Mark Jenkins

What works best here comes between the movie’s heavy opening and its lightweight conclusion.

Fortunately, the maudlin moments are offset by fine performances, flashes of humor and a visual sense that’s more astute than the script.

Greengrass employs a handheld camera effectively, as usual, to simulate confusion, panic and terror. He cuts away from the most horrific moments of slaughter.

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.

If this vaguely cyberpunk, occasionally comic Australian flick were named after its own qualities, it would have been called “Knockoff.”

Taking its cues from the religious severity of the community in which it’s set — and the London weather — Lelio’s latest film is austere, deliberate and rather chilly.

The rest of the film has a cozy TV-commercial vibe, pumped by tunes from Katy Perry and the inevitable Neil Diamond. It’s no champion, but it’s still a reasonably good cry.

As a form of life-coaching, this documentary is, in fact, kind of a dud.

Autism aside, writer-director Rachel Israel’s debut film is a fairly typical, low-budget New York romance, complete with an excursion to Coney Island. What distinguishes it are Israel’s empathetic characterizations — she’s known Polansky for 15 years — and the winning performances, not only by the leads but also by the supporting players.

Well-made and likable, without any major missteps. It’s also just a little bland.

Viewers who aren’t in the mood for star-crossed love will prefer the slapstick and earthy humor, including a sequence in which three of the guys get pregnant. It’s another fine mess the resourceful monkey king has to rescue his comrades from.

“Dunjia” is exuberant and visually inventive, notably in the ways it incorporates text into the images. It also benefits from engaging performances. But the story is motley and not very involving, and the anything-goes CGI undermines the battle sequences.

With its jazz-funk score and trust-no-one scenario, The Swindlers is an entertaining if mostly routine con-game thriller.

Campillo’s style is usually naturalistic, and the superb ensemble cast’s performances are entirely unaffected.

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 result is a solid if conventional bio.

In place of catharsis, the climax provides gross-out slapstick, but writer-director S. Craig Zahler takes his handiwork so seriously that viewers may do the same.

As both a movie and a battle plan for ending the child-sex trade, “Stopping Traffic” is disorganized and incomplete.

The movie’s thesis is that the 1960s’ political clashes and cultural revelations were essentially linked, and equally liberating.

Chinese director Guo Ke takes a quiet, deliberate approach. That must be partly out of respect for the women and their suffering. It’s also because this meditative film functions as a memorial to the remaining survivors: 22 of them when filming began, and even fewer today.

If her career as director somehow doesn’t pan out, Meyers-Shyer would make an excellent fairy godmother.

Hong Kong director Stephen Fung (“Tai Chi Hero”) is no John Woo, but he gives The Adventurers almost as much style as its larcenous characters exude.

This movie’s condensed telling is somewhat bewildering, although the essentials eventually become clear. But then they’re really just a pretext for such fairy-tale wonders as an underwater city, a living island and a hummingbird air force.

Perhaps more banter would have helped sustain interest. As the body count burgeons, the surprises become unsurprising, and the climax proves anticlimactic.

For viewers who aren’t hostile to mysticism, vegetarianism and endless chanting, it’s a stirring story.

Moka is a stark, moody mystery that doesn’t actually contain much mystery. Instead, it excels as a character study and a dynamic face-off between two formidable actresses: Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.

As usual in Hui’s films, the personal and the political are stitched tightly together.

Breakneck chases, high-altitude jeopardy and split-second rescues upstage everything save for a flowery moral: No technological breakthrough is more disruptive than a mother’s love.