Manohla Dargis

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.

A great deal happens in Pain and Glory, just not ritualistically and not at top volume. Its agonies are tempered, its regrets hushed, its restraint powerful.

It’s a dispiriting mess and waste of talent, sunk by a lack of focus, misguided choices and insistently unproductive, at times incoherent clashing tones.

Mostly, Judy offers the familiar spectacle of one star playing another. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is also cautious, too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away.

Ad Astra is unambiguously a film of its moment, one about a man’s struggle for personal meaning and a place in the world in a time of fallen fathers.

What largely distinguishes Midnight Traveler is its anxious intimacy, a sense of uneasy closeness that pulls you into a family circle that at times gets very small, creating a sense of appropriate claustrophobia.

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

The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.

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.

The director Gavin Hood, who wrote the script with Sara Bernstein and Gregory Bernstein, fits the pieces together coherently, no small thing given the complications. But the characters are malnourished and Hood’s attempts to build suspense often fall flat because he leans hard on genre conventions, on dark shadows, ominous music and abrupt sounds straight from a horror flick.

Give Me Liberty is a jolt of a movie, at once kinetic and controlled. It’s an anarchic deadpan comedy that evolves into a romance just around the time the story explodes. It has moments of unembellished realism as well as a fictional story line that runs through the bedlam.

Complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped.

Amusing and sleepy pretty much describe this movie.

Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past.

An offense against feminism, narrative logic and Fleetwood Mac, The Kitchen is a terrible, witless mess.

Adopting a cool, oblique yet accessible approach that complements the washed-out, nicotine-stained palette, Naishtat builds a modular narrative that increasingly bristles.

It’s one of those dumb movies that are so gleeful about their own idiocy that taking it seriously may seem pointless, which is always a good reason to take a movie seriously.

Despite all the time he lavishes on Dani and Christian’s relationship, which is drawn along stereotypical gendered lines (consuming female need that becomes devouring), the couple remains instructively uninteresting. That’s the case despite Pugh.

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

A sleek, exhilarating documentary.

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.

In other words, the movie is exactly what you expect — not more, not less — from an estimably well-oiled machine like Pixar.

F. Gary Gray can be a fine action director and sometimes better than fine, but the scenes that should pop and pow — given the squealing tires, bared knuckles and laser beams — consistently fall flat.

Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch Rolling Thunder Revue is to understand what he meant.

Mostly, the movie has a cascade of images and ideas, reference points and glimpses of everyday beauty that flow and swirl and, over time, gather tremendous force.

Kinberg does better when he goes big, which suits this franchise delivery system. For the most part he just moves characters from point A to B, pausing for face-to-face heart to hearts before the next blowout. But the mayhem is generally coherent and executed with clean, crisp special effects, even if Kinberg settles for slo-mo clichés.

It’s a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner’s script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license.

The comedy is situational and confessional, the flat one-liners mixed in with more memorable physical comedy. The scripted lines rarely zing, sing or sting (some seem improvised), but when the performers fall down or screw up their faces, you get to watch them fill in their characters with something like real feeling.