Manohla Dargis

A glib, enjoyable fictionalization of the 1973 exhibition tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Mr. Maggio's strengths here are his people (not their stories), a sense of intimacy and textured place rather than the generic hoops he forces the characters to jump through.

Like the first movie, the second is a sleek diversion with brittle and sharp laughs, truckloads of couture threads and lashings of light drama.

This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Mr. Fuqua, who happens to be surprisingly good with actors, does have a knack for chaos.

Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.

Stick with the movie for its leads, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, a beautifully matched pair who open up two closed people, unleashing torrents of feeling.

With its spy-on-spy globetrotting, old-fashioned villains, flirty but prematurely swinging minis and fan-boy bits (look for an eye-blink-fast tribute to "Basic Instinct" and a cameo from the cult actor Michael Ironside), the whole enterprise has an agreeable lightness, no small thing, given its rapidly moving parts.

Bruce Willis is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before.

Central to the last film's success are Manise and Blanc, who invest the story with intensity unmatched since Belvaux stormed through the first feature.

Although there's more romance in "Buck," a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in Pianomania the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he's a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.

Mr. Kormakur sets and keeps up a fast rather than frantic pace that never runs the movie off the rails even when the story nearly does.

It doesn’t aspire to art-house significance, just to white-knuckled entertainment.

Mr. Jayasundara studied film in France and has probably watched his share of classic European art cinema. Although his influences may originate closer to home (in interviews he has name dropped the venerated Sri Lankan auteur Lester James Peries), his use of landscape to convey states of mind suggests that he has more than a passing acquaintance with the work of Michelangelo Antonioni.

It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history.

The irony is, it's his vulgarity, this mixture of the gaudy and the glossy, that distinguishes Lyne, that makes his work identifiable and, when the story's right, such a guilty pleasure.

An enjoyably arranged collection of all the visual attractions and narrative clichés that money can buy, “F1” is very simply about the satisfactions of genre cinema and the pleasures of watching appealing characters navigate fast, exotic cars that whine like juiced-up mosquitoes. It’s also about the pleasures of that ultrasmooth performance machine, Brad Pitt.

Uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging -- the mind reels while watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, even as the eyes water, the temples pound and the body trembles.

The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in The Curse of La Llorona, an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story.

In Good Company lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of "About a Boy," as well as Mr. Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo directing debut.

Hooligan Sparrow, which Ms. Wang also shot and skillfully edited, has the pulse of a mainstream thriller but without the pacifying polish and tidiness.

There’s not much new under the moon here, which makes what the writer and director Richard LaGravenese does with the story all the more notable.

Nannerl, the subject of at least three novels also titled "Mozart's Sister," is in this film meant to be something more than a chapter in her brother's biography though it's not exactly clear what. Somewhat frustratingly if reasonably, Mr. Féret never settles on whether she was a genius, a martyr, a feminist cause, a disappointed daughter, a resigned woman or all of the above.

No Other Choice is easy to admire from one perfectly balanced shot to the next; it is a pleasure to see how Park plays with visual space and deploys some of the more slapstick comedy with sharply timed, Rube Goldberg-style finesse. If only the movie’s tones and moods were as modulated as its two vibrant, often touching lead performances.

Buoyed by Ms. Johansson’s presence, Mr. Besson keeps his entertainment machine purring. He may be a hack, but he’s also a reliable entertainer.

Grant is clearly having a lot of fun in Heretic, and it’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish.

There’s something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey.

The director Yan-Ting Yuen revisits the country's recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular.

In Freedom Writers Hilary Swank uses neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation.

This isn’t, it turns out, the usual once upon a time, but a story about the unknowns that can swallow us up.

What cuts through the filmmaking clutter are the young women and men who share their accounts of abuse by both their attackers and their schools.

In the end, what is most surprising about Predator: Badlands is also the most obvious, which is that filmmaking matters even to formulaic, apparently indestructible franchises.

Sin City has been made with such scrupulous care and obvious love for its genre influences that it's a shame the movie is kind of a bore.

The film effectively conveys the fears and frustrations of Palestinians struggling in a country that treats them as the enemy.

It’s almost always pleasant to hang out with old friends, particularly when no one overstays their welcome. The good news about “Spinal Tap II” is that everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment, which makes for a genial 83 minutes of soft jokes and jowls.

Hogg’s filmmaking presents its own forceful draw and is the reason I watched Souvenir Part II again.

A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.

Nasty, brutal and unforgiving, A Walk Among the Tombstones is one of those rare contemporary cinematic offerings: intelligent pulp.

A screenplay that not only has a way with genre cliché, but manages to score some deviously witty political points

There's nothing obscure about young love and loss, and a story, as Mr. Jiménez put it, about "youngsters who have to deal with this sudden lack of certainties which makes them more lonely than they could have ever imagined."

Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.

Although Vicky Cristina trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its locations and stars -- and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply -- it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss.

This paranoid thriller has all the failings we expect...but Enemy of the State also has enough wit, talent and narrative thrust to mostly transcend those flaws, at least until that ludicrous finish.

Extremely likable and has value as a historical document specifically because it includes snippets from a dozen later-life interviews with Photo League members like Rosalie Gwathmey and Mr. Engel.

When Montana Story works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.

Mr. Kerrigan isn't just playing with our sympathies; he's also playing with our assumptions. That keeps the tension going.

Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening.

Catching Fire isn’t a great work of art but it’s a competent, at times exciting movie and it does something that better, more artistically notable movies often fail to do: It speaks to its moment in time.

Mr. Garland likes to play with tones, mixing deadpan in with the frights, and later “Annihilation” becomes something of a head movie, swirling with cosmic and menacingly lysergic visions. He keeps the tension torqued throughout this phantasmagoric interlude, sustaining the shivery unease that is one of this movie’s deeper satisfactions.

While its subject means that "Listen to Me” is easy to like, Mr. Riley’s shaping of Brando’s words can make the movie, every so often, difficult to fully embrace.

This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.

Schadenfreude carries a delectable tang no matter the language, and as the history of Hollywood shows, stories about pretty people behaving badly remain reliably alluring.

A small movie with a full heart, Undertow takes an old idea - the loving, lingering ghost - and gives it reverberant, resuscitated life.

Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental.

The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance.

Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to persuade us that The Young Victoria is a serious work, and despite some tense moments and gunfire, the movie’s pleasures are as light as its story. No matter. Albert may never rip Victoria’s bodice, but he does eventually loosen it, to her delight and ours.

Guest begins -- but doesn't end -- with caricatures, then peels away at our preconceptions until we see the heart and soul beneath.

Essentially and very effectively a rollicking smash-and-crash chase movie that happens to be surprisingly well acted.

This veteran Spanish director has, in his latest, created both a tribute to an art form and a performance archive.

It’s a divertingly funny movie, but its breeziness can also feel overstated, at times glib and a bit of a dodge.

This is the kind of cornball entertainment that rainy afternoons were made for. Throw in a cozy sofa too. Beastly will size down well on your television.

Part of the ticklish enjoyment in The Monster is how the director, Bryan Bertino (“The Strangers”), plays with genre registers and how, after opening with disquieting stillness and an isolated child, he slowly yet surely turns up the shrieks.

If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.

Tiny Furniture is at times more pleasurable to think about than it is to watch, more of a conceptual coup than an enjoyable experience.

Those swayed by the argument in Client 9 that some of the rich and powerful whom Mr. Spitzer crusaded against might have exploited his stupidity should find all this enthralling. Others might just remember the hubris.

Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It's also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers - from their arrest through their absolution - it fails to add anything substantively new.

An often electric, bracingly urgent documentary.

There are times when the characters — and their director — surprise and genuinely delight.

It's possible that two actors other than Samantha Morton and Jason Patric might do justice to Cecilia Miniucchi's story about two badly matched Santa Monica, Calif., parking enforcement officers who stumble and grope into a relationship. But it's hard to think of a better match for the stubborn idiosyncrasies of Ms. Miniucchi's visual style and worldview than these two.

Graced with a shimmering visual style and sense of lyrical self-consciousness that owes a debt to French visionary Jean Cocteau, the modest film provides further evidence of Mexico's recent cinematic renaissance.

The film's septuagenarian director deserves his share of the credit for bringing this human story to the screen with engaging B-movie modesty and no small measure of chops.

It's the kind of outrageous, excessive flourish that can make Mr. Scott's work so enjoyable in the moment. He doesn't do much, but with a handful of appealing actors in tow, he sure keeps that machine going.

Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt's mug.

It’s an extremely well-lubricated entertainment machine filled with attractive images and wall-to-wall appealing performances.

Crammed with friendly, sympathetic talking heads and pretty images of a stunned-looking Mr. Bruce, then 35, relearning life (he remembers how to walk but forgot family and friends), the film comes up frustratingly short when it comes to the particulars.

Even as the gathering melodramatic storms threaten to swamp this pungent slice of life, Mr. Cretton manages to earn your tears honestly.

For long stretches, The D Train serves as a commodious vehicle for Mr. Black, who, like the best comic performers, never seems remotely concerned about going too big or risking the audience’s love. He’s a showboat if every so often, more of a steamroller, capable of flattening everyone and everything in his way. Yet he is also adept at conveying emotional and psychological fragility.

The film is good news nonetheless - it's a store-bought valentine with real heart.

Austen’s story and words, it turns out, prove unsurprisingly durable and impervious to decorative tweaking. And so, after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive.

Mr. Szifron creates inhabited worlds with comic timing and visual flair, but you can hear him chortling as he shovels his people into the grinder.

The good news is that the minions are more (unconsciously, if perhaps also strategically) in touch with their anarchic side than the typical onesie-wearing crusader, which suits the directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda’s well-tuned sense of the absurd.

In this film Mr. Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he’s just waking up.

it can be a strategically off-putting movie yet one that also steals under your skin scene by scene and through Ms. Schnoeink’s slowly revealing performance as an ill-fated heroine turned future biographical footnote.

Taken on the level of spectacle rather than of sense, The Last Samurai affords the sort of fizzy enjoyment that can come with epic movie endeavors, including a meticulously detailed world unlike our own, an excellent supporting cast and some pulse-pounding fights.

A smart, effectively unsettling movie about the need to believe and the hard, cruel arts of persuasion.

Although Mr. Pawlikowski often shows Mr. Hawke in medium and long shots, the actor draws you close. There's anguish in Tom's face that speaks of a terrible fragility and that leavens the story's mysterioso proceedings with a real, recognizable humanity.

A portrait of the artist as a refusenik, a recluse, a survivor and a stubborn question mark, “Fifi Howls From Happiness” registers, by turns, as a celebration, an excavation and an increasingly urgent rescue mission.

While compromised by the uplift and affirmation that mainstream animation regurgitates like a mommy penguin, it also shows a remarkable persistence of vision. Even in a story about singing-and-dancing fat and feather, Mr. Miller can’t help but go dark and deep.

Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty.

The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves.

Respect succeeds in doing exactly what is expected of it. You may argue with this or that filmmaking choice and regret its overly smooth edges, but it does give you a sense of Franklin as a historical figure, a crossover success story and a full-throttle, fur-draped diva.

In Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. Liman brings Mr. Cruise’s smile out of semiretirement and also gives him the kind of physical challenges at which he so brilliantly excels.

The script for Mockingjay Part 1, credited to Peter Craig and Danny Strong, gets the job done, but the performers matter far more than the words they deliver.

Woody Allen’s latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all.

Weapons may not be about anything much other than Cregger’s talent, but the guy knows how to slither under your skin — and stay there.

The most appealing character in Suspended Time is Assayas, a hovering offscreen presence who delivers the confessional, gracefully digressive narration.

Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh.

Hit So Hard is the touching story of how and why Ms. Schemel ended up in her own private hell and how and why she made her way out again into the world of sunshine, sobriety and puppy dogs.

Camus sets the movie’s initial course, but Mr. Oelhoffen resolutely steers it home with political context, historical hindsight, an unambiguous moral imperative and a pair of well-matched performances; put another way, he makes the story his own.

An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”

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.

Written by Vince Gilligan and directed by newcomer Dean Parisot, Home Fries is far too cute and eager to please, but Barrymore and Wilson are charming, and O'Hara is a blast.

What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising.

Nominally a story about sex, lies and faithfulness, Last Night is more truly a cautionary tale about mousetrap narratives.

Saturday Night is a movie made by fans, but because Reitman assumes that his viewers are fans, too, and because he’s racing against the clock, he gestures at instead of digging into the show, its humor and history.

Isn't half bad and every so often is pretty good, filled with real sentiment, worked-through performances and a story textured enough to sometimes feel a lot like life.

Pine and Foster sync up flawlessly, even when the dialogue fails them. This isn’t the reunion they deserve, but it’s nevertheless welcome. In silence and in action, they show you the unfathomable loss that the rest of movie never coherently expresses.

Although the presence of Mr. Sheen is initially distracting, it soon becomes the movie's greatest asset. There is, as it turns out, some benefit to having a real performance even in a formulaic entertainment like this.

Quirky goes a surprisingly long way before stalling out in Don McKay, an oddball comedy with the knowing, festering heart of a neo-noir.

It's a slam-dunk of an opener in a film filled with terrifically choreographed action and very little on its mind.

While it's frustrating that Mr. Palmer doesn't dig deep into the complexities of the fights, one of the movie's strengths is the honesty with which he confesses his doubts about them.

One problem is Jimmy and his mother's dialogue, which continues in the same clichéd vein as the opening scenes of him alone yelling and yammering into his cell.

Amy Schumer puts out so much energy in I Feel Pretty that it’s hard not to feel charged up, too. The movie is seriously suboptimal, but she is such a force for good — for comedy, for women — and the laughs land often enough that you can go, if somewhat begrudgingly, with the messy flow.

This is harmless stuff, and sometimes it's actually pretty funny, too.

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.

Fiennes peels David in layers, unraveling this man until you see his hollow interior.

Diverting if heavily padded, this is the newest addition to an increasingly crowded field of political nonfiction films and certainly the easiest viewing.

The overall results are generally pretty, mildly diverting, at times dull and often familiar, despite a few unusually sharp, brief departures from Disney’s pacifying formula.

That The Assassination of Richard Nixon is as well directed, acted and shot as it is makes Mr. Mueller's inability to invest his film with significance all the more disappointing.

While it’s no surprise that Mr. Lumet can spin a tale, these murky-looking, less-than-flattering sit-downs are irritatingly suboptimal, particularly given that he was so great at telling intimate stories about men in shadows.

An improvement on the original, but that isn't saying much.

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.

The actors don’t do all the heavy lifting by themselves. The uniformly good performances make it clear that Mr. Melfi knows how to handle actors, and there are some funny bits.

Serviceably, at times awkwardly, directed by Mandie Fletcher, the movie skews softer than the series at its barbed best, partly because the celebrity culture that once provided such rich material has become just another ratings opportunity for the Kardashians.

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.

For all Mr. Boyle’s labors Trance principally comes off as a showcase for his brio, a spirit that animates all his choices, visual and otherwise.

Here, it's the creepily quiet stuff, the stuff that might be rushed over in a different movie -- Annie shivering alone in bed or being visited by her dead grandmother as she hangs out the wash -- that makes the film more than a generic distraction.

Again and again Katniss rescues herself with resourcefulness, guts and true aim, a combination that makes her insistently watchable, despite Mr. Ross's soft touch and Ms. Lawrence's bland performance.

The Overnight ends just as it starts to get interestingly messy, tapping into something real and sweetly touching.

Mr. Carrey is such an attention hog that most actresses have a hard time holding on to their corner of the screen when he's onboard, especially in broader comedies. But Ms. Leoni never cedes her ground. Both performers exude such acute neediness - there's a touch of Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball in their mutual frenzy - that not to love them even a little would seem cruel.

In the end, like a lot of genre movies, this one pulls from different inspirations, and so weighs in, by turns, as overly predictable and satisfyingly recognizable (part of genre cinema's one-two punch).

Breaking the Frame is a tantalizing teaser for a story that still needs to be told.

A divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense and a solid lead performance from Mark Wahlberg.

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.

It’s hard not to root for Nina, even if this prickly, intriguingly difficult character becomes considerably less interesting as the story progresses and the dialogue veers toward the therapeutic

This bit of fluff overflows with so much honest charm it barely matters that it's one in a seemingly endless succession of Tarzan retreads.

Mr. Miller and his co-writer, Tom Phelan, manage to get under your skin largely with borrowed implements, though they receive solid support from Willem Dafoe and the resourceful veteran cinematographer Fred Murphy.

Brilliantly edited and gorgeously shot, Esther Kahn is a dream to look at and, courtesy of Howard Shore's minor chords and high-strung strings, definitely something to hear.

A nicely cast, respectable remake.

Mr. Ivin doesn't have a strong narrative line to play with or become distracted by, but he takes off on some lovely detours, whether he's narrowing in on Chook or going wide to take in the world that waits beyond.

The Cool School, is, well, cool, but it’s also fairly parochial.

You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work. But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces, and he makes his conspicuously low budget work for the near-claustrophobic intimacy.

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

Sex is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting.

Ms. Meyers, whose ambitions are telegraphed by her film's title, which directly invokes George Cukor's lovely 1938 romp "Holiday," has created a cumbersome vehicle by saddling Iris with a flamboyantly glamorous Los Angeles double, Amanda. As played by Cameron Diaz with oodles of charm and not an ounce of persuasion, Amanda doesn’t as much mirror Iris's love troubles as throw them into wincing relief.

It features a casually diverse cast and is openly, at times dutifully, feminist, with you-go-girl speeches that sound as if everyone involved had tried too hard to be decent. Funny and enlightened would have been better.

It’s all very pretty, but too often the movie’s beauty isn’t tethered to deep feeling or strong ideas, one reason you may often find your eyes and thoughts drifting away from the quietly escalating drama toward the vast green fields, the majestic horses and nice detail work.

Like the film, the characters mean well and look good. But they're so deeply immersed in their own heads that they can't see the world for their needs.

Alien: Romulus is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials.

For a Marvel agnostic like me, the single most interesting thing about Age of Ultron is that you can sense that Mr. Whedon, having helped build a universal earnings machine with the first “Avengers,” has now struggled mightily, touchingly, to invest this behemoth with some life.

In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ms. Forbes hasn’t made a movie about her father’s illness; she’s made one about her father, who, through hard and weird times, clearly helped give her what she needed so that one day she could tell this story.

Ms. Reed has taken on a vital story in Dark Money, which is why it’s frustrating that her storytelling isn’t better. Some introductory text or explanatory narration would have better helped historically ground viewers, who need to juggle a lot of information.

The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.

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.

Like oversolicitous lovers, the filmmakers are hung up on foreplay -- and not enough old-fashioned teenage raunch.

As erratically enjoyable as it is consistently ridiculous, the martial arts pastiche The Man With the Iron Fists is the latest evidence that the vogue for neo-exploitation cinema shows no sign of flagging.

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.

Still, despite the visual clumsiness and the production's tattered seams, I found myself rooting for this movie anyway, partly because Lindsey and Ben make a nice fit, as do the actors playing them, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movies, and partly because Ms. Barrymore inspires more goodwill than any other young actress I can think of working today in American movies.

At once a sick comedy, a bile-raising thriller and a genre pastiche, Save the Green Planet is a welter of conflicting tones, dissonant moods and warring intentions.

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

Mr. Gleeson, Mr. Farrell and especially the late-arriving and welcome Mr. Fiennes have great fun rummaging around inside Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks.

Zoom, crash, repeat with squealing, burning and flaming tires — it’s all predictably absurd and self-mocking, and often a giggle when not a total yawn.

Does it add up? Not really, but it passes the time nicely, working best when Mr. Monahan keeps it vague and off-kilter as his characters roam among the Hollywood ghosts.

It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages.

Doesn’t have the original’s wooden performances, puffy clothes and hairdos or its amusingly crude special effects, but it does share its blood lust.

What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.

Parigi -- who's clearly made a close study of Alfred Hitchcock's obsessions and has watched a fair share of intelligent horror perched between cheekiness and Grand Guignol (think "Re-Animator") -- succeeds nicely.

Mr. Cruise’s brisk, ingratiating performance — all smiles, hard-charging physicality and beads of sweat — does a lot to soften the edges. But Mr. Liman doesn’t press Mr. Cruise to dig into the character, and the actor mostly hurdles forward in a movie that never gets around to asking what makes Barry run and why.

As she does, Ms. Theron locks down your attention immediately, holding you with her beauty and quiet vigilance.

The film's gadgetry is pricier, but the leering is strictly the Playboy joke page circa 1967.

It's too little Grier too late, but it's also fairly satisfying to watch.

For all its flaws, its obvious if irrelevant similarity to "Dead Poets Society," it lets us spend some quality time with some of the finest actresses in American film as they give energetic life to one of the most radically underrepresented minorities in Hollywood: the intelligent woman.

Consciously or not, coherently or not, Maleficent tells a new kind of story about how we live now, not once upon another time. And it does so by suggesting, among other things, that budding girls and older women are not natural foes, even if that’s what fairy tales, Hollywood and the world like to tell us.

The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.