Manohla Dargis

Like too many animated films aimed at children, Barnyard embraces stereotypes that generally no longer cut it in adult films, and for good reason.

Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools — his lapidary visual style rises to the challenge of the natural environment — yet there’s something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.

It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.

Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).

While it flickers with grace and imagination during its initial half, largely because of Jack, it devolves into a dreary, platitudinous therapy movie in its second, largely because of Ma.

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.

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.

Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.

On viewing, the cuts seem negligible, but what is new and clearly improved is the sound, which now booms with each door slam and gunshot.

A nutty, often enjoyable farrago of craft and cinematic sampling, King Arthur moves fast and loose, and is almost aggressive in its absence of an original idea, in and of itself a Bruckheimer trademark.

The three leads remain watchable, but only the sourness in Jake’s face when he moves into Justine’s house hints at the kind of true and complex emotions that, bromide by bromide, this movie insistently denies.

Without question, the whole thing's absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it's also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher's energy.

Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to.

The movie has its diversions, including Scarlett Johansson's bodacious Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg's wheedling Lew Wasserman. It's fluff. But while its dim fantasies about Hitchcock and the association of genius with psychosis can be written off as silly, they also smack of spiteful jealousy.

There's something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together.

Alternately frustrating and rewarding film.

C’mon C’mon is a nice movie about characters who are so nice that I almost feel bad for not being nicely disposed toward them or this movie, even with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy and Gaby Hoffmann as the sister.

Johnson’s own sleight of hand is estimable, even if his effort to add politics into the crowded mix rings hollow. The machine is what matters here, and he has clearly had such a good time engineering it that it’s hard not to feel bad when you don’t laugh along with him.

Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with Killer Joe, which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.

The director Lee Toland Krieger is good with actors, especially in the expression of a low-key, unforced intimacy.

A misfired, misguided would-be satire.

There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.

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

What Michôd never manages to make clear is what we are to make of this version’s nationalism, its glorification of war, its ambivalence toward corrupting power and its selective, finally misguided attempt to brush off Shakespeare.

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 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.

Ms. Bullock, who excels at playing spunky, is as appealing as usual, but the role proves as awkward as those heels.

The title character is one of those difficult women that the movies just can’t quit and rarely prove as interesting as filmmakers seem to think. Anne obviously has issues — psychological, behavioral, familial — but the movie isn’t big on specifics. It’s a pretty, uninvolving blur.

High Fidelity wants to be hip, but it's comically square.

At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage, one that has disintegrated partly because of spiraling downward mobility and lost privilege. Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance.

The results are likable, unsurprising and principally a showcase for the pretty young cast, notably Mr. Miller, who brings texture to his witty if sensitive gay quipster.

The film’s solemnity is seductive — as is Mr. Scorsese’s art — especially in light of the triviality and primitiveness of many movies, even if its moments of greatness also make its failures seem more pronounced.

As a director, Bigelow knows how to get out of the house, but she can be impatient when it comes to humdrum reality. That may account for her interest in Shreve's novel, with its epic tragedies, and it may help to explain the misguided casting of Penn and Hurley, each of whom comes equipped with an oversized personality.

It’s evident that the filmmakers wanted to create a different, tougher and putatively more serious Pinocchio than the Disney version that has been lodged in the popular imagination for decades. But the movie’s decontextualized and disturbingly ill-considered use of Fascism is reductive and finally grotesque.

Ms. MacLaine, 82, holds the screen effortlessly. Too bad she has to share it.

Manning Walker sets the scene and stakes well enough, though after the millionth drink and shriek, whatever contact high you have is obliterated by a contact hangover. The largest problem, though, is that Manning Walker seems weirdly insensitive toward Tara, who endures a trauma that’s meant to say something about something — sex, consent, friendship — but mostly just gives the story some queasy heft.

The South takes another beating in Sweet Home Alabama, but that's nothing compared with the one conferred on the sweetheart personality of its pint-sized Gen. Sherman.

The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.

The man (Bay) just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.

Ms. Headland has a concept for a latter-day screwball comedy — two romantically challenged friends whose hang-ups create a roadblock to coupledom — but she doesn’t have the jokes or the emotionally textured characters that can fill in that conceit.

The most pleasure to be had from this high-tech bore is to compare the Disney world-view evidenced here (the triumph of collectivism) with that of DreamWorks’ own creepy-crawler animation, “Antz” (the triumph of individualism).

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.

Entertaining to watch - notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal - which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem.

Much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, the film has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience.

As it turns out, nothing else in Tracks matches the dramatic pow of a camel being relieved of his testes. Despite the otherworldly scenery and some predictable tragedy — Robyn can be maddeningly careless about the welfare of her animals — this proves to be a rather logy amble.

It’s a theme as familiar as life. The five women, all perfectly cast and almost perfectly played.

A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

Too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.

Alas, Tereza, whose interior life remains largely obscured from start to finish, isn’t a compelling vessel for whatever Mascaro is trying to do in this movie. And, as it drifts from one place to another, one encounter to another, one sketchy idea to another, so may your attention.

Exactly the sort of good bad movie that Hollywood does best -- it's big, worthless fun.

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

The larger problem is that there’s not enough here — in story terms or in the filmmaking — to sustain even the movie’s 90 minutes.

The Red Riding trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent.

The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.

While this The Jungle Book is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment.

It’s too bad that the filmmakers don’t allow an occasional breath of air into the sepulchral proceedings or ease up on the increasingly heavy-handed lessons.

As I, Tonya skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story. No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny.

If only the whole thing didn't collapse in on itself, and quickly become a parody of artistic reach and terminal folly.

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.

The producers are going to have to hire a better director if they want moviegoers to be curious enough about this Galt guy to buy a ticket for the presumptive third and final chapter.

A portrait of dispossession so acute that it's caused a few critics to cry, Let her eat cake!

“A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” is a largely enjoyable, cozily intimate movie that plays like it was made by a fan.

Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.

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.

Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.

There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Redford and his love of nature. But there’s something irritatingly softheaded about the generic, nostalgia-tinged blandishments that the film finally resorts to -- a Wendell Berry poem, a grizzled old farmer wielding a sickle -- in place of truly hard questions and solutions that may effect meaningful change. With the polar ice caps melting, I want more than poetry and blame. I want a plan.

For the most part, the director cuts loose her characters and lets them and the story’s vague ideas — about gender, sexuality, money and power — swirl and drift, leaving you to decide how and whether they all fit together, or don’t.

A blast into the past, but as with many nostalgic trips it's also shrouded in mist. The awkward, almost embarrassed way in which director Paul Justman, as well as writers Walter Dallas and Ntozake Shange, deal with race is unfortunate, as is the tendency toward overstatement.

Shooting in unattractive, hard-edge digital, Teller condenses Mr. Jenison’s years-long pursuit into 80 glib, alternately diverting, exasperating and tedious minutes.

Though Ms. Rapace is a fine professional scowler, with cheekbones that thrust like knives and a pout that’s mostly pucker, she tends to register as an intriguing idea instead of a thoroughly realized character. She more or less looks the part that the filmmakers don’t let her fully play.

Apparently started out as just another soft-core item, or what the Japanese call a pink film, but evolved into something more ambitious, sort of. Certainly it doesn’t look or play out like the typical American pay-TV fodder.

Topicality is all or at least a large part of the movie’s draw.

At once overstuffed with interviews and intellectually underdeveloped, the movie charts the area’s music industry and what is lyrically if elusively called the Muscle Shoals sound.

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.

A lot here is genially entertaining, but it doesn't make for interesting or vital filmmaking, because while Levinson might honestly prefer rye, he makes movies the way Wonder Bread bakes.

For all the chatter and intrigue, Mr. Finley never settles on a point or theme.

The problem is that while the children are lovely because they are children, there is nothing inherently interesting about them or their lives.

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

Washington is unsurprisingly the primary reason to watch “Equalizer 3,” which is basically a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and light up the screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly beautiful town on the Amalfi coast.

There's not much more to this adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel than charm -- effortless, pleasurable, featherweight charm.

However sincere and justified, the digs are so innocuous that their main purpose seems to flatter Western viewers who will nod along as they coo at the landscapes and chuckle knowingly about ugly truths they think have nothing to do with them, but do.

Phony choppers and a startling resemblance to Jon Voight aren't enough to transform Theron into Wuornos, and I didn't buy either the performance or the character for a second.

In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.

Mr. Tanne has clearly made a close study of his real-life inspirations, yet his movie is soon hostage to the couple’s history. His characters feel on loan and, despite his actors, eventually make for dull company because too many lines and details serve the great-man-to-be story rather than the romance.

It isn't just that there's something unsettling about a film that aestheticizes a crematorium; it's that there's something trivializing about the very effort.

It’s a handsome package that never transcends the banality of its ideas, most of which involve how different people, including from Boulder, were affected by the case.

The director, Iciar Bollain, who wrote the screenplay with Alicia Luna, invests Antonio with humanity, which would be more impressive if she had paid more attention to exploring the darker recesses of Pilar's inner life.

The director Sebastián Lelio should have been a good fit for this story if only because of the sensitivity he’s brought to female-driven movies like “Gloria.” Although Disobedience seems to offer him similar material — female desire up against the patriarchy — it defeats him.

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.

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

While cuddling up to the adored one is a familiar biographical tactic, some critical distance might have made for a deeper, stronger movie.

DaCosta is better at setting scenes than digging into them.

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.

Has the makings of a great documentary, but a subject as complex as this demands greater rigor, deeper intelligence and a sense of dialectics.

Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.

The Party is a brittle, unfunny attempt at comedy that features some very fine actors and a lot of empty chatter.

There’s pleasure and meaning in the sons’ roughhousing and camaraderie, as well as beauty, heat and melancholy in their heartbreakingly fleeting physical perfection. Yet as the story’s uglier side emerges, Durkin hedges.