Neil Genzlinger

Mr. Johnson and Ms. Lively are both pretty good, and with a more nuanced approach could have made this a powerful film.

The documentary “Tanzania: A Journey Within” is two travel diaries woven together. One is somber and moving. The other is distractingly annoying.

Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.

Things meander along to the inevitable blowup scene and a too-easy ending in which all is forgiven and personal growth has occurred, though not for the viewing audience.

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.

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

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.

This kind of movie is all about the special effects. They start out great - cool helicopter crash, very convincing giant lizard - but grow more amateurish as the film goes along, with a flight sequence on giant bees proving particularly clunky.

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

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.

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.

No swear words here; just harmless fun.

Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.

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.

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.

The earlier “Alvin” movie made more than $217 million just in the United States. It’s hard to imagine this somewhat confused sequel doing as well.

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.

What follows seems like a nonstop car and foot chase, with Albanian after Albanian falling victim to Bryan's remarkable aim and hand-fighting skills. Foreigners bad, Americans good, box office busy.

Has a plot as unambitious as a macaroni dinner, familiar and easy to eat and not particularly nutritious.

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.

Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day is usually pretty appealing when he dabbles in acting, and he’s appealing again in Ordinary World. But after a promising start the script lets him down, and the film turns into a predictable midlife-crisis yarn.

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.

The terrain is so familiar that it has a slightly stifling effect, even in Mr. Plympton’s demented hands. We long ago loved these characters to death.

The film does a pretty good job of conveying the bleakness and pointlessness Eva and her fellow mutants feel, but it's as if Ms. Trachinger were reluctant to take the premise any deeper for fear of being accused of imitating "Memento" or "Groundhog Day" or any number of other trapped-in-time films.

It’s a net broadly cast and woven of implications rather than of indisputable evidence, but — especially given the tobacco industry’s credibility problems — you’ll probably be inclined to think there’s some truth to the film’s allegations.

The changes — goodbye, white suburbia; hello, gritty diversity — recharge the batteries somewhat. But there’s no escaping that the found-footage phenomenon has gone from fresh and original to just plain annoying.

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

Some of the frights work reasonably well; and Ms. Ferland is convincing. But there aren’t enough surprises or innovations to make this one stand out in the sea of horror fare that comes along this time of year.

It meanders from start to finish, searching for a tone that it never quite finds.

The excitement factor only intermittently carries from the arena to the screen.

Over all, though, the hands-off approach leaves the viewer to draw his own conclusions, but without providing enough information.

The film, a first feature from Gillian Greene (wife of the director Sam Raimi, a producer here), has to settle for “sometimes amusing comedy” when it was probably aiming for “cult hit.”

Ms. Berry does a decent job with the role, and the film treats its subject matter respectfully, but the overall package doesn’t rise above ordinariness.

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

Has its share of funny moments. But it also has its share of tired ones, like the subplot involving the inadvertent swallowing of a ring.

There are enough good jokes in Fanboys, a road comedy about geeks on a "Star Wars"-related quest, to satisfy hard-core fans of that George Lucas franchise. But the film doesn't have the boosters, or thrusters, or whatever, to elevate it to more ambitious heights; it's weighed down by tired conventions and a general sense of having missed its moment.

A sometimes amusing sex farce.

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.

Ivory Tower, a documentary about soaring costs and other problems confronting higher education, can’t seem to decide what points it wants to make and ends up making none.

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

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

Escape From Planet Earth makes a tolerable diversion for a winter’s day or evening, just not a memorable one.

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.

It lacks focus and adds little to the awareness of the subject that even a casual follower of the news has already acquired.

Mr. Fuller is working on some kind of redemption theme, but he sabotages the story with underdeveloped plot threads: a bartender with cancer, an old car crash, sibling rivalry. Everything is annoyingly oblique; why?

The movie, directed by Steven C. Miller, doesn’t hold a lot of surprises, but there is worse terror-in-the-woods fare out there — rather a lot of it, in fact.

The guy's not much of a filmmaker, but he certainly gets your attention.

The actors do nice work before things derail.

Sure, Smurfs are blue, but who knew that they actually work blue?

Dismayingly, bad filmmaking isn't really to blame for the lack of punch in Ever Again. Perhaps it's the familiarity of it all.

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.

American Teacher doesn't come close to doing what it sets out to do, but it does end up as a heartfelt, bittersweet portrait of several teachers.

The documentary Can We Take a Joke?, a one-sided look at a multisided issue, does a fine job of defending a comic’s right to perform incendiary material. It would be better if it also at least acknowledged the possibility that some jokes ought not be told.

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

Christoph Baaden, the director, loses sight of the fact that, for people who don't run, the cult of running is kind of boring.

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.

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.

Sprinkled with moderately amusing comic moments, but basically your enjoyment of this film will be proportional to your tolerance for the one-joke phenomenon of air drumming.

The film wants to spur individual changes in behavior, but there’s a fair amount in it that might discourage you from even trying.

A comedy that's too late to the Ponzi-scheme party to be topical, and not outrageous enough to take advantage of its own setups.

Maybe expecting a horror film to have a point is expecting too much. In any case, the two actresses give committed performances on the way to a veiled ending.

A bit more editing to remove some of the airiness would have made for a better film.

Are these re-enactors really as clueless as they seem, or is the portrait just incomplete? It’s impossible to tell from this too-sparse film.

Now and then this documentary by Bert Marcus rises above mere promotion, leaving you wishing it had tackled the sport’s difficult questions in more depth.

This film doesn’t find any fresh ways to make you jump out of your seat. Ms. Lutz is appealing, though, and fans of the franchise will probably be pleased with the elaboration. Too many horror sequels are content merely to recycle what worked the first time.

It’s a boilerplate plot like one you might find in any morning cartoon.

The story may not stay with you, but don’t be surprised if you come away with a strong desire to visit Florence.

The film, though generous with doses of Heifetz in performance, isn't entirely successful at illuminating the man.

The film's most interesting aspects are its gimmicks rather than its frights.

A lightweight comedy aimed, presumably, at tweeners and fans of World Wrestling Entertainment.

An aimless film about an aimless fellow, but it's not without its charms. It may be without a point, but hey, you can't have everything in a no-budget film like this.

Although Language of a Broken Heart, a romantic comedy written by and starring Juddy Talt, eventually drowns in clichés and predictability, it has a few decent moments of humor and some appealing performances that make it marginally better than most vanity projects.

If the intent was to keep the characters here just as anonymous as most migrant workers are to prosperous people in the United States, it succeeds: Pedro and his family remain mere sketches. If, however, the aim was a more meaningful portrait of hardship and aspiration, the film is merely underdone. It's no secret that life in many places is hard.

Ms. Mann (Michael's daughter) does stage a bracing car chase, and Mr. Morgan makes an impression despite a story that's sometimes hard to follow.

Certainly the journey of Rachel Flowers, a blind musician and composer, is impressive, but Hearing Is Believing, a documentary about her, doesn’t put enough effort into giving her tale depth and context.

Only a couple of times do the stunts have that extra ingredient - wit - that makes this kind of thing amusing to watch.

Brian Malone's documentary Patriocracy feels as if it were made by someone who had been out of the country since the Clinton administration and upon re-entering was shocked at the polarized, dysfunctional state of the federal government.

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

Relies too much on rehash and preaching to the choir to kindle a broad-based outrage, but it does make you wonder what really happened on May 24, 1990.

Getting retro right is harder than it seems.

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.

Over all, the movie, directed by Dan Harris and featuring name actors like Kal Penn and Janeane Garofalo in small roles, has a focus problem that leaves its humorous moments obscured and its intentions hazy.

Cedric the Entertainer's artless performance deadens what could have been a much funnier comedy.

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

In the end, though, Mr. Garbarski makes no judgments, which leaves this film feeling sweet but light: we already knew that Judaism, like most other religions, is an ever-evolving collage.

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.

This film, directed by Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland, is a harmless enough way to occupy a youngster for an hour and a half. It’s just not especially rich in extraordinary characters or moments.

The whole film seems to have a vague heaviness to it. The best Muppet movies have been great because they had charm. There’s no charm here, really; just self-referential jokes, decent but not memorable songs, and lots and lots of cameos.

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.

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.

Aging Gen-Xers, it turns out, aren't all that witty, and Ms. Hillis and Mr. Grinnell don't have the kind of chemistry that might make this setup work.

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.

This being a film review, the relevant question is whether J L Aronson's documentary about Danielson is worth watching. The answer, for about two-thirds of it, is yes. Though ultimately, alas, the movie has a little too much Danielson in it.

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.

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.

Seed: The Untold Story is one of those documentaries that get you riled up about a situation but leave you feeling that nothing significant can be done about it.

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

Only occasionally funny and not at all illuminating about the rich world of a cappella singing.