Helen T. Verongos

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.

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

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

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.

Anyone who has seen one of these movies can just take over for the characters and guess their lines as easily as the three cousins can swap clothes and accents to impersonate one another.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

At times tender and at others unflinchingly brutal, this small drama of innocence and temptation could have aimed much higher.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.