Neil Genzlinger

The film’s messages about friendship, acceptance and being yourself are clear enough for the young, and grown-ups can read the story as a warning about conformity and about going to war on false pretenses.

The storytelling becomes muddled in the middle, and the suspense doesn’t build as well as it ought to, but the winking undercurrent keeps the film watchable.

Fans will love it; their main complaint may be that it ends too soon. Amateur psychologists in the audience, meanwhile, may be asking why such a successful guy seems so defensive.

A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"

As a chronicle of how one rock star slowly fell victim to the Broadway bug, it’s kind of amusing.

Mr. Brook and Ms. Wells are in a sense not documenting a controversy at all; they are capturing an endemic, heartbreaking defeatism.

With songs about shoes and dogs, Lucky Stiff couldn’t be sillier, but Mr. Marsh and especially Ms. James make it an enjoyable curiosity for fans of musical theater.

Marvin, Seth and Stanley aims to be a deadpan travels-with-my-wacky-dad story, but the father in it is almost an afterthought. It still has sublime moments, but it leaves you wanting more of them.

Refreshingly unpredictable but also frustrating.

It doesn’t really succeed in conveying McQueen’s great passion for auto racing. In truth, it mostly makes him seem like a jerk — but cinephiles might enjoy it as a case study of moviemaking gone wrong.

It would be better if it had a bit less proclaiming and a bit more nuts-and-bolts information, but still, it’s refreshing to see people bubbling over with enthusiasm for an art that is somewhat out of the mainstream.

Mr. Moore has basically made an earnest but not very entertaining pro-Clinton campaign film, occasionally funny, momentarily heartfelt when he takes up the subject of universal health care and the lives lost for lack of it. Against the rest of his work (“Bowling for Columbine,” “Roger & Me”) it’s fairly tepid stuff.

Everything goes pretty much as you guess it’s going to, but the conceit of seeing the whole story through the eyes of the videographer adds a dimension to the familiar goings-on.

Parts of it work, but the overall package is never really suspenseful enough to have you on edge or overtly funny enough to be a lark.

Ms. Breslin and especially Ms. Henley are quite good, elevating a film that seems like an oft-told tale.

With a manic performance by Jean-Claude Van Damme and an improbable but intriguing plot variation, Enemies Closer is an improvement over most hunt-or-be-hunted fare. A small improvement, but still.

This film, somewhat clumsy yet full of illuminating interviews, seems mostly like an exercise in building national pride, but it holds lessons for anyone trying to resist an overwhelming force.

There’s nothing wrong with being uplifting, but something less predictable would have been refreshing.

It is also unabashedly one-sided and is short on solutions, other than the usual "Call your Congressional representatives." But its message, despite the hyperbole, certainly warrants examination and discussion.

Mr. Perry has his moviemaking machine running smoothly, which is to say somewhat predictably.

The vivid recollections of the attack by survivors, including Mr. Hughes, take over the film midway through, and the friendship story line never quite re-establishes itself.

The story stays intriguing for much of the way, but eventually things cease to make sense.

It’s all too dumb and ribald for most tastes, but if you liked all the zombie comedies that came before, well, here’s another one.

Dough is sweet, often funny and always nonthreatening, a movie for those who wish the intractable realities of the world would just disappear.

The execution is a bit clumsy, but the documentary MIS: Human Secret Weapon shines a light on an interesting bit of World War II history.

Too much happens too quickly in The Hollars for the story to be credible, but the film has some likable qualities, among them the fun of seeing actors in unexpected roles.

It does have some sweet touches and a droll sense of humor.

The film’s main distraction, oddly, is the voice-over through which Nate annotates the action. A voice-over is standard procedure for the wistful-look-back genre, but here it’s forced and unfunny. This wild story sells itself, no narration needed.

The film is at its best when it’s in parody mode, though it keeps that card too close to the vest for much of its two-hour length. The humor, not the monster, is what you’re left wanting more of.

American Made Movie ends up feeling as if it were built from well-known facts and wishful thinking.

Characters this nicely etched deserve a more complete conclusion.

Considerable care goes into establishing the premise, but the film eventually abandons psychological subtlety for hallucinatory garishness, which is too bad.

The film, though, might have been more powerful with a little less grit. A few minutes of dispassionate discussion by experts about ibogaine and the obstacles to its legalization in the United States would have enhanced the film without damaging its street cred.

The scriptwriters, Kane Senes (who also directed) and John Chriss, keep the family secrets too bottled up, but the actors, who include William Forsythe as the McCluskey patriarch, play it with dark vigor.

The problems are clearly explained, though the film doesn’t have solutions any more than public officials do, since shoreline development is already a fact of life.

Some fine performances and an embrace of understatement make Matthew Leutwyler's oddly titled Answers to Nothing a respectable entry in the multiple-stories-that-interlock genre.

Of course, while your brain is fritzing out, you're trying to figure out how the cinematic trick was done and what the implications might be for other old films. Scary, disturbing, intriguing, all at once.

The animated feature The Boss Baby has some hilarious moments. If, that is, you’re a grown-up.

The plot twists are easily guessed, and the film goes on for one predicament too long, but there are some good laughs.

The script never gives them the kind of memorable exchange that makes fans howl with delight. But all in all, Escape Plan does what it sets out to do.

Cars could easily have been the stars of Lowriders, but the film makes them supporting players in a family drama that’s a mix of strong scenes and shopworn ones punctuated by clichés.

All in all there’s not much to complain about here, except that — as with a lot of revisited classics — the story’s not as revolutionary as you remember it. For veterans of the 1982 Poltergeist, it’s more like scary but pleasant nostalgia.

The film is at its strongest when Russell and Kevin face tests of their character brought on by their interactions with homophobic students.

The film doesn’t unearth anything that hasn’t already been voiced, and it could use more details on the scope of the phenomenon. But with more police shootings in the headlines just in the past few days, it’s nothing if not timely.

Bonobos: Back to the Wild is an uncomfortable mix of fictionalized account and nature film, but you have to admire the work it documents.

We’re left once again feeling we’ve had only a glimmer of illumination on a vexingly complex problem.

Some viewers will be frustrated by the film's determination to be evenhanded, but with this same battle likely to be fought repeatedly in the coming years (the issue is again on the 2012 Maine ballot), Question One stands as a pretty good primer in how referendums are won and lost.

The threads may not all be original, but they’re kept nicely distinct. Rather than awkwardly intertwining, they merely brush up against one another.

Matt Dillon and Kurt Russell may not make the most convincing half-brothers, but The Art of the Steal is a fairly amusing heist film with some sibling tension helping the story along.

Delivered with sloppy, gleeful confidence, the movie is smarter than most gross-out comedies but isn't afraid to inspire an "Ewww."

It’s all light as a feather, with Jeremy Leven, the writer and director, landing some good multinational jokes along the way.

The best animated movies for children are sublime. This one generally settles for noisy, though it throws in a positive message at the end.

The movie has a roughly equal number of clumsy moments and sweet ones.

A lot of intriguing ideas are floated in Teenage... But the film takes a point of view that leaves all of them underdeveloped.

The narrative, read by John Krasinski, is kid-friendly in a cloying sort of way, and unpleasant realities like China’s pollution are not mentioned. So as an introduction for children to exotic creatures in picturesque landscapes, the movie is harmless enough.

Ariel Vromen has directed a decent, fast-paced action movie, and Mr. Costner is enjoyable to watch as Jerico Stewart.

If Mr. Martin’s take on grief is facile, the movie overall is a pleasant trip, and Dean’s doodles — by Mr. Martin himself — are a treat.

For $600, it turns out, you can make a short documentary about aging recreational swimmers that has just enough winning moments in it to let viewers forgive that it's little more than a glorified home video.

Despite the preachiness, however, they have still made a moderately enjoyable film, thanks to some engaging performances.

Yes, it’s an exploitative sort of filmmaking, but Mr. Zarcoff keeps it fairly restrained for most of the way. You know things will end badly for someone, and perhaps everyone. The ominousness just keeps building.

Ray is courageous just for making the decision to change sexes. The film — which, by the way, includes a surprising amount of droll humor — would be better if it trusted the audience to recognize this, rather than piling ordeals worthy of the Labors of Hercules onto its protagonist.

A sobering study in how individual human beings can become afterthoughts in the face of broad movements like nationalism, a phenomenon that is still much in evidence almost a century later.

Several varieties of creepy run through As Good as Dead, a gruesomely alluring tale of long-simmering revenge.

The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.

It’s all kind of cute. Maybe a little too cute, but it does have a nice circle-of-life ending. And along the way, Mr. Byington shows a knack for observational humor, slipping in sly jokes that force you to keep paying attention despite the slim plot. Droll and interesting; just not very substantial.

The film, though, has some redeeming qualities, including the presence of Idris Elba as the obligatory good guy, who encourages Johnny to get Danny into the protective custody of a religious order.

The plot may be a little too cluttered for the toddler crowd to follow, but the next age group up should be amused, and the script by Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith has plenty of sly jokes for grown-ups.

The movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes. Whether the kiddies will appreciate that is unclear, but they’ll certainly like the voice work done by Emma Stone as Eep.

If the film doesn't measure up as a piece of historical scholarship, it does manage to be a rather touching exploration of the troupe's life cycle: achieving notoriety, then being torn apart by fame, then being destroyed by forces beyond its control.

Serves up its material with an excess of treacly music and an overabundance of glowing reminiscences. This has the odd effect of making his story less powerful than it actually is.

The most expensive home movie ever made, is one man's genial account of his trip into outer space.

There’s nothing sophisticated or groundbreaking here, but the movie is a moderately good entry in the bro-grows-up genre.

The lesson may not be particularly original, but the film has some striking moments as it follows him to his destiny.

The film is maddeningly vague about how the two men made their initial breakthroughs, but it certainly is proof that even those who are written off as children can find a voice.

The film may be one-sided, but if nothing else, it is a reminder that the “coal equals jobs” equation is a serious oversimplification.

The male characters here are too thinly developed for this to be a top-notch survival thriller, but Ms. Aselton knows how to get the pulse pounding.

Not much here is new, but condensing it all into one zippy documentary makes for an ugly portrait.

When it’s not being overly promotional, it can be interesting.

The film is, if nothing else, an interesting meditation on how a child who grows up without guidance might react to a situation that requires judgment.

For the non-Argentine audience, though, more context would have helped these wonderful songs and dances tell the nation’s story.

The film, by Justin Bare and Matthew Miele, would be better if it spent less time gushing about how great Mr. Benson is and more time confronting some of the questions his approach raises.

If you go, expect a diverting summer action adventure with occasional laughs, not a diverting stoner comedy with occasional action.

For the first half of the film, amusing monster humor keeps things interesting; some monsters, it turns out, are better at party games than others.

This isn’t exactly “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”; it’s more like a film version of a TV series you could comfortably let your tweens watch.

If you can choke down the implausible notion that the doughy Kevin James would last more than five seconds in a mixed martial arts ring, Here Comes the Boom is a moderately enjoyable, nontaxing sort of comedy.

Angels in Stardust ends up being too tidy to be a great coming-of-age movie, but it’s a decent one.

The fifth Transformers movie, The Last Knight, is far from the worst in this continuing experiment in noisy nonsense based on Hasbro toys. That is thanks largely to two words: Anthony Hopkins.

The film might have made a decent end-of-broadcast segment on a newscast. But inflated to feature length and devoid of nuance or fresh insights, it just seems self-congratulatory - aren't we great for having done this for these old guys? - and exploitive.

The samples of Mr. Abu-Jamal's writings aren't generous enough to establish whether his is a singular voice or just a prolific one, with Mr. Vittoria instead letting the film wander considerably.

Any wilderness ordeal has to help some character clarify something, and for Ben it’s his relationship with his girlfriend (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), which gives the film a modest side interest. But mostly this one is for fans of desert scenery and of Mr. Douglas in cranky, crazy mode.

The movie’s flaw is that it mixes tones. Ruth, her relatives and her fellow workers are realistically played, but her gal-pal buddies are caricatures.

The actors, none of whom have much experience, are quite convincing, but the story — Jed falls, then sees the error of his ways — is an oft-told one.

This film overstays its welcome and has pacing problems. But its eclectic characters certainly linger.

Mr. Matthiesen seems as if he might have been trying to make an indictment of sexism and exploitation in the fashion world, but if so he doesn’t hit the theme nearly hard enough.

Compadres tries to be a lighthearted cross-border buddy film, and sometimes it succeeds. But consistency is a problem — it doesn’t hit those humorous high notes often enough, and when it’s not in the comedic groove, it’s muddy.

My Lucky Star, a spy-caper romance from China, is sweet and harmless, but it’s also a little disorienting.

It's a lightweight romance that occasionally shows a sense of humor but seems afraid to turn it loose.

Rapture-Palooza has a promising setup and a cast with a good track record of bringing the funny, yet it never does live up to its potential.