Nicolas Rapold

It’s like a gently distressed company film blown up to feature length.

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.

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.

The tech-gadget-heavy plotting is so preposterously weak that it’s hard to look past the cheap laughs or half-baked direction.

The film is too sincere an expression of admiration for this poet’s work to feel pretentious, but it’s like a music video for the poems, often literal in its biographical readings.

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.

The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.

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.

The extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.

The sense of an invisible world being revealed is more potent than the film’s fairly standard portrayal of closeted life.

When a final shot takes us outdoors to the real world, it’s possible to wonder whether a certain spontaneity, or a different kind of energy, has been missing from Mr. Saura’s immaculately vibrant film.

Mr. Serra has said his film portrays the eclipse of Enlightenment rationality by the violent forces of Romanticism. It’s a tidy overarching conceit, but the film’s lived-in feel does make for one vivid way of imagining shifts in thought.

The dark comedy (punctuated by the catchphrase “Toodle-oo”) doesn’t always come off, and the filmmaking is more off-kilter than necessary, with capricious camerawork and pacing.

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 setup’s clichés grow harder to ignore, despite a welcome mischievous streak and some bucolic imagery.

Butter on the Latch thrives on its casually true snapshots of confusion and connection.

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.

Goofball antics and a terrific, raucous finale can’t make up for the essential slackness of its repetitive comedy and punk chest thumping.

Roberto Andò's Viva la Libertà wobbles between being wispily suggestive of finer existential meaning and generational commentary, and being basically a handsomely dressed-up “Dave” for post-Berlusconi Italy.

Warsaw Uprising is marred by a fictional audio drama among three characters (two cameraman brothers and an American airman) who provide an unnecessary, distracting and at times amateurish frame to this resourcefully, even wittily, edited tour. But the flaws don’t detract from the film’s casual and calamitous sights.

While Mr. Workman evidently respects Mr. Carbee’s talent, he also frames his movie as a trite narrative about a kind of lovably odd acquaintance who comes out of his shell, without many incisive ideas about shaping or broadening the material.

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.

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.

What initially feels like brash energy peters out until what’s left mainly evokes pretty ordinary gangster movies.

In a way, the occasionally lugubrious undertones and casual cruelties suit the setting, but the tragic heft Mr. Martinez seems to be pushing for doesn’t materialize.

Watchers of the Sky is a film that can dash hopes about humanity but also raise them in depicting the stories of these tireless defenders.

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

Exquisitely drawn with both watercolor delicacy and a brisk sense of line, the film finds a peculiarly moving undertow of feeling in a venerable Japanese folk tale.