Nicolas Rapold

The hand-me-down showiness and sluggish storytelling by the director, Paco Cabezas, underline the monotony in this ordinary revenge thriller.

A deserved tribute that puts us inside the music, and the head space, of a great, lost band.

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.

The movie is not always well unified and sequenced, but that seems to reflect Mr. Henin’s ambivalence over a past that’s like a book he is at once rereading and rewriting.

As with his other features, brevity — in this case, 1 hour 10 minutes — has a way of making the film seem minor. It’s a little diffuse, but it suggests that Mr. Côté is trying out a sketch, with more experiments to come.

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.

If this isn’t the iPhone of documentaries, it gets its point across, and unlike Mr. Gibney’s Scientology exposé “Going Clear,” this movie has a harder target (albeit with its own devoted following).

Belushi taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.

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 survey, pockmarked with sometimes dopey animations and music, feels scattered and less than the sum of Mr. Miller’s many parts. But it has its heart in the right movie-mad place.

Mr. Cheney’s movie, while teasing at times, does its celebrating and debunking in mild-mannered fashion, making points without seeming to try to score them.

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

The fearless streak displayed by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble deserves its equivalent in a bolder movie technique. But Mr. Atlas delivers a rousing finale.

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.

Premature bops along with a wiseacre self-awareness and a nimble cast... But Mr. Beers and his fellow screenwriter, Mathew Harawitz, also have a numbing Seth MacFarlane-esque weakness for purely attention-getting crudeness and unfunny stereotypes.

Ms. Leopold’s previous film, “Brownian Movement,” was a stringent, even off-putting study of a delicate-looking doctor who has secret trysts with various men, and her latest feature feels gentler, shot digitally and suffused with the gray shadows of old houses and dim twilights. But it’s just as concerned with the immediacy of desire.

The film’s rejiggered timeline is a little hard to follow, but the climax swings for the fences and shows an unashamed verve for tale-telling that warms the cockles.

This New York drama in some ways finds new names for age-old insecurities among men and women, though it doesn’t entirely deliver on its promising buildup.

For a movie about two people going through a wobbly patch, Fantasy Life glides with a sneaky storytelling ease.

Despite some conventional moves here and there and a weakness for the cult of genius, the documentary sustains that uneasy mood cast by Nas’s expression as a child on the “Illmatic” cover, sobered by experience and wisdom before his time.

Mr. Voss’s metaphors pile up helplessly: Finance is like being in the army, like catching a virus and as hard to grasp as quantum particles. The film in which he appears is a vertiginous look inside the bubble behind the financial bubble, with no end in sight.

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.

The graceful flow avoids the spoon-feeding of pocket biographies, and even if the material can feel lean at times, Mr. Klinger shepherds along a valuable encounter with a sense of easy, generally uncanned observation.

The pleasant surprise of Gareth Evans’s sturdy sequel to “The Raid: Redemption” is that neither its undercover drama nor its two-and-a-half-hour length bog down the bracing, and numerous, fight fests.

Mr. Platt’s good-humored attitude helps keep the potent material from turning mawkish, and having his perspective also wards off a sense of exploitive voyeurism.

Like the 1994 documentary landmark “Hoop Dreams,” Lenny Cooke measures out the years with a pensive jazz motif, but the film feels comparatively stuck on a couple of notes.

King Georges feels stretched into feature length, but its ending neatly portrays a man with a fierce personal code who seems to have accepted change.

It’s gratifying to see the care taken with his characters, though it would be no betrayal of them for Mr. Hartigan to flesh out their world and their lives further.