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.