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.