Nicolas Rapold

Holly is supposed to be out of Guy’s league, but neither of them is up to carrying scene after scene of weak sparring and punny flirting.

Mr. Harmon is delightfully talented at improvisation, freestyling nonsense lyrics. Mr. Berkeley, on the other hand, proves himself a dismayingly predictable chronicler, making sure that we know exactly what we’re supposed to think and efficiently packaging jokes and revelations.

This film could have been more surely and deftly put together.

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.

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.

The voice-over-driven readings and the illustrative footage — unwisely augmented with new sound effects — lack a fundamental filmic momentum.

The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.

As skillful an orchestrator as Björk is, her crescendos and tightly designed wilderness can lose their strength with repetition. But she and her collaborators do make a pretty singing picture with their chosen audiovisual tool set.

Wiktor Ericsson’s A Life in Dirty Movies outlines this filmmaker’s work reasonably well, but, somewhat surprisingly, truly hits home with a heartwarming look at Mr. Sarno’s relationship with his wife, Peggy.

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.

Neither the action nor the comedy in this action comedy is consistently strong.

Mr. Nalin applies an on-the-ground approach, mainly looking at holy men and lost boys at the gathering. But he lets the sprawl slacken his overlong film’s grasp and, strangely, underplays the nuances of the event’s spiritual aspects.

Mr. Gomes remains laudably faithful to his character, and Ms. Guedes’s bodily sense of languor gets across more than any crystal-clear dramatic statement would.

Mr. Rollinger, a protagonist of a curiously circumscribed life, proves to have an opaque appeal.

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.

The bravery of Ms. Baumane’s own coping methods (which some may disagree with) brings her tough-minded film to a cleareyed, forward-looking conclusion that doesn’t lose sight of her demons.

Enervatingly synthetic, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears slices and dices the images and tropes of Italian giallo-style slasher films into an inert pile of style.

The story comes to feel mild (and incomplete) in its tempered nostalgia.

[Ms. Kroot's] banalizing documentary is self-defeating as it tags along with Mr. Takei and his wonky husband, Brad, on their busy daily schedule.

Loving difficult people (and being difficult, and sometimes helpless) is the subject of the film’s drama, shot through with comedy and satire, thanks to Mr. Tobia’s razor-sharp, rapid cutting of scenes and needling dialogue.

The film is essentially an evolved hybrid of global environmental documentary and the group-trip experiments of reality television. Its biggest step onto unfamiliar terrain might be its ambivalent ending, conveying uncertainty about what can or should be done next.

Though Ms. Louise-Salomé’s film strikes a potentially irritating pose as a kind of artistic séance — shrouding interviewees in shadow, conjuring up clips with the drifting rhythm of the unconscious — it delivers articulate insights and has an elegant construction.

Mr. Kim does show an abiding concern here for the unsubtle realities of human libido and cruelty, but he’s alarmingly tone-deaf as he makes his points, and shows disregard for his female characters as he uses them up.

It’s all a bit like a classic-rock tribute concert, or playing with all your action figures at once, or maybe “Cannonball Run,” with the strained buddy-buddy back-and-forth.

This film is actually less menacing than marveling, though a disturbing opening scene in a storm-tossed van could fit right into Mr. Quale’s earlier work.

A certain kind of discipline and experience is at work here: It’s no accident that the action and dialogue seem blandly cartoonish, as if the moviemakers wanted to keep everything easy for all ages to follow.

It’s a proud film but average.

Most of the movie is a losing proposition.