the American education system in the early 21st century. Don’t let that keep you away, though. It’s more often than not really funny.

Whatever investigation it’s attempting, the movie is leaden in its pacing — the first 15 minutes feel like an hour — and its constricted shooting style, practically all hand-held almost close-ups, is transparent in its contrivance of realism.

Even if you are unmoved by Mr. Szegedi’s personal story (I found him somewhat sympathetic), what Keep Quiet tells us about its larger themes is upsettingly pertinent.

A road movie that’s as mesmerizing as it is tense.

While her filmmaking style can sometimes come across as staid, [Ms. Asante's] sense of pace is always acute. The best reason to see A United Kingdom, however, is the performance by Mr. Oyelowo.

The movie is replete with ingeniously constructed mini-narratives, including a turf war. The mesmerizing score by Kira Fontana, interspersed with well-chosen Turkish pop, is a real asset.

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.”

So hackneyed, tired, labored and overstuffed with contempt not only for all of its targets but also its own self that one gets the feeling that the talented Mr. McDonagh has gone mad with rage. Possibly during dealings with the American film industry.

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

The movie’s wide-screen framing, ruthless plot reversals and say-what-you-mean writing sometimes recall a master of socially conscious cinema from another era, Sam Fuller. But this is a picture with its own strong voice.

Until its climax, which clearly seeks to be congratulated on its restraint, Dark Night is not much more than an arty bore.

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.

A more finely focused treatment would have made a much better summation of, or introduction to, Mr. Naharin’s work.

This film, directed by Zhao Liang (acclaimed here for his 2009 “Petition”) is a kind of poetic documentary. It’s all images and sounds, no interviews, no talking heads.

The tonal weirdness and the philosophical fallacies and the general level of treacle did not sit very well with me. Then again, I have to admit I’m really more of a cat person.

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

The information here is compelling and frightening, but the movie is ham-handed.

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.

One thing’s for sure: In Staying Vertical, every character has sex on the brain, all the time.

Remarkably pointless movie.

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.

The movie is both heady (there are real thrills in the stories of exploration) and sobering (Mr. Lorius’s findings are convincing). This is a cogent, accessible cinematic delineation of an increasingly crucial problem.

We Are the Flesh, its abundance of repellent imagery notwithstanding, has an air of the academic about it.

The movie is a worthy time capsule and a must for Cohen devotees. Its occasional meanderings into artiness, which take the form of interpolation of outside footage (war atrocities and home movies, mainly) are emblematic of the time it was made and mercifully brief.

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.

Did I mention this movie is a comedy? It is, and a very sure-footed one, although the style does take some getting used to.

Jonathan Penner’s sharp script (from a story by Robert Damon Schneck) and Stacy Title’s assured direction keep the heat on, and there’s some resourceful misdirection that deepens the story and intensifies the scares.

[A] cogent, fascinating portrait of the artist.

The movie, directed by Robin Pront from a script by Pront and Jeroen Perceval (who’s also one of the film’s lead actors), is well-crafted up to a point. But the end to which it is crafted is utterly useless.

Mr. Davis, speaking to Faith Morris of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, poses a knotty question about how far his cause of eliminating race hate has yet to go. Her reply: “How long is this documentary going to be?”

It’s heartening to see Mr. Chan, who plays the avuncular leader of the guerrillas, demonstrating that he’s still game, but you wish his energy were being expended in more consistently enjoyable pictures.

In its sensitivity and attention to detail, Ocean Waves makes itself into something special, and kind of magical, and so proves very much a Ghibli gem.

The movie’s protagonist, played with spectacular attention to detail and what feels like a genuine sense of affinity by Adam Driver, is named Paterson.

Despite its shortcomings, there are things about this film that are hard to shake; the movie’s ultimate wisdom and overarching compassion make it very likely that you won’t want to shake them, after all.

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

For an ostensible action movie, the cast spends an awful lot of time standing around and looking lost. I can only guess that they were following their director’s lead.

My reservations about such pictures in general were not put to rest by Patriots Day, but this film’s real merits are not easily dismissed either.

I’m not even going to discuss, in detail at least, the elephant in the ideological room that Passengers inhabits, which is its spectacular sexism.

The directorial pyrotechnics keep Solace from “dragging” in a narrative sense; the very real boredom it nonetheless elicits is more existential.

The Hollow Point is such a shameless and indifferent recycling of Nihilistic Crime In The New American West clichés that it feels like it was crafted by committee. A really lazy committee.

The point of it all being that history and poetry are not possible without personified antimonies, real or imagined. Neruda does not make this point in any particularly convincing way, despite excellent performances by Luis Gnecco as the title character, a stolid Gael Garcia Bernal as his pursuer, and Mercedes Morán as Delia.

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.

This is an engaging movie depicting some sympathetic people, and is ultimately worthwhile. But there’s a one-dimensional quality to Ghostland; Mr. Stadler’s team obviously felt it was more important to record events than to explore conditions.

The filmmakers are themselves too celebrity besotted to comment in a meaningful way on how Benson’s career balanced depictions of the rich and famous with in-the-trenches risk-taking.

The movie makes no attempt to engage any current situation, basking instead in a one-dimensional nostalgia.

In a movie year in which I’ve had to see both “Clown” and “Trash Fire,” the bar for worst of year is pretty low. I suppose that Pet, for me at least, completes a trifecta of sorts.

The movie is not boring as such, but because it is a chronicle told almost entirely by the people behind the space (Mr. Conboy being one of them), it is relentlessly personal — there’s no genuine cultural critique.

The clichéd story line pursues turgidity with a relentless determination.

The ending, while not inapt, also delves into a realm of cinematic overstatement that the movie had up until that time been careful to avoid. While disappointing, it doesn’t wholly mitigate the power of what has come before. This is an engrossing and unnerving film.

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.

Mr. Montiel may have had honorable intentions in creating this movie. But what he made is neither a viable work of art nor an effective call to action. It’s a sadistic and ghoulish spectacle.

What the movie is very good at revealing and expanding upon is how this reluctant actor became such a masterful one.

Always Shine is a deft, assured movie with a sly self-reflexive undercurrent containing commentary on sexism and self-idealization that’s provocative, and sometimes disturbing.

It’s very fresh and often very funny stuff, communicated in a direct, unforced style.

It’s an impeccable, creepy and genuinely transporting movie.

Particularly in its portrayal of Thurman, who here isn’t so much misunderstood and unloved as he is dumber than a bag of rocks, this sequel actively devalues the compassion-on-the-knife-edge-of-misanthropy that distinguished the original in favor of a mainstream gross-out cartoon. The market demands nothing less, apparently.

This is one of those “based on true events” movies that give you the distinct feeling that the true events deserved better.

A work of exceptional, undeniable craft, but it’s also a movie that’s meant to stick to you a little bit.

Ne Me Quitte Pas...is soberingly adept at portraying the tedium of drunken life. Whether it actually avoids emulating said tedium depends on how engaging you find its two stooges. I was sympathetic without being wholly charmed.

The movie is a deft sort of dual narrative.

There’s some intriguing social commentary in the Chinese comedic melodrama I Am Not Madame Bovary.... But appreciating it, and the other points of interest in the movie, requires a perhaps unusual amount of patience, or even indulgence.

With their scrupulous but unobtrusive attention to pertinent details, Mr. Younger, Mr. Teller and the rest of the cast make Bleed for This more than an inspiring version of Mr. Pazienza’s story; they make it a genuinely interesting one.

The movie is relentless in how it poses questions about our culture’s way of dealing with the power of female sexuality (and it wouldn’t work without Robinson, whose appearance and performance is impeccable for the job) and acknowledges that there’s not only unease in these questions and their answers but also mordant hilarity.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

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.

The writer-director Zack Whedon toggles his plot between “Out of the Past” and “Three Days of the Condor” with highly mixed results before letting loose with a hilariously unconvincing climactic reveal.

The family comedy-drama Almost Christmas is an often disarmingly entertaining picture, in spite of its being a not particularly well-thought-out cinematic contrivance.

A very unusual and rare kind of movie: one that is good in spite of itself. Which isn’t to say that the movie’s director and co-producer Tony Stone doesn’t make some provocative, interesting choices.

Dog Eat Dog is a movie that wants everyone off its lawn, but only after they’ve had time to appreciate that said lawn is way more nihilistic than their own.

I didn’t think I had see a worse fiction film this year than that other failed American Guignol, “Clown.” I may have been wrong.

In a sense, the weirdest thing about Gimme Danger is how not weird it is.

It may surprise people who’ve experienced the Gallaghers only in tabloid-fodder mode that “Supersonic” teems with stirring and even moving moments.

The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise

As laudable as the movie is, it does not quite achieve greatness. That’s the fault of both its indirectness and its obviousness.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.

While it’s not entirely kid-friendly, this portrait of an artist is both enchanting and thought provoking.

It goes very far south, with two plot reveals that are among the most ludicrous that I’ve experienced in quite some time.

The movie is a good representation of Mr. Hart’s comedy, but not a perfect one.

The movie’s impersonal, conventional telling of a reasonably standard male coming-of-age story almost tends to make the punk milieu it depicts beside the point.

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.

This isn’t a film that makes a big deal of its contemporary authenticity; it wears its carefully measured elements lightly, the better to shine a light on its intriguing characters.

This is a potent, vital film.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero is both an irrefutable proof of that statement and a nagging reminder that the statement is insufficient to address the ultimate tragedy of war.

A figure as unusual and distinctive as Fields certainly deserves a commemoration. The bad news here is that he deserves better than what Danny Says serves up.

The full-on goofiness is not reliably buoyant; this is an intermittently enjoyable but often choppy comic ride.

Good-hearted stuff, to be sure, but mainly of interest to lovers of cinematic comfort food.

Tharlo instead opts for fleeting charm and shaggy humanism, until the narrative takes a grim turn that’s both trite and sexist. The bottom drops out of the movie, leaving its interest almost exclusively ethnographic.

Tim Roth gives a career-high performance in this meticulous, disturbing film written and directed by Michel Franco.

The performances are conscientious and earnest.

The bohemian paradise of this environment had a dark side, and the movie doesn’t give it short shrift. Nevertheless, a genuine exhilaration holds throughout.

A low-key and intelligent character study, Miss Stevens doesn’t escape from its indie-film commonplaces often enough to become really distinctive, but it has enough conscientiousness about its people that it doesn’t let the commonplaces fester into movie-sinking clichés.

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

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 depredations of the Nazis are depicted in a way that will make viewers want to declare war on Germany anew. But Come What May is also too pretty of a movie. It is often sentimental and, worse, schematic.

As conventional and stiff as Max Rose itself is, Lewis’ performance in it is full of virtues: he’s committed, disciplined, and entirely credible.

Some of Mr. Smith’s prior work made me laugh so hard that I cried; Yoga Hosers made me want to cry for different reasons.

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is a challenging, sometimes poignant engagement with the man and his work.

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.

Mechanic: Resurrection suffers from a storyline and script that strains credulity and insults intelligence even by the low bar set by the majority of contemporary action movies.

Hands of Stone...is absolutely a boxing movie. A corny and sometimes clumsy one, it scatters pleasures here and there, Mr. De Niro’s alert performance among them.

I’m not qualified to say whether it’s an effective delivery system for its Christian message, but I think I can credibly pronounce it a good popcorn movie.

The action is gorgeously fluid, the idiosyncratic 3-D visual conceits (including floating eyeballs undersea) are startling, and the story and its metaphors resolve in unexpected and moving ways.

The issues presented in When Two Worlds Collide are so crucial that it feels churlish to characterize it as a dutiful, and ultimately pedestrian, documentary. There is something evasive about it as well.

Anthropoid has one hell of a story to tell, a story that once again reminds us of a savagery that is not so far in humanity’s past that we need to stop being reminded of it.

An efficient and pleasurable bad-man-tries-to-go-good exposition that gives Gibson ample opportunity to flex his now-somewhat-grizzled movie-star muscle.

Mr. Baena (who, with David O. Russell, wrote the tricky 2004 “I ♥ Huckabees”) is more accomplished than many microbudget filmmakers, and the looseness with which he imbues the middle section of Joshy is deceptive, creating a sense that the necessary emotional crash might not actually occur.

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

This is not a picture about which extravagant claims ought to be made; it really is, in the end, an hour and change in a London disco in 1984. But as a page from an artist’s notebook, and a time capsule curio, it rates pretty high.

The movie’s prime mover, Rogen, is a doge of stoner humor, and he shows incredible discipline in this film by saving the first weed joke for twenty minutes in. I commend him for that.

The movie’s relentless one-note tone makes its final twist, such as it is, entirely predictable and pat.

While not an earth-shaker, this movie is an amiable and informative look at a guy who is shaping up to be, yes, one of the major American directors of the last fifty years.

The Land won’t win any awards for originality of premise. And the movie, after that premise comes into play, tends to meander more than a suspense story ought to. It meanders for the best reason, though, which is to help the viewer get to know the characters.

Schamus’ commitment to a style, and to the material, yields potent results.

Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie’s title.

Gleason is incredibly frank about Gleason’s physical suffering and the toll his terrifyingly implacable physical deterioration takes on his marriage.

The performances in the picture are all solid, but what makes Summertime really refreshing is that it doesn’t treat its central romance as anything but wholly normal, despite the attitude of other characters, or indeed, the tenor of the time in which it is set.

According to a certain interpretation of the auteur theory, a film’s value derives from the extent to which it communicates the personality and character of its director. Judged by that standard alone, I suppose “Hillary’s America” is some kind of masterpiece.

The betrayal of Native Americans by larger forces looms over this powerful movie without ever being explicitly discussed.

The movie’s actual entertainment value rises considerably during the dialogue-free sequences.

Instead of maintaining an effervescent fizzle, Phantom Boy too frequently sputters piffle.

It’s the filmmaking around the writing that casts a particular spell.

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

Meerpool’s movie is scary without being alarmist.

The filmmakers’ bold pushback against the rigid formality of the genre they draw upon doesn’t always deliver. With the exception of Ms. Korine, the performers often seem to have a hard time shaking off the aura of the contemporary. Nevertheless, there’s much of value here.

The movie raises disquieting questions, including a few that Mr. Mansky might not have meant to.

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.

Marauders lays out a scenario in the first 40 minutes or so that, oddly enough, makes you think “this is not an entirely uninteresting premise for a thriller.” But after that, things devolve into “this is extremely far-fetched” and, finally, “this is goofy.”

For what it's worth, The Legend of Tarzan is several unpretentious cuts above the pompous, leaden "Greystoke" of over thirty years ago.

The movie is pedantic, humorless, dry — all of the things that, as it happens, “The Searchers” is not.

When the tension finally does break, the movie goes a little nuts, in venerable Johnnie To tradition. The elaborate, largely slow-motion multifloor action climax is as audacious as anything he has staged and filmed.

The Neon Demon is hot garbage that dares you to call it offensive. In addition, it’s offensive.

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.

[A] glib and repellent exercise in “can you top this” genre opportunism.

The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension.

The moviemakers craft a satisfying narrative while leaving the viewer with some questions; this is a movie that manages to be disquieting and entertaining simultaneously.

Despite the appalling circumstances and events it depicts, the movie’s plain and unstinting affection for its lead characters gives Parched a frequently buoyant tone.

Taking on a novel that’s already been adapted by two of the greatest filmmakers of all time should give any contemporary director pause, you would think. But Benoît Jacquot shows no signs of intimidation in his Diary of a Chambermaid.

I’m not the only one who was at least slightly taken aback, though, by a persistent quirk in the movie’s casting, which is that not one of the Lions of American Literature in this picture was played by, well, an American.

Beth B is not out to deliver a comprehensive biography. Instead, she achieves a vivid snapshot of a still-vital artist late in a still-purposeful life.

It is well-intentioned, conscientious and competent in its filmmaking craft.

The characters and the actors playing them are appealing, and the fight scenes have a lot of moxie, not to mention a lot of steel-slinging.

I was so invested with Jong-gu and his family that as the suspense, violence and worse ratcheted up, I was not merely scared, but heartbroken. An overly literal bit of business at the end slightly undermines the film. As a whole, though, The Wailing is the hard stuff. Handle with care.

This movie is, it happens, easier to sit through than the 2014 film. The 3-D action, overseen by the director Dave Green, is not wholly incoherent. The production values (showcasing new mutants and many gear-heavy extra-dimensional machines undreamed of in any actual engineering philosophy) are ultrashiny. And there are even a couple of amusing, albeit unmemorable, sight gags and one-liners.