Nicolas Rapold

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.