Nicolas Rapold

By not centering on the victims, Mr. Khalfoun nearly makes the film about pitying the panic-prone killer; the camerawork lacks the ominous, confident glide of much Steadicam horror.

A gently wry sense of humor about human foibles and some well-turned exchanges keep the proceedings drifting along pleasantly enough, until characters start convening for the requisite heart-to-hearts and making-up.

Mostly you root for Mr. Michel’s couple to reconnect simply so the movie will come to an end.

It’s not unlike many of Mr. Strickland’s beloved Italian films, which could be superb exercises in cinematic style and atmosphere while remaining imperfect.

A clumsy mixed-nuts comedy.

Less a documentary than an experimental essay tapping age-old notions of the sublime, it’s a perplexing artifact that flirts with the banal yet moves with lovely intuitive rhythms.

Neither the very relaxed pace of this builder, Chris Overing, nor Mr. Stone’s sporadically amusing neuroses about his filmmaking make for a gripping documentary.

Mr. Kaleka’s film feels a bit like wandering into a hotel convention hall full of true believers who have been chatting for hours.

It’s the no-nonsense filmmaking, seamlessly integrating even dreams and visions, that keeps us fixed on the bold line of the student’s trajectory, all the way through to a transcendent ending.

For all its faults, “We Steal Secrets” reminds us that despite the potential of WikiLeaks, its project of truth and consequences remains treacherous and complicated in practice.

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.

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

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 protagonist’s life changes for the better, but your mileage may vary.

Most often Mortem just lacks bite, and the dedicated leads seem at times a little slight for the staging of a struggle at eternity’s edge.

Mr. Nance turns his thought into a performance of vulnerability that’s all too relatable in its indulgences. It has heart without becoming cloying.

The film’s ending, introducing farmers whose lives (and weight) have been changed for the better, sounds enough like an infomercial to undermine the whole enterprise.

The movie’s best bits lose out to the requisite moral turnaround.

Shola Lynch’s documentary about Angela Davis, the activist and beacon of counterculture radicalism, is a snappily edited, archivally wallpapered recollection of fearless behavior in the face of an antsy establishment. But it’s equally significant as a pointed act of retelling.

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

The filmmakers’ aversion to coherent narrative and genuinely suspenseful visuals (not to mention a penchant for having Ms. Moore receive terrible news via cellphone) keep the movie’s mystery stew from hitting the spot.

As heartening as it is to see a slum child tutored about vicious cycles of adversity and using the buzzword “partnership” with aplomb, the film comes to feel cut and dried.

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.

The film dresses up pretty young things in fatigues and retro T-shirts for a story so clichéd and brainless that it’s almost more disturbing than laughable.

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

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.

It’s a far cry from the wonders of Morris Engel’s “Little Fugitive” and might have been better off in a kid’s-size portion as a short.

This tedious chronicle has the interest level of a home movie of a vacation with bickering and yammering left intact.

Though some of the writers inject a force of metaphor and strength of voice, no one would confuse the movie with a short-story collection. But it’s more ambitious and effective at blunting cynicism than most consciousness-raising efforts.

This promisingly tragic tale is sunk by cartloads of context and an overbearing, slanted narration.

Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.

The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the-making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.

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.

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.

The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.

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).

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 pacing and performances are more organic than in most horror.

Colman's performance comes as a revelation.

In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.

The flashy adaptation of the book by aging Belgian provocateur Herman Brusselmans is as systematically offensive and boisterously vulgar as its degenerate punk protagonists.

Though floridly written and relentlessly scored, the film's dramas are more persuasively framed than many human ones, going so far as to include multiple flashbacks.

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

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.

It's hard to appreciate things like the character detail amid the insufferably squealy voicing and arbitrary suspense.

Like most primates, Nénette is both fascinatingly familiar and strange, capable of almost human expressions yet totally unknowable (as well as massive and hairy).

The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg.

The ultimate break comes with a glorious full-screen CGI zoom into blazing heavenly bodies, a refutation of the title's modesty.

The highlight is the crop-cut woman of the group, Wei Caixia, resoundingly vivid in her mix of ambivalence and confidence and worth her own film. Why not this one?

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.

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.

The escapades are tossed off and fall flat, all products of the business-as-usual template created by the film’s producers, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell.

Campanella, who overconfidently takes his time, outfits the film with ludicrous interrogation scenes, a drunken colleague who provides comic relief and redemptive tragedy, and a climactic flood of memories that plays like a trailer.

Embracing what's really standard tabloid fodder of the decade with earnest engagement and doled-out suspense, Cropsey is one step from macabre comedy.

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.

Documentarian Mark N. Hopkins gives us a mature look at the bracing yet very human personalities attracted to crisis.

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

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.

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

Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist’s optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in.

The film's frustrating treatment is actually more like the local reporter who is shown struggling to stay in the loop.

Eventually runs out of gas--or rather, pedal-power--as the filmmakers grope for how to cap the Beavans’ story.

The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration brings out the production’s opulence and hence the regal stage von Stroheim sets for his characters’ attractions and abjection.

The film’s state of play is still less exciting than its famous ancestor (Battle of Algiers) and offspring (The French Connection), but the military junta that ensued in Greece gave the film (shot in Algeria) a sense of urgency approved by Cannes and Oscar alike.

The 20-year-old Hubble Space Telescope--whose repair mission is the subject of this chronicle--turns out to be a bit of a stage hog, and audiences expecting a blissout of swirling galaxies will wonder why so much time is spent on astronauts sweating over screws and bolts.

The facts are more gripping than the filmmaking in Marco Amenta's routine docudrama about tenacious teen informer Rita Atria.

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