Neil Genzlinger

The director and writer, Noah Buschel, has no fresh insights to add to the well-worn dynamic and doesn’t give the actors or the audience much to work with.

It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time.

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

The Conjuring 2 does everything you want a sequel to do. It’s as well made as the original, but the location and the story are different enough that it’s not just the same thing all over again.

A film that tries to be both titillating and suspenseful but is neither.

The film, awkward and amateurish, is by Eric Merola, and at least it’s useful in explaining the differences among the various types of stem cells that are being explored for medical treatments.

If it were at all original, Andron would be merely a bad movie poorly executed. That it is instead a knockoff of “The Hunger Games” and “The Maze Runner” makes it all the more condemnable.

Welcome to Happiness is an airy fantasy of a film, cute but also frustrating. It’s a little too determined to be eccentric.

The script, by Adam Hirsch and Benjamin Brewer, is full of both humor and menace, giving the actors plenty to work with. That makes for an enjoyably slow buildup to an unexpected ending.

The script, besides being full of bad-guy clichés, doesn’t give the actors enough opportunities to work up a buddy rapport, though the glimmers of it that they are permitted are promising.

"Star Wars” fans will, of course, love this film, but it’s also a thought-provoking exploration of the dawning of our current age.

Mothers and Daughters is full of recognizable stars and heartfelt conversations. Unfortunately, it’s largely devoid of the kind of character development that can give such conversations real impact.

A lot of the weight of selling the story falls on Ms. Chen, and she’s not entirely up to the challenge, but Mr. Lim is able to build suspense anyway.

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

Even when it could be specific, Love Thy Nature isn’t.

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.

It somehow manages to feel more like a Hallmark Channel romance than like a serious film.

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.

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

This is a story full of people being miserable, humorless and selfish, despite having been given a lot in life, and they’re pretty much the same at the end of it as they were at the beginning.

Is the film a bit self-promotional? Sure, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless.

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.

This appealing documentary makes you understand why aficionados regard baseball as a form of poetry.

If nothing else, it’s evidence that the digital age has opened up new ways to work through grief.

The film doesn’t have the focus, pacing or plotting of the best of such bromance tales.

Feels as if it’s arriving late to its discoveries and, given the current political climate, as if it’s only scratching the surface.

Ms. Rauch (who wrote the film with her husband, Winston Rauch) nails the portrayal admirably under Bryan Buckley’s direction. But that doesn’t mean Hope is anyone you want to spend almost two hours with.

Like the Muppets and the Simpsons, Pee-wee Herman seems not to age. But in his new Netflix movie, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, he does take things down a notch; he’s less frenetic and more reactive.

Christopher Plummer puts on a master class in acting, and his director, Atom Egoyan, delivers one in audience manipulation in Remember.

About Scout is another entry in the “charming road movie” genre, one that banks a little too heavily on charm and not enough on story.

Will this hard-luck president again defy death while his stoic sidekick vanquishes the nasty, uncivilized terrorists? It’s hard to care when a movie is this formulaic and moronic.

Funny, smart, thought-provoking — and musical, too.

You already know the history told in The Last Man on the Moon, but this story just never grows old.

The film is part psychological thriller, part horror movie, and the horror elements deliver some solid frights. Mr. Brody isn’t asked to stretch much, but he does his usual thing adroitly.

This film doesn’t seem to trust the inherent likability of his story. The director, Dexter Fletcher, and the writers, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton, load it up with tropes that actually make it less endearing.

A starry father-son pairing is largely squandered in Forsaken, an old-school western that is a little too old school for its own good.

It’s full of discussion points but lets them go by undiscussed.

It is aimed at younger children and includes pretty songs, but it doesn’t soft-pedal anything. Its low-key story is about friendship, but it’s also about loss, which should leave pint-size viewers with plenty to think about.

The two stars are attractive, and Emily Ting, who wrote and directed, makes the city look great, but during their endless strolling Ruby and Josh never get much beyond shallow banter.

A dreary Australian movie, directed by Nick Robertson, that has more dogs than “Cujo” but noticeably less plot.

These are fragments more than complete stories, and the incompleteness is its own kind of creepiness.

The more desperate the characters’ flight becomes, the less interesting the movie grows. It does end with a witty flourish, though — one that makes good use of those glasses.

Lazer Team ends by setting itself up for a sequel, but that’s mighty wishful thinking. There’s not a big demand for laugh-free comedies.

Lots of comedic fight scenes break up the story’s more somber stretches, and the animation, especially in 3-D, is simply gorgeous.

It still has enough scary moments to satisfy horror fans, but you’re left wondering whether it might have been more disturbing had it stayed on its original path.

Even before a “do as I say, not as I do” twist costs it all credibility, Prescription Thugs is a not very good documentary about a very important subject.

Though Mr. Grint and Mr. Perlman both come off credibly, the movie is practically laugh-free.

A decently executed creeper built around a convincing performance by Natalie Dormer.

Refreshingly unpredictable but also frustrating.

Nowhere does Mr. Core’s film approach the action-movie chops or psychological smarts of Ms. Bigelow’s original or, truth be told, benefit from actors displaying the same charm as her stars. But for a number of liberating airborne seconds, none of that may matter.

The humor in Mr. Krawczyk’s script is deliciously subtle, as it has to be when your lead character is a man of few words; a viewer might easily spend the first half of the movie not even realizing it’s there.

The film delivers the standard upbeat message about family, along with one particularly outstanding and incongruous cameo that — sorry — won’t be spoiled here.

This is well-worn territory, and though the two leads are very good, the romance that is supposed to drive the story isn’t particularly well delineated.

American Hero starts off seeming as if it is going to be a fresh take on superheroes, but Nick Love, who wrote and directed, turns out to have nowhere to go with his intriguing premise.

It’s an assured, deftly acted movie that builds its creepiness slowly and keeps its secrets well hidden till the end.

It’s a curious, bittersweet story, flecked with dashes of bombast and overstatement that Presley himself would have admired.

There are no suggested solutions here to the difficult issues raised, but the film at least reminds us that it’s important not to accept this new way of warring without scrutinizing it.

It doesn’t feel like a mere imitation; it has too much wit and too many striking performances for that.

One of the decade’s odder political stories is revisited, without much illumination, in Sweet Micky for President.

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.

Man Up, a destined-for-romance story in the spirit of “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” has just enough edge to distinguish it from a Lifetime movie. It also has Lake Bell and Simon Pegg, versatile and likable actors who help the mild story considerably.

The film is occasionally amusing but rarely feels genuine.

The movie briefly picks up some warmth when John and Louis encounter a mother and daughter (Lynn Collins and Emma Fuhrmann) who are also in the midst of some self-discovery, but the movie seems unwilling to linger too long on it for fear of becoming rewarding.

The Peanuts Movie may be simultaneously the most charming and the most daring experiment in human genetics ever conducted. At issue is whether the character summaries and back stories of fictional pop-culture figures can be passed from one generation to the next solely through DNA.

The Sarah character isn’t developed well enough to make her journey enlightening or involving.

What follows is a decently structured story of personal demons and culinary competition, with a couple of nice twists thrown in, but it’s built with materials that at this point in the life cycle of this genre are mighty shopworn.

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.

There are a few sweet moments early in Jem and the Holograms.... But then the movie’s lumbering, overstuffed, unfocused plot shows up, and whatever high hopes we might have had for this latest exploitation of 1980s nostalgia are slowly ground away.

The setup is a scriptwriting gimme — if your central couple lose a child, practically any subsequent behavior is justifiable — but the actors sell what they’re given quite effectively.

The subject matter is only part of what makes Poached one of the more unsettling documentaries to come along lately. The presentation is also pivotal.

The sci-fi premise that drives the thriller Reversion is probably close enough to being a reality that the movie should raise goose bumps. Instead it’s uninvolving, thanks to uninspired acting and a script that doesn’t take the central idea very far.

A horror comedy that proves that with the right actors you can make an amusing movie even if a lot of your ideas are borrowed.

You certainly feel as if you were getting to know the man as he really is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gaining much insight.

It only occasionally delivers the kind of unguarded moment that makes you feel as if you’re getting beneath the media image, and it is not at all interested in discussing broader issues raised by Ms. Yousafzai’s fame.

You can get away with this sort of thing if your humor is sharp, but here it’s mostly sophomoric and rarely surprising.

The film reawakens long-repudiated notions of white supremacy and such, but Mr. Roth is surely not trying to peddle them. He’s merely seeing if he can replicate the formula of the subgenre. And he does, fairly slickly, in fact.

Documentaries about disabilities don’t come any smarter or more touching than Mission to Lars, a beautiful sibling road trip tale with a heavy-metal flourish.

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

It’s tantalizing, sublimely creepy stuff that keeps you guessing even after the credits roll.

Though Cooties has a reasonable amount of laughs and frights, and though real teachers may find it an apt allegory for the zombielike charges in their classrooms, it’s not really funny enough to achieve grown-up cachet, and it’s too ugly and violent for younger viewers.

Ultimately, it is only partly about Bobby Fischer. It is equally about us — Americans or any other nationality inclined to put too much importance on chess matches, soccer matches, space races, whatever. It’s about how we manufacture celebrities on scant pretext and then destroy them, or allow them to destroy themselves while we watch.

Michael Ealy has a very ominous stare and Sanaa Lathan sells her inconsistent character pretty well, but The Perfect Guy is still just a boilerplate stalker story that proceeds more or less as you suspect it will.

Ms. Harden is fine in a role that requires little, but her character is a lazy stereotype that ought to make real librarians wince.

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

For most of the way, Return to Sender merges creepy and sexy to good effect, thanks to a close-to-the-vest performance by Rosamund Pike.

If you are one of those people who romanticize the East Village in New York when it was at its grungiest, Ten Thousand Saints might be the movie of your dreams. Even if you’re not, it’s still a very fine film, full of quietly impressive performances and young characters who register as authentic.

All of the characters here are underwritten, and Mr. Cage and most of the other actors don’t seem to be putting much effort into them.

A charming and clever concoction.

Strengthening of brotherly and marital bonds is the real agenda, of course, but happily the movie never stays on these laugh-killing themes long.

Big Significant Things is a cute idea in search of substance.

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.

it’s not as original as it wants to be, despite having the able Chris Columbus in the director’s chair.

The film has too many fits of uncontrolled laughter and other awkwardness that suggest an unedited home movie, but, in general, Twinsters makes for a heartfelt alternative to a traditional documentary approach.

This informative foodie film is more than just footage of assorted chefs cooking delicious-looking cuts of meat. The tour encompasses breeders, butchers, grazing practices and genetics.

The experiment’s methodologies and meanings have been analyzed endlessly over the years, and the film doesn’t delve deeply into these interpretations and critiques. It doesn’t need to; this stark and riveting version of events speaks for itself.

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.

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

The horror movie The Gallows starts with a decent if improbable premise, and it ends with a pretty good jolt. But in between, the film sure wears out the already tired found-footage device.