Neil Genzlinger

If Urban Hymn starts with that familiar dynamic, it stays surprisingly fresh thanks to three fine performances and a willingness to be uncompromising.

The buildup to the actual competition is perfectly paced, with the film never tipping its hand as to the winner. And the championship has all the drama of a high-stakes sporting event: failure under pressure, unexpected triumph, gracious losers and winners both.

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.

Getting retro right is harder than it seems.

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

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.

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.

Its scenes frequently feature Africans machine-gunning other Africans or hacking them to death with machetes. This is a disturbing sight indeed. Maybe it was intended as a metaphor, but this movie isn't nearly sophisticated enough to pull off that kind of commentary. It's not really even sophisticated enough to be an absorbing zombie movie

Detroit Unleaded is about as gentle as comedies come these days, commendably so.

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.

Serves up its material with an excess of treacly music and an overabundance of glowing reminiscences. This has the odd effect of making his story less powerful than it actually is.

It is Mr. Akhtar whose understated performance holds together this far-ranging, cameo-filled film.

The film genre that might be called Old People Behaving Hilariously gets an appealing new entry with The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, a sometimes daffy, often droll Swedish movie.

Mr. Matthiesen seems as if he might have been trying to make an indictment of sexism and exploitation in the fashion world, but if so he doesn’t hit the theme nearly hard enough.

Disorganized and somewhat annoying.

If Mr. Martin’s take on grief is facile, the movie overall is a pleasant trip, and Dean’s doodles — by Mr. Martin himself — are a treat.

The product - sloppy even by guerrilla filmmaking standards - has no revelations to offer that are worth the slog of watching it.

The director, Greg Vander Veer, makes this case through the sheer number of people he interviews.

It’s all kind of cute. Maybe a little too cute, but it does have a nice circle-of-life ending. And along the way, Mr. Byington shows a knack for observational humor, slipping in sly jokes that force you to keep paying attention despite the slim plot. Droll and interesting; just not very substantial.

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

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.