Mark Feeney

Is the movie any good, and does Irving embarrass himself? The answers are: sort of, and nowhere near.

Holding it all together is his voice-over narration: always intelligent and thoughtful, sometimes wistful, occasionally navel-gazing annoying. Even when annoying, the narration sounds great, thanks to the murmury musicality of Salles’s Portuguese.

The Leisure Seeker is slack and episodic in a way that only a committee could love. The sense of energy and surprise that one expects from a road movie is nowhere to be found. The pleasure of Mirren and Sutherland’s company is considerable, but not that considerable.

A better title might have been “All the Movies in the World.” We get a thriller, of sorts, and a crime movie, of sorts (Romain Duris, as a kidnapper, gives the most appealing performance). It’s also a morality tale crossed with family melodrama.

The film’s episodic nature, which serves to underscore the moments of grim drama, adds to the problem. One can only salute the filmmakers’ ambition and seriousness of purpose, but it’s hard to see who The Breadwinner audience is.

Much as there is right with Wonder, there’s just as much that isn’t. Emotionally, the movie rarely feels false.

Beautifully shot and deeply dispiriting, the documentary examines the global refugee crisis.

Director Tomas Alfredson and cinematographer Dion Beebe have given The Snowman a gloriously subdued look.

There’s a reason the names in the title don’t appear in alphabetical order. Abdul is the far more interesting character, but it’s her majesty the movie dotes on. God save the queen? Oh yes, and God help the rest of us.

Swinton’s vocal performance as Bell is so vivid and absorbing it could be entered as evidence for the defense. Swinton makes Bell so compelling it’s easy to overlook what a paradoxical figure she was.

Most of all, California Typewriter is an elegy. “The truth is, no good typewriters are going to be made again,” Hanks laments. There’s a reason that the title of the first tune on the fine musical soundtrack is “Stolen Moments.”

A glorious late-summer pendant.

That’s how the gifted young Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro makes his movies, in a style that seems casual and feels sure-handed — casual and sure-handed being about as good a combination as artistry, in any medium, has to offer.

The film has two big things going for it: Stanfield and Asomugha. Their characters could easily become capital-letter caricatures — Victim, Loyal Friend — but the actors give Warner and King a sense of personality, and deeply felt hurt, that stays with you.

Mostly people talk. Lovely to look at, In Transit is even better to listen to. The documentary tells us straightaway that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t offer Plaza a breakout role so much as a dig-deeper role. There’s a bravery to her performance that recalls De Niro as Pupkin. Actors really, really like to be liked — and understood. Ingrid is intensely unlikable — and opaque.

New York looks very appealing: uptown, downtown, even the little bit of Brooklyn we see. Think of “Boy” as a Bridges highlight reel and Gotham travelogue, instead of precious coming-of-age story, and it’s not half bad. But it isn’t, so it is.

The proof that the “Trip” formula hasn’t become formulaic? How often, and hard, these two can make an audience laugh.

Even by the junk-food standards of summer action comedies, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is overlong, over-violent, and over the top.

All three actors are excellent. So’s Gil Birmingham, as the victim’s father.

The movie reaches its emotional climax with the signing of the accords. But even under the best of circumstances, climate change offers no quick solutions. “This is a mission I have dedicated myself to,” Gore says, a mission that remains “a constant struggle between hope and despair.”

In other words, it’s hopeless tosh — but expertly done hopeless tosh.

This is the rare movie that might benefit from silence. Partly that’s because of the squeezed syrup of Randy Newman’s score.

Some of the best scenes show the family gathering after court sessions to discuss strategy, support each other, and vent.

A bit more internal tussle would have both better honored her spirit and made for a better documentary.

Much as Bardem enlivens things, the real source of zip is Kaya Scodelario (“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”). Charming and spirited, she’s Daisy Ridley dialed up a notch.

The documentary variously consists of archival performance footage, home movies, photographs, pointlessly flashy graphics, and many, many talking heads.

A lot of talent gets wasted in Wilson: not just Harrelson, Dern, and Clowes.

The effect is less video-game-turned-movie than zombie movie minus zombies: stilted, static, s-l-o-o-o-w. The ending couldn’t set up a sequel more clearly if “To be continued” appeared on a title card. Don’t count on it. Game on? Game over.

We hear from Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, several still-awed costars, one of Mifune’s sons, Kurosawa’s script supervisor, and a film sword master identified as “killed by Mifune more than a hundred times.”

What Allied increasingly offers is insincere sincerity: As the emotional quotient rises, so does the phoniness.

Of course what’s most interesting of all is the art. Huystee’s many closeups and slow pans over Bosch’s teeming backgrounds are transfixing, unsettling, and a rare privilege.

The film shifts back and forth in time. It works like memory that way, but the memories are Johnson’s, not the viewer’s, which makes the absence of some discernible organizing principle a real drawback.

Overall the results are amiable, if also slack and talky.

It’s like a collection of short stories — most dystopian, some not — trying to pass itself off as a novel.

That Morgan Freeman voice! It’s so rich and full and authoritative that even when he’s telling Judah, “OK, OK,” you almost believe people used that word in the year 33. If they were very progressive.

Hill’s braying-bro performance is indelible. Unfortunately. Go ahead, try to forget his more-more-more grin as he fires away, testing those Chinese bullets. He’s so grotesque you can’t take your eyes off of him. He’s also so grotesque you really want to.

Café Society is a romantic comedy where the romance is lackluster and the comedy an afterthought.

There’s one NSA staffer in particular — seen in shadow, her voice altered — who’s the real star of Zero Days. Her reveal is at once solid journalism and dramatic tour de force. It’s a challenge Gibney meets with ease.

Much of the plot is outrageously, if also cheerfully, implausible — except that, in a context of talking fish, what qualifies as implausible? The important thing is how everything rings true emotionally.

“2” is as flashy and splashy as the original. Both also register right up there on the implausibility scale — that’s like the Richter scale, only with head scratching — but “2” has a lighter touch and more interesting settings. Macau and London, here we come.

That we don’t hear more from Ruscha is one of the documentary’s flaws. Hockney, the subject, is like a great painting. Hockney, the documentary, is a pretty plain frame.

Mastering subtlety, you won't be surprised to hear, remains on Moore’s to-do list.

Crump has directed Troublemakers with assurance and energy. Perhaps too much so.

A very middling movie, it does have a nifty premise.

If the documentary isn’t especially deep, maybe that’s because its subject wasn’t.

Lively and loving documentary.

Hunter has a scene with Pacino in a cafeteria where she expresses a degree of emotional pain, just through how she looks at him and holds her head, that’s at once awful to see and magnificent. It’s hard to figure out what Pacino saw in the script. What Hunter saw was this scene and getting to act with Pacino.

She (Seyfried) provides some real charm, something the movie otherwise lacks. She also seems like a plausible part of the action in a way that Kunis never did.

Full of energy and attitude, it’s the sort of movie that likes to startle, if not necessarily shock. No wonder Dope was an audience favorite at Sundance last winter.

The Forger wants to be many things: gritty crime thriller, heist picture, domestic drama. Family bonds get “forged,” too, right? Director Philip Martin, who’s mainly done British TV work, is best known for “Prime Suspect 7.” Martin keeps things moving a little too briskly, perhaps. Scenes generally feel underdeveloped, and transitions abrupt.

There are unexpected things in “Magician,” such as Puck’s presence. Welles’s first screen test, from 1937, and an appearance on “I Love Lucy” are others. But even the expected things, such as the numerous Welles clips, are consistently unexpected.

Fetisov, who looks like a cross between Sam Neill and Klaus Kinski, is a compelling figure. He has an unmistakable gravitas. He’s just a hockey player in the way that Reagan was just an actor. In fact, Fetisov is a member of Russia’s parliament and previously served as minister of sport. If all that weren’t enough, he has a winningly dry sense of humor.

There’s a similar shared joy among the participants, a similar sense of discovery for the viewer, and, of course, a killer soundtrack.

In a sense, there can be nothing ordinary about such an extraordinary place. Furthermore, Wiseman’s special gift as a filmmaker has been to show how searching attention reveals that there really is no such thing as ordinariness.

So Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, the directors of Art and Craft, have themselves an enticing subject in Landis’s activities. They do not have an enticing subject in Landis himself.

Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off.

At once riveting and heartbreaking. This youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy has the good sense — far rarer among documentarians than you’d like to think — not to get in the way of her material.

Hardy once again shows what quiet force and phenomenal range he has.

Is Borgman a fable? A fairy tale? A parable? An allegory? A burlesque of Western bourgeois life in the 21st century? One thing Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s film isn’t is a black comedy, even if that’s what it’s meant to be. The movie’s black, all right, but a comedy has to be funny.

Ed Harris, who voices Blade Ranger, the no-nonsense helicopter who heads the fire-and-rescue operation, doesn’t lay it on too strong. Julie Bowen, as Lil’ Dipper, an air tanker, does.

At its best, The Great Flood is hypnotic — at its worst, numbing.

The music is the occasion, and it’s stirring. What linger, though, are the images — and the ideals and emotions they convey.

One of the best things about the documentary is their interaction, as Depp visits Steadman at his home in the English countryside — surely, it has a garden? — watching him draw and paint (and splatter) in his studio while asking him questions about his life and work.

The chief problem is the documentary’s misapprehension of the artistic personality.

“The Fog of War” (2003), about McNamara, won Morris a best documentary feature Oscar. The Unknown Known takes its title from a favorite phrase of Rumsfeld. It also accurately describes its subject, whose smiling inscrutability makes him consistently fascinating and often maddening.

Slick, loud, assured, overplotted (way overplotted), fairly diverting, and pretty much empty.

You may not recognize the Vignelli name, but you certainly recognize their designs.

The archival footage in Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali is wondrous. How could it not be, featuring the gentleman in the title.

Lively, if overlong, documentary.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

A documentary about comedy needs to be funny. The old guys, as noted, have definitely lost a lot off their collective fastball.

The best thing about Money for Nothing is the many talking heads trying to explain what monetary policy is and what the Fed does: controlling the supply of money and, with any luck, guiding the economy.

Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.

Artistically, though, you can’t help but trust him. Like any star turn, Holliday’s performance rings utterly true. It’s that indefinable but unmistakable reality-beyond-reality called art.

Planes has some wonderfully goofy, even ineffable, touches.

Technique largely does the work of imagination. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The nuts and bolts of Europa Report may feel very familiar, but the movie doesn’t look quite like anything else.

Museum Hours is an unusual film. It lacks a score yet feels like a sonata, intimate and musical. Secret harmonies are being heard.

Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s documentary shows that its subject’s true talent may have been for an occupation no less rarefied than the ones he failed at: movie star.

The editing of the action sequences is an insult to the idea of narrative clarity.

The idea behind Girl Rising is strikingly simple and even more strikingly imaginative.

Oblivion is a lot like its star: clean, cold, efficient, increasingly overblown, and not a little inexplicable.

The documentary nicely mixes vintage news footage and photographs, talking-head interviews with journalists and Koch associates, and lots (and lots) of Koch.

A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?

High Tech, Low Life has a nice easy rhythm. It feels neither hurried nor emphatic. There’s no narration. Zola and Tiger do most of the talking.

Bertrand does his jelly-belly best to keep Starbuck a comedy. But even the broadest shtick can’t prevent a movie that features a Busby Berkeley-style group hug from becoming a male weepie. Or a testimonial to Planned Parenthood.

Solanas’s daring takes the form of ambition. Upside Down has a visionary look that has affinities with everything from “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner” to “Children of Men.” Solanas has the temerity to split the screen horizontally in many shots. Usually, this works, though “Upside Down” is not recommended for anyone subject to visual dislocation.

This is a world where people still put out wash to dry on fire escapes, watermelon has seeds, amusement park rides cost 9 cents. Joey is the little fugitive of the title, of course, but at the heart of the movie, as its makers could never have imagined 60 years ago, is a much bigger fugitive: time itself.

When MacArthur stands side by side with Hirohito (Takatarô Kataoka), it’s the ultimate in victor-vanquished encounters. That’s also true whenever Jones shares a scene with Fox.

As morally engaged as the movie is, it’s also argumentatively slack. Precisely because it’s so easy to agree that hunger is bad, it’s hard to agree what to do.

“Happy” isn’t meant ironically. Herzog, who narrates, clearly loves, and envies, the trappers’ elemental existence and connection to nature.

The moral weight of Hitler's Children is unmistakable. So is that weight's inertness.

The biggest complaint about Brooklyn Castle is that there's not enough of her. A presence as magnetic as Vicary's demands more screen time. How did she come to chess (a notoriously male-dominated game)? How did she come to 318?

Manages to be both compelling and unsatisfying. But what limits it isn't lack of execution. The movie is many things, but a mess isn't one of them. Estes knows exactly what he wants. Whether it's worth wanting is another matter.

It's always raining or snowing or misting. This makes for a nice visual, but it also makes the scenes look interchangeable. This is even more of a problem because the writer-director, Michael J. Bassett, imparts no shape to the story. Many movies suffer from worse problems, but not many waste the talents of Max von Sydow, as Solomon's father, or Pete Postlethwaite.

The neatness of the plotting becomes almost comical after a while. Construction is one thing; contrivance is another.

The biggest problem with the documentary, besides the overexposure of its namesake, is length.