Helen T. Verongos

Yes, The Princess Switch: Switched Again is syrupy, and no, beyond its central gimmick, there is little substance to be found. But the same could be said for many a beloved romance film or holiday movie.

While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful, the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas.

A respectable and all-too-real introduction to a chilling chapter of a Hollywood horror story.

Although it offers a dungeon, a curse and a shocking theft, this flat, anodyne movie is unlikely to join the pantheon of holiday classics, so keep a rein on your expectations and accept that you’ll need something more to salvage the evening.

The lack of local color notwithstanding, the movie more than fulfills its promise to unsettle and to incite shivers — and it doesn’t quit.

The movie becomes a cavalcade of tired gags — less com than rom.

The tantalizing clues, occasional laughs and lapses in reality are not enough to hold this film together.

The delight of Echo in the Canyon is in the delicious details its subjects impart.

It’s rare that a director’s first feature film, accomplished with an ensemble of nonprofessional actors, proves to be as quietly powerful as Jean-Bernard Marlin’s simple but lyrical “Shéhérazade.”

Mouret manipulates our sympathies effortlessly as the story zigzags its way from there to its ultimately surprising and quite satisfying resolution.

In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.

As one Syrian character tells another, “Timing is everything in this business,” and timing is only one flawed aspect of this uneven movie.

Overall The Gardener is flat and lacking in soul, a word that comes up many times in the movie.

We get a brief dip into his family’s past and emigration from Israel, but the filmmaker never digs deeply enough to reveal any other substantial dimension of this man, or her theories about what shaped him.

A mild film, Drawing Home could use an electrical charge, or an undercurrent of urgency. The pacing is uneven, and the movie feels slow in spots and too long overall, even though it lacks detail that would have enriched it. An internet search offers a fuller idea about the real lives of the subjects.

Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.

It’s easy to fall in love with the animals in Sled Dogs. It’s thornier to sift through the words of the handlers and mushers — many of whom seem to genuinely care for the dogs — and determine how pervasive abuse is in dog-sledding ventures.

A surplus of wisdom and benevolence radiates from The Last Dalai Lama?.

Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.

Over all, this is an exciting film if not a completely cohesive one.

It conveys a satisfying, informative portrait of a well-read man who looks back at his life, good decisions and bad, with wisdom and intelligence.

While any explanation of this fraught phenomenon feels like an oversimplification, Mr. Dotan sorts out the forces and personalities that shaped the movement.

Without the benefit of theatrical devices that might clarify the order of events, its time warps undermine the plot.

In the film, a student of Mr. deLeyer’s recalls some of his advice: “Throw your heart over the top, and your horse will follow.” Harry & Snowman makes you want to do the same.

Will fluffy, poodlelike chickens replace cats on the internet? Maybe not, but these chicken people, with deep connections to their birds, make for a fun and at times astonishing film.

A parable about the contagious nature of corruption and the curse of dirty money, 1000 Rupee Note asks, How valuable is a windfall to people who live their lives largely without money?

Mr. Church fully inhabits the character, making the most of Willie’s dented moral sense and his many limitations. But the film constructs some too-perfect solutions to problems and manipulates our emotions.

The Wild Life is pretty to look at, with its skies and ocean, calm or stormy, and it has a driving soundtrack. But the story lacks that extra layer of complexity and meaning that parents can appreciate.

Broader than it is deep, Equal Means Equal still drills down into enough specific issues to shock us afresh.

What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.

The title, by the way, is Trinidadian slang for being disoriented or dizzy or just a little bit crazy, possibly because of romance. And you might go bazodee over that contagious soca beat.

We bend over backward to find joy in this movie, but, like eager yogis striving to achieve an impossible asana, we just can’t do it.

Humor creeps in from strange sources, including a seller of funeral packages and a march through a Paris graveyard. And while not every motivation is clear, subtext isn’t everything in a movie as complex and satisfying as this one.

For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.

While the beauty of the setting is nourishing, without a narrative structure, the disjointed scenes raise questions.

There is a delicate beauty to this movie and its visual composition.

This ambitious documentary, by Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani, is largely pleasing to the eye, and it pays close attention to the eloquent activists at its core. Journalists of every stripe provide context, perhaps more than we can digest.

Bob Yari’s Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is more artifact than art.

The tale, ripped from the headlines, is stirring, even if the repeated rally scenes and aerial views of the region grow stale.

Its tightly shot scenes never reveal much context, and the rather cryptic subtitles can lead a viewer to mistaken conclusions until the identities and motivations of the characters click into focus.

A clever film written and directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, H. keeps the viewer watchful, waiting for it to splatter into a familiar horror plot or spin off into an alien abduction.

This film fails even to evoke the ’80s in costumes, soundtrack or other atmospherics.

The director, Andrew Nackman, in making a super-mainstream film, leans so far toward the feel-good end of the spectrum that he forgoes the opportunity to make something that is more real, more fraught, more complex.

If you can endure the messy slaughter, with a body count in double digits, the plot is not without its rewards.

Overall, the arguments are persuasive, the message from the birds powerful, and the film a rich and satisfying call to action that is presented with some novel ideas for how to restore the ecological balance.

Gentle, coaxing questions from off camera draw out their stories.

The tidbits we learn are wrapped in an unabashedly promotional tone that overestimates the global emotional attachment to this car’s muscular mythos. It’s difficult to believe that this tribute comes from the director who showed such delicacy in his appreciation of Jiro Ono’s art.

The screenwriters, Ariel Kleiman (who is also the director) and Sarah Cyngler, have cut their story loose from any real significance, leaving us with Gregori, who has no discernible political views and no unifying beliefs, even delusional ones.

Perhaps because it tries too hard to be too many things, the movie loses its punch.

It fails to deliver a thrill — not even a shiver, except of revulsion — rendering all that slasher gore downright anemic.

The film, pleasing and inoffensive, often amuses as it wrestles with the nature of familiarity as well as the question of where beauty resides.

There are few feelings as glorious as spreading your wings onstage for the first time. Ruby Yang captures that rare electricity in her documentary My Voice, My Life, about Hong Kong teenagers who put on a show.