Neil Genzlinger

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s adorable.

It's like being trapped in a roomful of teenage girls for 80 minutes.

The film doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. There is little sense of what kinds of debates take place at board meetings or how pressure is applied behind closed doors.

It's beautifully played and will hit home with anyone who has had to struggle with the most difficult aspects of aging.

The filmmakers, chronicling the Dalai Lama’s somewhat muddled attempts to respond to the protesters’ calls while not antagonizing China, do a fair amount of muddling themselves. They lurch awkwardly between reverence for the Dalai Lama and hints that he has become, politically, irrelevant or an obstacle.

The director, Josh Appignanesi, has a nice sense of comic timing, slipping in some of the best jokes when you least expect them.

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.

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

The story has several well-disguised twists, and although it’s a drama, it is sprinkled with touches of whimsy, thanks to a colorful collection of robots.

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.

The film, especially in its resolution, feels a bit like a “Twilight Zone” episode and might have been better at that length, but the acting’s pretty good, and the cinematography keeps things lively.

A dandy little documentary whether you view the story it captures as a precursor to the flash fame of the Internet age or as one of the last genuine underground phenomena before the Internet made that whole concept obsolete.

[Todd Phillips] delivers an entertaining tale, especially when one or both men have to travel from their home base in Florida to overseas hot spots to correct their ineptitude.

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

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.

Characters this nicely etched deserve a more complete conclusion.

Yet the urban images he presents are missing the thing that makes any city come alive: human beings. You begin to suspect that Mr. Persons hates humanity. This makes General Orders No. 9, for all its sheen of sophistication, rather simplistic: people bad, nature good.

Ms. Bailey’s willingness to let the children talk and to let the viewer impose broader meaning elevates it.

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

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.

Mr. Morelli mixes live-action and animated scenes to good effect. He doesn’t have time to give his characters depth, but there’s pleasure in figuring out how they connect and pondering the movie’s modest themes.

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.

Sure, you've seen this story before, but this version has a freshness nonetheless.

It’s a smart, understated sex comedy, a description that suggests a certain maturity. You’d never suspect it was the first feature from its director, Robert Schwartzman.

Mr. Walker is convincing as a man battling grief, exhaustion and, occasionally, an intruding outside world where lawlessness has taken hold.

A charming concoction with positive messages for younger children about conquering fears, understanding outsiders and knowing yourself.

A riveting piece of work full of unpleasant characters whom you're glad you've met but never want to see again.

The South Korean director Kim Jee-woon fails to dazzle with the endless speeding-car sequences, but that 60-second flourish during a lengthy firefight is almost worth the tedium.

The film, directed by Gregg Bishop and released by the Chiller Films horror factory, has a few good special effects, but it’s too noisy and scattershot to be suspenseful.

The movie's messages are delivered with a heavy hand, but some of the scenes are eye-popping, especially -- sorry, peace-loving Terrians -- the battle sequences.

It’s hard to score big laughs with hidden-camera material these days because there has been so much of it since the “Jackass” TV show, but Mr. Knoxville and his young sidekick still land a few jaw-droppers.

If "Wall-E" pushes the boundaries of what can be done in an animated movie, Space Chimps proves that the old formula is still pretty effective when executed well.

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.

The director, Harold Guskin, and writer, Sandra Jennings, show admirable patience in letting the story unspool, and the actors reward them.

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 more a patched-together collection of anecdotes than a coherent story, and some of Greg's tribulations, like fear over a high dive and an amusement-park ride, don't seem age-appropriate for a boy who has just finished seventh grade.

Has some delicious moments, but you never quite shake the feeling that it’s documenting a tempest in a teapot.

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

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

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.

Mumbly dialogue, relentlessly jittery camerawork, a star who is also co-director and co-writer: Yes, it’s time for another movie that mistakes the claustrophobic world of young New York artsy types for something interesting.

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

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.

The director, Mike Mendez, shows no signs of knowing how to make campy horror work the way that the creators of similar movies on Syfy do. It has to be either subtle or over the top. This is neither.

Every new generation has to learn the lesson: Comedy success on the small screen doesn’t guarantee the same on the big screen. If anything, it guarantees the opposite.

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

Mr. Miller makes a questionable choice in setting the film against the backdrop of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, and he lingers too long on an offensive fringe group that hangs out near ground zero with signs saying the terrorist attacks were God's will. But for most of the way, his treatment is substantive and evenhanded.

Free Samples is a modest but pleasant small-budget movie with two bits of laziness in the script, but one particularly sweet performance that makes up for them.

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.

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 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.

Do they have date movies in China? Probably, and Hot Summer Days, an enjoyable concoction of loosely intertwined stories of love and obsession, is just right for that purpose.

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

It avoids the big confrontation or grand statement; doing so allows it to be an effective, if somewhat uneventful, study of the Brooklyn bubble effect.

The film uses nonprofessional actors and has a good eye, but more story development and fewer lingering shots of the trash-strewn trailer park would have been an improvement.

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?"

The script, by Mr. Canon and Doug Simon, eventually strains credulity - even frat boys aren't this dumb - but Mr. Canon, in his first feature, shows a great knack for keeping things moving. The gathering implausibility is dispelled by a nice ending twist.

This distillation of Philip Shabecoff’s book doesn’t really capture the urgency and militancy promised in the title.

With a pair of irresistible leads and a straightforward love-overcomes-adversity story, Everything, Everything scores a direct hit on the teenage-girl market. Others might find it pretty enjoyable as well.

New Jerusalem feeling like an acting exercise in search of a theater class.

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

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

Enjoyable performances keep the tale from becoming too heavy-handed.

The movie isn’t interested in fully developed characters, just carnage.

This might be more entertaining if any of the three main characters were at all likable.

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

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

Mr. Norris arrives just as the blood baths and leaden dialogue are beginning to grow tedious, and his deadpan self-parody is pretty darn funny. More important, it gives you permission to laugh at the rest of this mindless movie, which is the only way to choke it down.

Mr. Carolla’s wide-ranging résumé includes writing, voice-over work, talk-show appearances and a popular podcast, but it’s light on acting, and he shows why here, proving himself unable to perform the difficult trick of making a loathsome character sympathetic.

Skiptrace settles for a warmed-over plot, tedious fight sequences and humor that’s heavy on crotch jokes and pratfalls.