Nicolas Rapold

Pine wisely avoids winks to the audience. But he whiffs at making the mystery especially gripping, leaving one instead to savor the moments, like a note-perfect Bening calmly talking Pine’s befuddled pool man through his latest setback.

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.

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

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

Ms. Hanna’s creativity and force are catching. But other voices are needed to evaluate her achievements with a fuller sense of cultural context and perspective.

As Denji and his adversaries converge on and above city streets, it’s possible to enjoy the combat on the level of pure sensation. Here, the rapturous ability of anime to isolate and prolong movement and emotion within a frame is on full display.

The film’s four-person shuffle turns into a bit of a hash.

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.

Mr. Meltzer doesn’t quite find an effective tone or structure to stay on top of his unsettling person of interest.

Mr. Wechsler’s film might be loose to a fault, but Mr. Weber’s work yields its share of gratifying, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it New York moments.

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.

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.

The brisk clip and dashes of dark humor ward off actual despair, but the length poses challenges for some of the heavy lifting of character growth.

A little of Sunlight, which she directs and co-wrote with Allen, goes a long way. But there’s still something to seeing a performer go for broke, purging a character’s shame and despair through a screwy, confessional sense of humor.

Mr. Lee’s film is more traditional than its sexually frank humor might indicate, with faith and charity ultimately given pride of place (right alongside human pettiness). But even if some of the crudeness and the drama feel forced, it’s hard to hate.

The crisscrossing pursuers and pesky police suggest a watered-down version of the treacheries in “City on Fire.” But the cluttered, unfolding dynamism of Mr. Lam’s action scenes remains resilient when gunplay or knife fights are thrust into street life.

Golden Slumbers has a tendency to wallow in its romanticism, not to the point of trivializing its history, but definitely dropping off into somnolence.

Getting peeved at Mottola and Hamm’s easygoing efforts would be like getting mad at a cat for sleeping too much.

The Cold Lands feels as if it were just taking hold when it reaches the end of the road.

The fuzziness of Mr. Avitabile’s sentiments on boundary-blind unity is echoed in the movie’s slack, tag-along portraiture.

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.

The behind-the-scenes component, juiced with razzle-dazzle excerpts from the “Fela!” production, is sound, in theory. But — like many sequences — it’s not so tightly executed, and this strand tends to knock the documentary off balance.

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.

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

More reminiscent of public television than of cinema, this rather humbly wrought movie makes no claim to being comprehensive in recalling a scary time.

The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.

Impressively, nearly everything was shot by the documentary’s subjects. Yet although their double duty is an awful fact of life in Ukraine, the film lurches between its varying components and tones.

The documentary tends to linger on some assertions about sexuality in Lincoln’s era while papering over others. But the general effort of bringing to light (and potentially to history books) an underrepresented part of American experience remains vital beyond defining Lincoln’s identity.