Nicolas Rapold

The movie (directed by Janeen Damian and written by Kirsten Hansen) skips over Maddie savoring the outcome of her wish, and shifts right into charming comedy around her confusion, including having no memory about how she got engaged.

Mr. Meyer adheres to a cinema of broad experience by casting rugged but uninspiring nonprofessionals and focusing on the rebels’ long, lonely struggle rather than on triumph and tactics.

The newer film’s picture of neglect and denial, with flashes of connection and empathy, is promising, if tough to inhabit.

The many red herrings and the dark-secret finale recall the reliable, compulsive appeal of a page-turner, although the tensions don’t always feel fully translated to the rhythms and demands of a film.

Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew, the storied group of session musicians.

Butter on the Latch thrives on its casually true snapshots of confusion and connection.

Cronin thrills as ever to luscious gross-out scenes.

Though not terribly nuanced, a bit muddled and lacking certain perspectives, “Zipper” drives home the fragile identity of even the city’s signature locales and the alarming cultural myopia of much redevelopment.

The filmmakers behind Elemental might have done better to commit to a single portrait and been more fearless about avoiding familiar oratory, but small steps are progress too.

The film, which could definitely focus more on the multiple-Grammy-Award-winner’s music, peters out around 2024, a year before Ye released a song called “Heil Hitler.” But Ballesteros, who started the project when he was 18 years old, does his best to portray a reflexive iconoclast without excusing the inexcusable.

The film’s often frenetic editing tends to weaken this strong story. But this hopeless history does have the flair to deploy Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” capturing the tragic absurdity to Goudreau’s ambition.

The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies.

Mr. Gordon is likable, though it would be naïve to think he is unaware of cultivating his own image here.

It’s all mellowly funny rather than creepy, something like a stand-up conceit elaborated into scenes.

The severely beautiful film is painted in a dauntingly austere manner, as if lost in a war against itself, with confrontations underplayed and the rural landscapes making more of an impression than the detoured drama.

It’s a chronically underachieving movie, but relatively amusing in its quaint wish fulfillment.

Seriously, if not always elegantly, the film portrays the great Ip Man as someone trying to survive, which is to say just as often a victim as a victor.

The filmmaker strikes gold in her varied selection of defectors, especially the military man fed up with the myopic chain of command.

Many little touches in the film reflect the offbeat hand of Ms. Delpy. But she sells herself short by not giving the mother-son conflict a bit of a sharper edge beyond Lolo’s awfulness.

There’s a lot to learn from How to Make Money Selling Drugs, but sometimes there’s just a lot.

While these ninnies' antics and banter are remarkably entertaining, the quality of the satire depends on when the movie is sending up ludicrous extremist logic and when it's just engaging in repetitive buffoonery.

While the movie creates an intriguing emotional space in which characters at the end of their ropes can open up, there’s the distinct sense of a missed opportunity.

Mr. Sembène was an inspiration; as a film, Sembène! is something less than that, petering out as it goes on, but at least offering a fair-minded tribute to a master.

There’s a loose, bohemian quality to Mr. Cohen’s sketch of a film.

Whatever the facts, Mr. Gracia’s messily structured film works best as a document of fear in today’s Ukraine and as a kind of ghost story about the Soviet Union.

The lustrously shot movie breaks Sam out of the gallery grind through Hollywood-grade somersaults in storytelling (one of them so breezily violent as to feel a little tasteless)

The tell-all promise of the film’s title dwindles away into predictable perspectives from members of his family. But this introduction to Chaplin shines whenever he performs, displaying his comic genius for doing everything wrong to absolute perfection.

As it dives into this infrequently depicted culture, Mr. Fraser’s film is caught shuttling uneasily between speeches and action.

The film’s final shot might seem a little too apt a summary of an audience’s reaction: Mr. Trêpa, looking into the camera, shrugs.

Mesrine's promised end in November 1979 arrives as history recorded it, but, by that time, you're hoping the next vogue in biopics is the short film.

Mr. Borden, an acclaimed Canadian stage actor and playwright, turns in a slyly entertaining performance. But the relationship between Lake and Melvyn feels a bit more one-sided than perhaps was intended.

Mr. Nalin applies an on-the-ground approach, mainly looking at holy men and lost boys at the gathering. But he lets the sprawl slacken his overlong film’s grasp and, strangely, underplays the nuances of the event’s spiritual aspects.

Mr. Toledano and Mr. Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. That comes in handy when their points about French identity miss the mark, or when the main characters share special moments without really acquiring depth.

Ms. Bradley’s debut feature flutters along with inoffensive lyricism and a kindly eye, but it’s not enough to bring off a full-fledged portrayal that holds together.

What pops more than the gunfire are the line readings, where Ms. Parker, especially, but also Mr. Malkovich and Ms. Mirren, can give personality to standard action repartee.

A film plunked somewhat unfortunately between the inspirational and the ordinary.

The movie proves to be a fragile conceit. It’s as likely to fall apart and cause frustration as it is to induce a reverie.

Though Mr. Holdridge and Ms. Saasen feel genuine, they lack acting chops, and their screenplay’s self-consciousness about romantic clichés plays like a cliché itself.

[Mr. Greenbaum] is observant of tears and laughter alike, but he might have made fewer sacrifices in the name of a tidy package.

It can’t fail to trigger shudders of recognition as well as feelings of release, but the filmmaking lacks a certain drama.

The Institute stumbles between documentary and exploratory simulation, at once confusing and pedantic.

As more and more perfect shots drift by, the reality of the characters and their relationships dissipates, and we’re left with just picturesque moods.

A movie whose techniques present problems not containable by the noble intentions of its makers.

Stu’s travails feed into his salty homilies about getting closer to God, delivered with Wahlberg’s usual bluffness. That doesn’t automatically translate into a religious experience, and watching the movie can feel like a two-hour hearty handshake.

All in all, the beloved kingdom of Oz is not well served, though there’s just enough detectable affection to keep it from feeling like a pure cashing-in.

This film could have been more surely and deftly put together.

The naval collisions and melees play out in panel-like renderings that are bold and satisfying for the first half-hour but lack the momentum and bombastic je ne sais quoi of “300.”

Not that some of this isn’t amusing, but you feel the considerable improvisational skills of the cast going to waste.

Roberto Andò's Viva la Libertà wobbles between being wispily suggestive of finer existential meaning and generational commentary, and being basically a handsomely dressed-up “Dave” for post-Berlusconi Italy.

Goofball antics and a terrific, raucous finale can’t make up for the essential slackness of its repetitive comedy and punk chest thumping.

Perhaps it’s a hazard tied to a subject, seeds, which are all about potential, but Ms. McLeod’s film feels naggingly diffuse and insufficiently vivid in evoking diversity.

What’s most curious is Mr. Labute’s kid-glove treatment of the scenario, forgoing real sexual gamesmanship, much less the opportunistic rug-pulling in past films. That baseline of sincerity is refreshing to a point, yet he’s written a fairly weak-tea story of conflicted self-discovery that would make for a mildly engaging evening on the stage.

The film feels both hermetic and declarative, and it’s folly to constantly remind a viewer of Fassbinder’s impossible-to-replicate alchemy of color, lighting, angles and passion.

Pathaan is in some ways a save-the-world superhero movie without suits, and while less self-serious, the hefty length can lag. More is not always better — though the gusto of Padukone speedskating to the rescue at one point goes a long way.

An urban drama limited by its nonprofessional cast and impressionistic, scattered storytelling.

The ticktock horror plotting muffles the romantic spark that brought Maja and Leah together in the first place — the thrill replaced by a lukewarm chill.

The landscape can go only so far in expressing Toichi’s mind-set, and the movie turns hokey when it dramatizes Toichi’s inner thoughts.

The wish fulfillment of time travel tends to be fun to watch, and the director, Dean Israelite, feeds on the friends’ giddy escapades for a while.

The root of the movie’s appeal is less the scripted story than watching three game oldsters.

The Forecaster has the distinct hermetic feel of a documentary that employs an echo chamber of people too close to the material.

Despite much talk of diversity and tradition, Mr. Levine has little fresh to say about gentrification issues or documentary storytelling.

Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.

This dully structured film makes its points early and often, treading water before a purposely delayed big finish.

The “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production.

This film is actually less menacing than marveling, though a disturbing opening scene in a storm-tossed van could fit right into Mr. Quale’s earlier work.

Despite a generous attempt at a series recap, it’s chaotic for the uninitiated. These characters require several episodes of exposure for us to feel that much is at stake in the ebb and flow of honor, hysteria and eternal friendship. In any case, the animation is often a pure sensual delight.

The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge).

The movie doesn’t need to achieve the same levels of sensation as a wildly popular racing simulator, but it should convey excitement and dynamism in its own cinematic way. When the novelty of watching a gamer become a driver wears off, we’re left with an adequate racing drama in a medium built for so much more.

The burlesque take on high school has some fine, ridiculous moments and lets the movie get away with more than a serious drama might.

The story comes to feel mild (and incomplete) in its tempered nostalgia.

Mr. Harmon is delightfully talented at improvisation, freestyling nonsense lyrics. Mr. Berkeley, on the other hand, proves himself a dismayingly predictable chronicler, making sure that we know exactly what we’re supposed to think and efficiently packaging jokes and revelations.

Despite some nifty freak-outs, the movie’s buildup can lack a certain snap.

Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, who also tapped Norwegian history with his bank robbery re-enactment “Nokas,” doesn’t convey a creeping atmosphere of moral rot so much as an irksome glumness.

Lost and Love (“Lost Orphan” in the original Chinese title) confronts serious problems but is too busy reaching for epic sweep and soaring moments to nail the fine detail of main characters’ fraught give-and-take.

As written by the TV veteran Robert Carlock, Kim’s rise-and-fade arc is sympathetically rendered, with humor and the urgency of an underhand pitch.

Despite its cultural detail and fetching leads this Jamaican director’s colorful debut feature is undone by ragged scene construction, weak acting and a scattered script.

The film’s biggest trick might be casting Moore, Stan and the positively glowing Middleton and still never quite catching fire.

The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.

While Mr. Workman evidently respects Mr. Carbee’s talent, he also frames his movie as a trite narrative about a kind of lovably odd acquaintance who comes out of his shell, without many incisive ideas about shaping or broadening the material.

It’s informative but not enlightening, and Mr. Berlinger packs in chattering news clips and a score that’s audible under the interview.

The big-kid-bulky Dayton-born comedian gets some welcome playtime in Jim Pasternak's patchwork tribute, but not nearly enough.

[Ms. Kroot's] banalizing documentary is self-defeating as it tags along with Mr. Takei and his wonky husband, Brad, on their busy daily schedule.

William Eubank’s The Signal demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel.

His strategy is political — in a meaningful way — but not cinematic.

Comes across as more of an extravagant gesture than a fully realized artistic conceit.

Decency prevails in a somewhat ludicrous finale involving an army of children and a train containing a high-ranking officer. It’s an ending so tidy as to undercut the effort to broach a shameful side to the American war effort.

Though not pretentious, his film feels a tad overthought, held back somehow by a stubborn, dour obscurity clouding its freshly realized, lurid milieu.

As Terraferma tightens its focus on a courageous resolution of tough issues, too much nuance is jettisoned along the way.

Despite an appealing fondness for New York locations and habits, Mr. Buschel and his cinematographer, Ryan Samul, have embalmed their film in style. J. J.’s ostentatious speeches feel like a projection of self-conscious cleverness, and the film’s virtuoso lighting doesn’t always match up to the needs of a scene.

Some of this recalls Stephen Chow’s “Journey to the West,” minus the brilliance.

Despite the urgent subject matter and lyrical touches, it’s a film that needs further layers of complication and texture.

Despite eccentric touches, like a handheld street-shot overture and Grand Guignol Omen references, there's little difference between this story and soap-opera intrigue.

But viewers looking to learn more about Mr. Watterson and his creation than what’s contained in his Wikipedia entry may come away as hopped-up with impatience as Calvin when confronted by parental indifference.

There’s a go-for-broke vigor to the way Mr. Amata cuts to the conflict in most scenes, but the heavy-handedness across the board imposes some significant limitations. Mr. Amata, though, pulls no punches with his ending.

Richet proves maddeningly loath to edit his material, and his charismatic star, Vincent Cassel, does not delve deep into the character.

Soko gets credit for not softening Mwangi’s landing, and the outcome of the election is dropped as nearly an afterthought to his valiant efforts. But the on-the-ground campaigning and complex history could use a better shape than the film’s fits and starts.

This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.

The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.