Kyle Smith

Instead of a theme park, it’s more of a cathedral—solemn, sober, beautiful and forbidding. Greig Fraser’s photography and Hans Zimmer’s score are full of majesty.

About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips.

The film is a lesbian-road-trip gangster farce with a hint of political satire, and though it’s admirably offbeat I found it only mildly amusing.

Even though it starts out likable, it gets sillier as it goes along and winds up as camp.

If the film is ambitious, it is also inert.

As bright as Ms. Cody’s imagination is, she deserves a director who understands comic tempo. Instead, the third act, which should be frantic, seems ponderous, with a clunky ending. Lisa Frankenstein may celebrate the undead, but it’s not lively enough.

The bad news about the Ennio Morricone documentary Ennio is its length: 2 1/2 hours. Far too short!

A combination of whimsy and devastation.

Mr. Wang’s honest self-appraisal yields a richly detailed film.

Forswearing anything like a pedantic message and giving the audience plenty of reasons to be sympathetic to the viewpoints of all three characters, Ms. Chinn has created a heartbreakingly real coming-of-age story.

The most annoying tactic in the script is its repeated, strenuous attempts to convince us that we’re in the rarefied air of serious literary discussion.

With its feel for both beauty and ugliness, the film transports us to this unfamiliar milieu with a richness rarely attempted in the cinema anymore.

The screenwriter starts to seem like a sweaty basement-of-the-coffee-house magician who keeps sawing ladies in half long past the point of diminishing returns.

Even those who find Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis convincing are likely to concede that it is more at home in the library than at the multiplex. Many others will find Origin confusing and dry.

After an intriguing start and a strong middle, however, the film can’t quite deliver a satisfying ending.

Mr. Stanfield is a gifted performer. Thanks to an amateurish script, however, Clarence is a lifeless Brian.

The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.

A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

Tiresome digressions mixed in with philosophical banalities add up to a pointless, inert drama.

It’s a passable bloody-knuckles action piece for those who enjoy relaxing with a couple of hours of crazed carnage.

The direct, intimate way in which the movie is filmed and acted, however, makes it an affecting study of two people’s attempts to forge some kind of relationship despite huge psychic damage on both sides.