Nicolas Rapold

Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic.

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

This heart-wrenching and deceptively conventional documentary manages the tensions in its subject and in the vérité approach in a fruitful, illuminating and surprisingly moving way.

I can’t think of other actors at his level who could keep a sense of true north in a nonlinear story like this, from bear scene to sex scene to earnest confrontations, amid quotations from St. Augustine and Nietzsche.

The movie’s biggest weakness comes with its tendency to film people telling us what’s going on rather than having us observe.

The actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes.

The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).

Some low-budget manifestations of the supernatural jazz up the frights now and again, but as the novelty of worshiping a hole in the ground fades, the film paints itself into a corner.

Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.

The filmmakers pop their story’s bubble in a confusing finish, but it all ends up feeling like a mystery novel that simply never revealed the key clues.

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.

Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.

Mr. Kurosawa expertly modulates an uncanny flow of energies between shame and grief, between venal urges and high-minded moral demands. The women’s travails suggest something that’s part curse, part mythic cycle of guilt and part kaleidoscopic dread.

The bare facts of the feat seize the imagination, even if Ms. Tobias’s competent documentary doesn’t quite rise to the challenge.

Low Down stumbles into the pitfalls of both addiction narratives and observer-style autobiography, even if Ms. Albany’s memoir suggests even rougher times. But it still catches in-between moments of closeness that aren’t always seen or heard.

The writer-director, Andrew Bujalski, zeros in on the delicate dances and negotiations between the people in these two-handers, which percolate with sly humor, decency, curiosity and sheer nerve.

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

The baggy 137-minute story drowns out Mr. Feng’s assorted sharp moments with hoary family drama and clumsy plotting, and Li Yifeng is generic as Mr. Six’s son.

It’s Shannon’s slow, steady world of hurt that makes the film watchable.

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.

Mr. Téchiné ’s methodical storytelling covers more narrative ground than the drama requires, sapping the film’s energy.

It’s a proud film but average.

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.

Rosendahl’s framing complicates any “great man” narrative of the period, and shows how the energies of public and private worlds course back and forth.

Ms. Wallach has fashioned a multifaceted, informative portrait conveying the emotional urgency of the Kabakovs’ work.

Ms. Passon ultimately seems to skirt some of the larger life questions hinted at along the way.

Based upon a 1999 young-adult novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster conveys the ache for all that its protagonist could lose, but it can’t escape the dramatic ruts of its own creation.

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

There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.

Too many scenes feel routine or clichéd, sometimes even those depicting extreme experiences.

Mr. Barbosa blends tales of a coming-of-age and a burgeoning class consciousness, and never loses sympathy for Jean (Thales Cavalcanti).

In truth, it’s less Manglehorn than Mr. Pacino that you warm up to in this film, as so many times before.

Bringing out truths about fatherhood, love and pride without dissolving into crowd-pleasing, that material feels like the genuine article. Fluffy, not fluff.

Dutifully hitting its marks up to a point, this story of a married man struggling to stay closeted proves to have a maturity that eludes more overtly ambitious dramas on the subject.

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

The screenplay tracing the characters’ struggles has a tidy, workshopped feel, and the dialogue and acting can be gratingly flat. But what gives the film a certain confidence is its cultural specificity and the fresh clashes and contrasts it presents.

Like many broad successes this unremarkable movie proves decidedly reluctant to yield any golden secret to box-office bonanzas, unless you count tried-and-true chase formulas and a moral about rethinking priorities.

Mr. Song puts his usual big heart into the character, though there aren’t many layers or nuances to the drama. Every scene does its job, tears flowing on cue.

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.

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.

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.

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

The voice-over-driven readings and the illustrative footage — unwisely augmented with new sound effects — lack a fundamental filmic momentum.

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

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

Despite Mr. Maren’s own ample experience as a writer, the references to book culture don’t feel vivid enough to act as more than scene-setting, and the film’s strength lies in the family relationships.

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.

As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.

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.

The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured.

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

This sly documentary rises above its speculative hook by shifting to show the very human, and very mortal, sides of these would-be warriors of eternity.

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

Slack storytelling (including snippets from a post-film Q. and A. session) and patchy filmmaking seal the unappealing deal.

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

It’s a literally colorful and playful attempt to portray battlefields of artistic ambition and political struggle. But its dialogue and characters are also written as subtly as a radical manifesto.

The strategy and strategizing of Beyond Outrage still feel like overkill (if you’ll pardon the expression).

Enervatingly synthetic, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears slices and dices the images and tropes of Italian giallo-style slasher films into an inert pile of style.

Motorbikes careening round corners just millimeters off the track still quicken the pulse, but “The Next Chapter” also demonstrates the padding that documentaries in general have picked up in recent years.

Technology remains no substitute for well-written characters and genuine intrigue and atmosphere, so despite the cute special effects and camera jostling, this film feels like an extended episode of an after-school show by Disney.

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.

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.

It’s a hodgepodge that Michael Moore (whose movies Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal have produced) and his editors might snappily dice together, but here the construction falls short.

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

It’s a job requirement for a show host like Mr. Uygur to project his personality and beliefs; this filmmaker doesn’t muster a healthy skepticism to match.

Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.

If the film is less persuasive for its lack of balance, it’s at least heartening to learn that undesirable dams can be destroyed and their rivers restored to their old ways and means.

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

Since the filmmaker's main agenda here is to keep things bumping along, the fraught situations are happily played and funk-scored as crowd-pleasing rather than issue-stroking.

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.

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

This reheated “Sex and the City” adventure flops, even with Leslie Mann and Rebel Wilson hard at work being funny.

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.

Perhaps most impressive are the resources deployed in shooting this production. As if the film’s ostentatious aerial vistas, merely functional scene-writing and score weren’t distracting enough, Mr. Sexton’s dialogue freezes dead any simulation of the period with tone-deaf lines amid Bolívar’s impassioned rhetoric.

Pulp done with passion can be its own reward, as the veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Dante Lam shows with his feverish cop thriller That Demon Within.

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

Mr. Lespert and his screenwriters tend to telegraph what’s happening next with on-the-nose dialogue, leaving behind an orderly but not vividly realized biography (or necessarily a complete one).

The fun is not always contagious, even for someone like me who grew up reading Tom Clancy’s wonky Cold War fantasias.

Ms. Ambo communicates the notion of compassion and calm as something teachable, but perhaps feeling already convinced, she’s less ambitious as a filmmaker about taking her subject and her portraits to another level.

The standoff with authorities dawdles and languishes, and a side plot with a TV journalist (Labina Mitevska) feels one-note. Still, we should all look forward to seeing what Petrunya does next.

The movie, directed by Swinton O. Scott III, plays like an extended series pilot, built out of largely interchangeable episodes.

The message of manifesting your goals reigns supreme, which is great, but it’s worth mentioning that Watson’s willpower benefits from the privileges of financial security, family support and a curmudgeonly-turned-selfless coach.

It’s a cornball odd-couple comedy: Prim older woman meets a brassy young gay man. Still, it’s extraordinary just watching the peerless Ms. Rowlands wring the most out of the repartee in this adaptation of a play by Richard Alfieri.

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.

Even as the movie is lampooning one trope, it keeps taking refuge in other conventions in ways that undercut the pop of its premise and make one wish for greater depth to its thought experiments.

Not that Dr. Bot and the oblivious self-righteousness won’t delight certain fans, but this remains a protracted, scattershot comedy sketch that never quite nails its tone.

Mr. Rush can’t fly far on Mr. Tornatore’s dialogue and workmanlike plotting, and Sylvia Hoeks, as Claire, doesn’t bring a corresponding energy.

Mr. Chapman administers some of his (amplified) thwacks and drop kicks with a likable, you-should-know-better air of amusement, recalling a Reagan-era TV cop show.

The movie’s few spectacles — particularly the composite image of Russian soldiers aflame after a fuel depot explodes — seem to consume the creative energies of the filmmakers, with their palpable pride in staging patriotic deaths from the safe distance of history.

Overall, the movie has the bantamweight feel of a really long DVD extra: Little details of the director’s ancestral stomping grounds are appealing, but don’t jell into something satisfying.

Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.

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.

Lifted by the sepulchral Stephen McHattie as Lisa’s nemesis, the film’s frazzled thought experiment becomes an adequate yarn.

The movie, admirably shot on location, has a cast that is nonetheless directed without much verve by Wiebke von Carolsfeld. The film was adapted from a novel by Aislinn Hunter, but the characters’ inner lives remain elusive.

Most of the movie is a losing proposition.

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

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 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.”