Manohla Dargis

Everyone is engaging, the art is magnificent and the whole thing pleasant, if overly cozy and hagiographic. That’s too bad. Then again — with “Maus” and his other work — Spiegelman has already produced his definitive biography.

Ms. Myers too often tells rather than shows, and she doesn’t have the cinematic skill set to transform her idea into a fully satisfying movie, especially at this low-budget level.

Filled with brilliant filmmaking and features outstanding performances, but it's neither profound enough nor pop enough to be great -- it's mournful, serious, beautiful and, finally, pointless.

Amusing and sleepy pretty much describe this movie.

No matter how seriously everyone works to make the CIA impossibly sexy, the illusion that these pencil pushers are incarnations of Bond, James Bond, is difficult to sustain.

Mr. Broomfield maintains a level of cool detachment throughout. That's to the good of the movie, which, though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length.

Mr. Bateman’s direction of the actors is especially sensitive in this and other tricky scenes, showing a delicacy with emotional textures that isn’t always matched by the story, especially when Annie and Baxter speak in therapeutic clichés.

It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.

Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, Heartless moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next ("Donnie Darko" and "Taxi Driver"). It doesn't go anywhere special or much of anywhere, though it goes there in appreciably icky style.

Unforgivable isn't one of Mr. Téchiné's greatest achievements, but it's engrossing even when its increasingly populated story falters, tripped up by unpersuasive actions, connections and details.

Cyrus is more finely tuned than their earlier movies ("The Puffy Chair," "Baghead"), but it shares a similar, almost aggressive lack of ambition. John doesn't work hard and neither do the Duplasses, who don't want their audiences to break a sweat either. That's too bad, because Cyrus is more interesting and fun when you're recoiling at the effrontery of its comedy and not its conventionality.

Despite the slow start Mr. Condon closes the series in fine, smooth style. He gives fans all the lovely flowers, conditioned hair and lightly erotic, dreamy kisses they deserve.

At once a heartfelt story about a family undone by violence and an overburdened allegory of fascism.

Once Vivi and Eva are forced off the train and start wandering the countryside, the forest seems to fold its arms around them, and Endzeit modestly deepens into beguiling mystery.

Mr. Webb's Spider-Man movie works only because he keeps the whole package, at least until the requisite final blowout, tethered to his two appealing leads.

Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.

I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.

The movie isn’t especially well made, yet because Tucker is such a gloriously rich figure — immigrant turned runaway mother turned vaudevillian turned superstar — she renders its formal and aesthetic shortcomings (mostly) irrelevant.

Although Ms. Davenport pushes the analogy between this modest rescue operation with America’s invasion of Iraq a bit too forcefully, she nonetheless makes her point with persuasive, touching candor.

[Proyas] hasn't yet learned how to enliven his characters as fully as his sets. Part of this is structural (somnolence is built into the script), but the greater fault lies with Proyas' direction of his performers, most of whom deliver their lines in a strangulated whisper.

Ms. Lemmons has a tough time finding her tone. From scene to scene, the actors are good and then less so, while the direction wavers from assured to unsteady.

There are not one, but two wars raging inside this adaptation: one between the North and the South, and another, more calamitous war between art and middlebrow entertainment.

Mr. Hamm certainly makes it easy to care for Mason and all that he signifies, and it’s a pleasure to watch him just silently nurse another drink, a lifetime of regret weighing on him. Yet as Mason sits alone, the shadows closing around him, you also catch sight of a character whose past — including a cozy association with Henry Kissinger — suggests a tougher, harder and more interesting movie than the one you are watching.

The new movie is as moth-eaten as the serapes strewn through the 1960 film, but there’s no denying the appeal of the image of Mr. Washington riding a horse, shooting a Colt and leading a posse of vigilantes to save a mostly white Western town.

The movie is as blunt an instrument as the poster, but it’s also crammed with enough moving parts and unexpected distractions (Winona Ryder as a “meth whore”) to make it an indefensibly enjoyable piece of exploitation hackwork.

In the end there might not be much to this tale other than titillation, but there's plenty to be said for Ms. Ronan, who was the best thing about "Atonement" and holds her ground against forceful screen presences like Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Bana.

The horror of where rationalism can lead (the death camps, for one) hangs over Irrational Man and helps hold you as does Mr. Phoenix, even with some bad writing and Mr. Allen’s narrative laxity and lack of interest in how real people live.

Nicely directed, the film version proves refreshingly free of the customary blights that affect most modern children's movies, notably adult condescension. But, man, is it mean.

While Mr. Moshé’s ambitions can be frustratingly modest, he does know that — however fraudulent the genre’s myths — the image of a man riding a horse into the sunset is in our cinematic DNA.

Watching this reasonably funny, professionally assembled calculation is a little like snuggling up in front of the television with a mug of hot cocoa and a warm blanket. Those who prefer their drinks and recreation spiked would do well to look elsewhere.

A nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event.

Neither the screenplay nor the direction has the requisite depth to turn the banality of one unremarkable life into the stuff of Chekhov, much less of Mr. Payne.

There's so much that's right in it that its blunders are all the more frustrating.

The tick tick tock of the mortal clock gives the science-fiction thriller In Time its slick, sweet premise.

Tully isn’t really interested in the sustaining joys of female bonding. It has a message to deliver, which is as sincere and decent as it is obvious: Mothers need help, sometimes serious help. Which is why it’s strange that as Marlo very visibly sinks into postpartum depression — you can see Ms. Theron pulling Marlo deeper and deeper inside — the movie pretends that her burden is somehow too hidden for anyone to notice.

Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches The Outfit, a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.

Working with the cinematographer Yunus Pasolang, Ms. Surya gives “Marlina” a stark, steady, captivating look that keeps you largely engaged even when the story and your attention drift.

A dreamy, elliptical neo-noir about a cop turned killer turned something else altogether.

The self-reflexiveness of the entire enterprise only breaks the spell that Slate and Camp work hard to maintain — one which Rossellini effortlessly keeps intact with intelligence, beautifully controlled phrasing and a soft, melodious warmth that feels like a tender caress.

There are, once again, too many busy, uninterestingly staged battles that lean heavily on obvious, sometimes distracting digital sorcery. But there are also pacific, brooding interludes in which the actors — notably Mr. Freeman, an intensely appealing screen presence — remind you that there’s more to Middle-earth than clamor and struggle.

Con Air is entertaining in an extravagantly decadent sort of way. It just isn't a movie.

Djukic has a fine eye and is a talent to look out for, even if here, like Ana-Maria, she chose the wrong girl.

Mr. Basset is too enamored of the usual action film clichés, down to some Hollywood-gangsta gun play. But he has a graphic visual style that suits the simplistic material and he keeps you watching even as the wet, sucking sounds of skewered flesh grow tedious.

There's plenty of frantic energy here, lots of noise and money too, but what's absent is any sense of rediscovery, the kind that's necessary whenever a filmmaker dusts off an old formula or a genre standard.

Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, The Brown Bunny is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous.

Visually sumptuous if disappointingly hollow account of Hughes's early life.

An alternately fascinating and disquietingly intimate portrait of a 1960s American family falling apart.

That the film works as well as it does, delivering a tough first hour only to disintegrate like a wet newspaper, testifies to the skill of the filmmakers as well as to the constraints brought on them by an industry that insists on slapping a pretty bow on even the foulest truth.

In the main, Mr. Palm sticks to the usual biopic formula: a chronological account of a heroic individual told through talking heads, still photographs and film clips. Mr. Palm's principal deviation from this formula is that some of the interviews take place in moving cars.

Less outright terrifying than under-the-skin shivery, this psychological thriller from sui generis Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa breaks nearly all the rules -- including those of narrative logic.

Mr. Feig handily manages the mood and scene shifts, using regular laughs to brighten the deepening dark. By far his smartest move was to give Ms. Kendrick and Ms. Lively room to create a prickly intimacy for their characters, a bond that’s persuasive enough to push the story through its more forced moments.

For devotees of cinematic blowouts and dedicated students of screen masculinity (like me), 12 Strong is premium, Grade A catnip. Directed by the newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig, it is generally watchable, if unsurprisingly easier on the eyes than on the ears or brain.

While climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.

It's an unshowy, generous performance [by Franco] and it greatly humanizes a movie that, as it shifts genre gears and cranks up the noise, becomes disappointingly sober and self-serious.

Paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.

It’s watchable — it stars Brad Pitt — jokey, sometimes funny and predictably stupid.

At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, Man of Steel will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off.

Adams is a performer whose emotional transparency can make her characters seem unguarded and appealingly vulnerable, and the movie works as well as it does in great part because of her.

The only sure thing is that Pugh deepens the material, investing Yelena with real feeling and a lightly detached ironic sensibility that’s reminiscent of Downey’s Stark. Pugh is the best thing to happen to Marvel in a while.

A passably amusing romantic comedy with a laugh-strewn script that's almost undone by the hard sell of an enterprise that drills every emotional beat into your head.

The plot doesn't rate as high as the quality of the bodies in fast, furious motion. What counts in The Transporter isn't the wafer-thin story about smugglers -- it's the way Martin kicks open a door, fends off a couple of axes and uses a perfectly ordinary sport shirt as a weapon.

Just as there is something undeniably pleasant about an entertainment like Tristan & Isolde that delivers exactly what it promises, no less, no more.

Although the digital dinos look great, especially the clumsy stegosaurs, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have failed to absorb the single most important lesson from the movies they've looted: If your people aren't interesting, at least make your monsters memorable.

It’s an interesting exercise and, for the most part, a passably diverting one.

The movie keeps moving, the story keeps flowing, but these images — which feel suspended between cinema and still photography — create a pause in the action that your anxious imagination can’t help but fret over. That’s especially true because Mr. Saulnier’s images are often in service of spooky, blood-drenched tales.

Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).

What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable.

More of a sketch than a fully developed portrait.

Patel does some fine work in Monkey Man even if its fight sequences rarely pop, flow or impress; they’re energetic but uninspired.

It’s cute for a while. The stars are pros, and their scenes, often staged so that the characters are within breathing distance of each other, have snap.

There are good movies and plenty more bad ones and many, many more that fall somewhere in between. And then there are enjoyable absurdities like Welcome to the Punch, which contain evaluative multitudes and which, scene by scene, register as not bad, pretty good and flat-out ridiculous.

DaCosta is better at setting scenes than digging into them.

Ms. Diaz has found her down-and-dirty element in the kind of broad comedy that threatens to get ugly and more or less succeeds on that threat.

Close Your Eyes has its virtues, certainly, including some pleasurably loose interludes at the beachfront compound where Miguel lives. These have a delicate, unforced quality that creates pinpricks of light in a movie that, as it struggles to engage meaningfully with the past, sinks into ponderousness.

However caricatured a vision of female empowerment, Lara Croft exercises an irresistible tug not just on the adolescent male imagination but the 12-year-old female imagination as well.

As is the case with other unsatisfactory diversions, it is entirely possible to ignore the worst parts of this movie, to drift along during the lulls, slide over the half-baked jokes and just wait for Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Bateman to do their things.

Whether she's lying in bed, her gray hair spilling out around her head, or exalting in existence itself during one of several flashbacks, Elizabeth draws you in, which works for the story and simultaneously unbalances it.

What keeps you watching isn't the story or the actors, none of whom are at the top of their form, but the relentlessness of Friedkin's vision. The film has great forward thrust -- Friedkin's a full-throttle guy -- and the director knows where to put the camera.

No life is seamless, and not every biographical portrait needs to be, but this one is so riddled with awkward transitions, including on the soundtrack, that it tends to lurch distractingly, as if Mr. Mori were still trying to figure out how to piece the whole thing together.

A sly, amusing if underconceptulized and needlessly elliptical inquiry into truth, memory and appearances.

That character, or rather Ford, or really the two of them together are the main arguments for seeing “Dial of Destiny,” which is as silly as you expect and not altogether as successful as you may hope.

Frank Langella plays so many variations on cute and crotchety and with such suppleness - he's by turns a charming codger, a silver fox and a wise graybeard - that his performance comes close to a saving grace.

The first 20 minutes of Wolfgang Petersen’s new action adventure, Air Force One, are so thrillingly choreographed (and so very, very loud), it’s all the more disappointing that the balance of the movie tends to move less like a Stealth bomber and more like a jalopy — jerking fitfully from plot hole to plot hole, only occasionally finding momentum.

It’s lightly funny and a little sad, filled with ravishing landscapes and juiced up with kinetic fights (if not enough of them). It has antiseptic violence, emotional uplift and the kind of protagonist that movie people like to call relatable.

By the time Rachel Weisz, as a scientist called Dr. Marta Shearing, showed up in a lab coat, I stopped trying to parse every plot twist and just went with the action flow.

Closer in texture and consistency to individually wrapped American cheese than good, tangy English cheddar. But even humble plastic-wrapped cheese has its virtues and so does this film.

Mr. Heineman has said that he wanted Cartel Land to feel like a narrative film as much as possible, and to an extent it does. What’s missing is a directorial point of view, including about vigilante groups, the so-called war on drugs, and Mexican and American policies and politics.

You do feel Haynes’s touch now and again, particularly in the sense of menace that seeps into a crepuscular law office and in the everyday eeriness that suffuses outwardly ordinary homes that are anything but normal.

Working from Richard Raymond Harry Herbeck’s script, Mr. Thelin plays with genre clichés without upending them, and the results are more creepy than scary.

The rather lost-looking Mr. Amalric, most recently seen on screens giving his left eyeball a furious workout in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” maintains a suitably funereal mien throughout.

The absurdity of the story in the largely thrill-free thriller Contraband, its hairpin twists and outrageous coincidences, may keep even hungry action fans away. That's too bad because the story doesn't matter. (It rarely does.)

McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.

Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.

Mr. McDowell manages and massages the mystery, even while he forgets to do much with the camera except periodically have it chase after someone. He can be frustratingly inattentive to the visual possibilities offered by the story.

The story, which starts promisingly only to stop, restart, sputter and come to a wheezing, disappointing puff of nada, proves the least satisfying part of the whole. The finale certainly isn't earned, but all the nasty, tiny jolts throughout the movie do prick the skin nicely.

Here, after the gunfire dies down, terror at times gives way to a melancholy that can be quite affecting even if the message remains familiar: We have met the zombie, and it is us.

Alternately frustrating and rewarding film.