Mark Jenkins

The inspirational docudrama nicely evokes the havoc of the initial cave-in, but spends too much time above ground to convey the existential horror of the almost-buried men.

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

Like most mysteries, this one relies heavily on coincidental discoveries, even if they arrive via Gmail or FaceTime, rather than more traditional means. But the plot’s contrivances are less problematic than the movie’s insistence on maintaining its artifice even after it becomes a hindrance.

Boy Erased is a showcase for Hedges, who played a closeted boy in “Lady Bird” and who plays a teen with a different sort of burden in the upcoming drama “Ben Is Back.” In each of those roles, the boy-next-door actor finds just the right combination of ordinary and anomalous.

An action thriller in which the Irish actor plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow operator at a Colorado ski resort with the death-dealing skills of a special-ops commando. This time, the absurdity is intentional.

Overlong and overstuffed with Southern rock and blues numbers, Burden is not exemplary filmmaking. But for viewers who can endure another spin through white-supremacist malice and ignorance, Hedlund and Riseborough make it a compelling ride.

The result is a solid if conventional bio.

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy.

Ip Man 3 credibly conjures the period with soundstage sets, rock-and-roll oldies and slicked-back hair. But director Winston Yip shows less concern for authenticity in Ip’s antagonists.

Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It’s part Kurosawa, part “X-Men,” part “Ichi the Killer.”

The plot fails to deliver a single surprise, however, and the characterizations are thin even by the standards of the tough-guy genre.

Here and There has been compared to such Jim Jarmusch films as "Stranger Than Paradise," and "Lungulov" does emulate Jarmusch's deliberate pace, minimal dialogue, deadpan humor and strong sense of place. In fact, Belgrade is the movie's most compelling character, its tattered charm underscored by back-street New York locations that oddly evoke Eastern Europe.

The movie is crisp and contemporary enough to inaugurate another franchise for Statham.

The broad comedy clashes with the movie's final message: that 6,000 girls face genital mutilation every day.

As an investigation into American municipal corruption, Broken City is, well, damaged. But as an opportunity for hard-boiled types to trade threats, blows and caustic banter, this modern-day noir works reasonably well.

Historical records being what they are, the filmmakers are forced to speculate about certain things, but where facts are known they generally adhere to them.

Triumph seems the wrong note for a feature film about mass murder. Yet Gallenberger insists on an old-school historical melodrama, with the darkest of terrors leavened by humor, tenderness and even romance. It's only the terror that rings true.

Thanks to his major role in songwriting, Krieger is credited repeatedly, but the other two players recede as the band increasingly becomes The Jim Morrison Show.

The protagonists of Late Bloomers have a problem, but it's not that they're getting older. Their dilemma is that they're reacting so differently to aging.

Teresa's doggedness parallels the movie's own. Paradise: Love would be more compelling if it had a second act in which either its protagonist or one of her boy toys came to some sort of realization. Instead, Seidl's strategy is to reiterate and escalate, which is finally more exhausting than illuminating.

The deliberate pace may suggest that the film is being thoughtful, but Let Me In is really just an exploitation movie with the confidence to take it slow.

Freakonomics' commercial success reflected the once-fashionable notion that economics could explain, well, everything.

Rickman is too theatrical, and too British, to vanish entirely into the person of Hilly Kristal. But he's entertaining to watch, and ultimately one of the more persuasive actors in a movie that suffers from as many odd casting decisions as Lee Daniels' The Butler.

After nearly 90 minutes of human folly, though, Surviving Progress can't very well conclude with a tribute to mankind. So, to end on a hopeful note, the movie turns to a chimp.

For a hymn to panic and hostility, the movie is curiously artful. But only the most sympathetic viewers will find that its poetry outweighs its belligerence.

Oddly, Countdown to Zero ends by suggesting that viewers get those nukes abolished by texting their disapproval to a phone number listed in the credits -- as if the governments of China or North Korea (or the United States, for that matter) are just waiting for a gentle rebuke from civic-minded documentary viewers.

A preachy parable of suburban discontent, Shorts probably has enough kid-oriented slapstick to please the under-12 set. But it's not likely to rival writer-director Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" series in long-term appeal.

An entertaining concert film, but not an incisive character study.