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.

This two-track meditation wraps ethereal glimpses of age-old Slavic locales around a fairy tale told through hand-drawn illustrations.

A certain curiosity value arises out of Mr. Phillippe’s coincidental occupation here as a professional actor and a director.

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.

Regular hazily scored, gauzy interludes cut into the film’s immediacy and tone. But the filmmakers shade in humble, sympathetic portraits of these children.

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.

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.

Bringing out truths about fatherhood, love and pride without dissolving into crowd-pleasing, that material feels like the genuine article. Fluffy, not fluff.

This glossy movie from Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz about the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas feels the burden of promotional urges and lacks a sense of immersion in a multistage event attended by hundreds of thousands.

Relatable doesn’t have to mean routine, but Mr. Reiner doesn’t always bother to tell the difference.

Despite a generous attempt at a series recap, it’s chaotic for the uninitiated. These characters require several episodes of exposure for us to feel that much is at stake in the ebb and flow of honor, hysteria and eternal friendship. In any case, the animation is often a pure sensual delight.

Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.

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 newer film’s picture of neglect and denial, with flashes of connection and empathy, is promising, if tough to inhabit.

The filmmaker Caroline Strubbe’s affection for her characters is evident, even through the often oblique narrative.

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

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.

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.

This succinct documentary sticks smoothly to its beat.

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).

Though not pretentious, his film feels a tad overthought, held back somehow by a stubborn, dour obscurity clouding its freshly realized, lurid milieu.

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

If there’s a certain depth missing in The Amazing Catfish, the film brings forth the small-scale pleasures and poignancy of an ambling short story.

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.

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.

Mr. Gordon is likable, though it would be naïve to think he is unaware of cultivating his own image here.

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.

The Life & Crimes of Doris Payne has an embarrassment of riches in Ms. Payne’s story, and it’s often a ripping good yarn, but, as a film, it lacks the nimbleness and resourcefulness of its subject.

Mr. Fleifel helps walk us through the history with an ingratiating voice-over that lightens the seemingly permanent clouds of a dire history.

The movie is predictably sentimental at its root, but it’s also meant to be comedy, partly resting on Mr. Williams’s energetic but failed attempt to play a jerk.

Despite Mr. Maren’s own ample experience as a writer, the references to book culture don’t feel vivid enough to act as more than scene-setting, and the film’s strength lies in the family relationships.

Cold Bloom, in its tightly controlled moods, comes to feel like a smaller and more tentative film than it might have been, despite an admirably frank ending.

While the documentary marshals an impressive array of survivors and visits several international locations, it grindingly adheres to an unwieldy tour-style presentation, with more than a few rough spots and, at times, an unpolished look.

All in all, the beloved kingdom of Oz is not well served, though there’s just enough detectable affection to keep it from feeling like a pure cashing-in.

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.

The filmmakers are blessed and cursed with a subject who seems to lack the usual filters. We in turn witness Mr. Foulkes in action, at length — revamping his works, railing against the art world and speaking his neurotic mind.

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.

His strategy is political — in a meaningful way — but not cinematic.

Sometimes genre-based filmmakers don’t know how to make their material fun without making fun of their material, but that’s not a failing of Mr. Kren’s.

A movie whose techniques present problems not containable by the noble intentions of its makers.

The movie proves to be a fragile conceit. It’s as likely to fall apart and cause frustration as it is to induce a reverie.

Shot in sleek tones by Christopher Doyle, the film melds class-conscious melodrama with malleable mood piece, but keeps threatening to fade from understatement into stasis.

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.

Despite the bracing beauty of the wilderness, and the respite provided by cubs at play, the movie is primarily a sobering treatise on survival.

There’s a loose, bohemian quality to Mr. Cohen’s sketch of a film.

Though not very ambitious, this winsome, whisper-thin tale shimmers along with the charming urge to connect and reveal yourself that links its two correspondents.

Not that some of this isn’t amusing, but you feel the considerable improvisational skills of the cast going to waste.

Most of the time, this incoherent thriller resembles an overheated trailer for itself: a glaringly rough assembly of ill-staged computer-generated action sequences and portentous moments.

The King of Escape is more loosely put together than “Stranger,” and, considering what happens, it’s relatively underplayed.

As these overwritten characters cope and make fresh romantic missteps, the movie cruises obliviously along, littered with glib dialogue and howler developments.

Rather than distressed retro photography, or Guy Maddin mash-up fantasias, the movie’s often deadpan episodes feel like something out of one-act theater

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.

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 movie, admirably shot on location, has a cast that is nonetheless directed without much verve by Wiebke von Carolsfeld. The film was adapted from a novel by Aislinn Hunter, but the characters’ inner lives remain elusive.

Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs’s thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject’s life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open.

Mr. Perry’s latest film touches upon some recognizable and realistic challenges with efficient compassion, but there’s probably more dramatic tension in a car pool than in this film’s collection of predicaments.

It’s the kind of movie that makes you zero in on and root for an actor (Ms. Madigan) as she tries to wring something real out of her lines, but there’s no saving this film.

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

Mr. Chow has perhaps achieved more sustained and elaborate adventures, but he hits a sweet spot of comedy that never grows too self-aware or forgets the value of a good, clean demon whomping.

The naval collisions and melees play out in panel-like renderings that are bold and satisfying for the first half-hour but lack the momentum and bombastic je ne sais quoi of “300.”

The movie’s few spectacles — particularly the composite image of Russian soldiers aflame after a fuel depot explodes — seem to consume the creative energies of the filmmakers, with their palpable pride in staging patriotic deaths from the safe distance of history.

Son of God may have hit the mark if part of the goal was to create a portrait flat enough to allow audience members to project their own feelings onto the screen.

Mr. Rosebiani evidently wants to avoid depressing his audience while addressing a serious subject, but his aims are likely to be lost in this film’s strained mugging.

There’s a little effort to give each story its own tempo and style; you notice bits and pieces plucked from other movies or TV shows.

Mr. Song puts his usual big heart into the character, though there aren’t many layers or nuances to the drama. Every scene does its job, tears flowing on cue.

After a somewhat tense opening chase involving a lot of girders, much of the film is rather shakily assembled.

Slack acting (perhaps aggravated by the harsh lighting design) and the script’s inability to build characters together vaporize the chances for the movie, which is both smugly clever and at times distastefully clueless.

It’s informative but not enlightening, and Mr. Berlinger packs in chattering news clips and a score that’s audible under the interview.

12 O’Clock Boys packs more life into its 72 minutes than many longer documentaries do.

Having established a downbeat, even stoically plain tone, this economical affair feels like a canvas prepped for, and awaiting, further detail (or straight-to-video-on-demand sequels).

The root of the movie’s appeal is less the scripted story than watching three game oldsters.

Indigo is vaguely defined here as having a certain sensitivity and even power, but the movie doesn’t quite share those qualities, collapsing from a lack of direction in more than one sense.

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.

While Mr. Ramsay accomplishes some kind of a trick in streamlining the play, his trimming of corners feels more like a taking away of the center.

The tone ranges from wounded to disgusted, but a movie positing this deep a rot in the system needs to be more measured and better made to take hold.

The movie’s biggest weakness comes with its tendency to film people telling us what’s going on rather than having us observe.

The strategy and strategizing of Beyond Outrage still feel like overkill (if you’ll pardon the expression).

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.

47 Ronin can’t entirely paper over the void at its center, traceable partly to the shadowboxing of computer-aided filmmaking or studio tinkering.

With a character who can essentially say and do whatever she wants, you might expect a bit more.

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.

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

Desultory, dauntingly DIY but secretly efficient, Breakfast With Curtis is something like a leafy summer afternoon in movie form.

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.

A messy collision of strained portrayals, semi-comic incidents and tear-jerking tactics.

The residents of the English village Gladbury in the period holiday film The Christmas Candle might as well be bustling about in a snow globe for all their dimples, yuletide obsession and quaint, consumptive coughs.

The film feels like a work of community advocacy.

Comes across as more of an extravagant gesture than a fully realized artistic conceit.

But viewers looking to learn more about Mr. Watterson and his creation than what’s contained in his Wikipedia entry may come away as hopped-up with impatience as Calvin when confronted by parental indifference.

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.

Ms. Wallach has fashioned a multifaceted, informative portrait conveying the emotional urgency of the Kabakovs’ work.

Ms. Otto conveys a double-edged intelligence as the film’s pinched notion of “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,” while Ms. Pires strides about, every snap judgment and grand gesture a measure of her appeal. Both are hemmed in by direction and a screenplay that are relentlessly on point (as well as an off-the-shelf score).

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.

Mr. Miyazaki renders Jiro’s life and dreams with lyrical elegance and aching poignancy.

Mr. Zizek’s daisy-chained improvisations amount to an argument on behalf of complexity and unseen depths, and, like much academic writing, it risks monotony and becoming as reductive as it can be seductive.

This heart-wrenching and deceptively conventional documentary manages the tensions in its subject and in the vérité approach in a fruitful, illuminating and surprisingly moving way.

The filmmakers record the flash of youth’s headlong energies, its bumps and bruises, and its melancholies and brilliant chaos.

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

With their sensitive feature clocking in at an hour, the filmmakers make you wish only that they had developed their material further.

This dully structured film makes its points early and often, treading water before a purposely delayed big finish.

Blithely hokey, amusingly eager to distract and rather entertaining, the film resembles a children’s travel show with music-video elements more than it resembles a straight-up documentary.

Feeling a little stage-bound because of frequent far-back long shots, the show can’t quite become a true extravaganza on screen. But Peaches — even without commanding the screen — shines through, vulnerability winning out over bravado here.

Lifted by the sepulchral Stephen McHattie as Lisa’s nemesis, the film’s frazzled thought experiment becomes an adequate yarn.

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

The hormonal realism to the performances and a laid-back run-up give the film a fairly legitimate feel for adolescence.

The Institute stumbles between documentary and exploratory simulation, at once confusing and pedantic.

More a medium-length gallery piece than a feature, the movie can look a little rudimentary in presentation... But its subject is eternal.

Ms. Passon ultimately seems to skirt some of the larger life questions hinted at along the way.

This static documentary portrait relies on the usual panning over photos and tag-team interviews, but the format, like the radio length of a song, doesn’t get in the way of its subject’s heart.

Let the Fire Burn relentlessly sustains its tragic momentum.

Stories of humanized hit men make for a small but well-trod patch of screenwriting terrain, but The Dead Man and Being Happy quickly transcends that territory to become a beguiling road movie.

What little we learn of Pascal, who has worked in Switzerland as a shepherd for more than 30 years, and Carole, who is a former dietitian, fits in a scene or two, but their practical journey yields a certain contemplative equanimity.

Mr. Reich ties together his talking points with a reasonable-sounding analysis and an unassuming warmth sometimes absent from documentaries charting America’s economic woes.

Predictability and clichés get in the way of comedy here, especially with a lead character who rarely comes across as more than blandly sweet.

[Mr. Greenbaum] is observant of tears and laughter alike, but he might have made fewer sacrifices in the name of a tidy package.

As flatly directed by Christian Vincent, Haute Cuisine is a reserved, très simple tale that raises the occasional smile and tummy rumble but keeps hiccuping because of the drawn-out parallel story about her subsequent tour of duty.

Seriously, if not always elegantly, the film portrays the great Ip Man as someone trying to survive, which is to say just as often a victim as a victor.

Mr. Berliner’s film bravely brings us to the edge of language and experience.

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

The real pleasure of this film lies in its recognition of session artists and in the oddities and mysteries within the evolution of any given item of pop culture.

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.

The burlesque take on high school has some fine, ridiculous moments and lets the movie get away with more than a serious drama might.

Mr. Meyer adheres to a cinema of broad experience by casting rugged but uninspiring nonprofessionals and focusing on the rebels’ long, lonely struggle rather than on triumph and tactics.

This directorial debut by Liz W. Garcia, a writer for television, bears some echoes of its creator’s origins, going from deft to trite in its drama and setting up character arcs that feel sappily resolved within its feature length.

Suri Krishnamma’s Dark Tourist takes an effectively unpleasant trip down the lost highway of a morbid mind before its bad choices start catching up with it.

The film falls short of explaining Mr. Ali, who, like many outspoken individuals, can stubbornly repel scrutiny, nor will it pacify the many who opposed his conscientious objections. But it also underlines one enduring quality: namely, that he probably couldn’t care less what people think.

It’s fortunate that the cartoons on display are such instantly satisfying works of popular genius, because, despite its subject, “Herblock” shows how even an edifying talking-heads documentary bumps up against the limitations of the format.

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.

The film’s stacked stories naggingly lack a cohesive train of thought beyond the often harmful pervasiveness of pharmaceuticals in American society.

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.

Some low-budget manifestations of the supernatural jazz up the frights now and again, but as the novelty of worshiping a hole in the ground fades, the film paints itself into a corner.

Mr. Ponsoldt ably charts a journey through the high stakes of adolescence, with both Sutter and Mr. Teller showing great promise.

Smash and Grab has a grating, repetitive score and can look a little homely on the big screen. But unlike many true-crime accounts, it cherry-picks its material successfully and preserves the conspiratorial sense that we’re learning the ins and outs of an illicit art.

Routinely botching the basics of setting up characters and scenarios, the film lets punch lines die like dogs and at times resembles a pornographic film without the sex.

As Terraferma tightens its focus on a courageous resolution of tough issues, too much nuance is jettisoned along the way.

An urban drama limited by its nonprofessional cast and impressionistic, scattered storytelling.

What pops more than the gunfire are the line readings, where Ms. Parker, especially, but also Mr. Malkovich and Ms. Mirren, can give personality to standard action repartee.

The film’s final shot might seem a little too apt a summary of an audience’s reaction: Mr. Trêpa, looking into the camera, shrugs.

Along the way the movie strikes its chosen couple of notes resoundingly, making clear what makes Singh run.

The Shine of Day pulls itself together with an ending that feels a bit ready-made for drawing out the parallels between its kindred performers. But the movie gratifyingly observes the openness that seems the base line for Philipp and Walter, and the glimmer of realization in a stage actor about the void that may lurk among his many liberating roles.

If the lineup is bipartisan, the analysis oscillates between apt and obvious, culminating inevitably in amen calls for popular action.

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

A Band Called Death is more concerned with bringing out the personal connections behind their driven music than with insisting upon the group’s distinction in the perennial music history search for oddities and firsts.

There’s a lot to learn from How to Make Money Selling Drugs, but sometimes there’s just a lot.

At once loose and dense, Ms. Endo’s treatment wilts somewhat when drawn out to feature length, though it’s a nice place to visit.

On its own terms — setting aside the likelihood of knee-jerk political objections to its mission — it’s more convincing than many films pegged to specific causes.

By not centering on the victims, Mr. Khalfoun nearly makes the film about pitying the panic-prone killer; the camerawork lacks the ominous, confident glide of much Steadicam horror.

A gently wry sense of humor about human foibles and some well-turned exchanges keep the proceedings drifting along pleasantly enough, until characters start convening for the requisite heart-to-hearts and making-up.

Mostly you root for Mr. Michel’s couple to reconnect simply so the movie will come to an end.

It’s not unlike many of Mr. Strickland’s beloved Italian films, which could be superb exercises in cinematic style and atmosphere while remaining imperfect.

A clumsy mixed-nuts comedy.

Less a documentary than an experimental essay tapping age-old notions of the sublime, it’s a perplexing artifact that flirts with the banal yet moves with lovely intuitive rhythms.

Neither the very relaxed pace of this builder, Chris Overing, nor Mr. Stone’s sporadically amusing neuroses about his filmmaking make for a gripping documentary.

Mr. Kaleka’s film feels a bit like wandering into a hotel convention hall full of true believers who have been chatting for hours.

It’s the no-nonsense filmmaking, seamlessly integrating even dreams and visions, that keeps us fixed on the bold line of the student’s trajectory, all the way through to a transcendent ending.

For all its faults, “We Steal Secrets” reminds us that despite the potential of WikiLeaks, its project of truth and consequences remains treacherous and complicated in practice.

The filmmakers behind Elemental might have done better to commit to a single portrait and been more fearless about avoiding familiar oratory, but small steps are progress too.

Slack storytelling (including snippets from a post-film Q. and A. session) and patchy filmmaking seal the unappealing deal.

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 protagonist’s life changes for the better, but your mileage may vary.

Most often Mortem just lacks bite, and the dedicated leads seem at times a little slight for the staging of a struggle at eternity’s edge.

Mr. Nance turns his thought into a performance of vulnerability that’s all too relatable in its indulgences. It has heart without becoming cloying.

The film’s ending, introducing farmers whose lives (and weight) have been changed for the better, sounds enough like an infomercial to undermine the whole enterprise.

The movie’s best bits lose out to the requisite moral turnaround.

Shola Lynch’s documentary about Angela Davis, the activist and beacon of counterculture radicalism, is a snappily edited, archivally wallpapered recollection of fearless behavior in the face of an antsy establishment. But it’s equally significant as a pointed act of retelling.

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

The filmmakers’ aversion to coherent narrative and genuinely suspenseful visuals (not to mention a penchant for having Ms. Moore receive terrible news via cellphone) keep the movie’s mystery stew from hitting the spot.

As heartening as it is to see a slum child tutored about vicious cycles of adversity and using the buzzword “partnership” with aplomb, the film comes to feel cut and dried.

Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.

The film dresses up pretty young things in fatigues and retro T-shirts for a story so clichéd and brainless that it’s almost more disturbing than laughable.

A film plunked somewhat unfortunately between the inspirational and the ordinary.

Despite its cultural detail and fetching leads this Jamaican director’s colorful debut feature is undone by ragged scene construction, weak acting and a scattered script.

It’s a far cry from the wonders of Morris Engel’s “Little Fugitive” and might have been better off in a kid’s-size portion as a short.

This tedious chronicle has the interest level of a home movie of a vacation with bickering and yammering left intact.

Though some of the writers inject a force of metaphor and strength of voice, no one would confuse the movie with a short-story collection. But it’s more ambitious and effective at blunting cynicism than most consciousness-raising efforts.

This promisingly tragic tale is sunk by cartloads of context and an overbearing, slanted narration.

Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.

The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the-making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.

As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.

Like many broad successes this unremarkable movie proves decidedly reluctant to yield any golden secret to box-office bonanzas, unless you count tried-and-true chase formulas and a moral about rethinking priorities.

The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.

The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).

This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.

The pacing and performances are more organic than in most horror.

Colman's performance comes as a revelation.

In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.

The flashy adaptation of the book by aging Belgian provocateur Herman Brusselmans is as systematically offensive and boisterously vulgar as its degenerate punk protagonists.

Though floridly written and relentlessly scored, the film's dramas are more persuasively framed than many human ones, going so far as to include multiple flashbacks.

The big-kid-bulky Dayton-born comedian gets some welcome playtime in Jim Pasternak's patchwork tribute, but not nearly enough.

Despite eccentric touches, like a handheld street-shot overture and Grand Guignol Omen references, there's little difference between this story and soap-opera intrigue.

It's hard to appreciate things like the character detail amid the insufferably squealy voicing and arbitrary suspense.

Like most primates, Nénette is both fascinatingly familiar and strange, capable of almost human expressions yet totally unknowable (as well as massive and hairy).

The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg.

The ultimate break comes with a glorious full-screen CGI zoom into blazing heavenly bodies, a refutation of the title's modesty.

The highlight is the crop-cut woman of the group, Wei Caixia, resoundingly vivid in her mix of ambivalence and confidence and worth her own film. Why not this one?

While these ninnies' antics and banter are remarkably entertaining, the quality of the satire depends on when the movie is sending up ludicrous extremist logic and when it's just engaging in repetitive buffoonery.

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.

The escapades are tossed off and fall flat, all products of the business-as-usual template created by the film’s producers, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell.

Campanella, who overconfidently takes his time, outfits the film with ludicrous interrogation scenes, a drunken colleague who provides comic relief and redemptive tragedy, and a climactic flood of memories that plays like a trailer.

Embracing what's really standard tabloid fodder of the decade with earnest engagement and doled-out suspense, Cropsey is one step from macabre comedy.

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.

Documentarian Mark N. Hopkins gives us a mature look at the bracing yet very human personalities attracted to crisis.

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

Overall, the movie has the bantamweight feel of a really long DVD extra: Little details of the director’s ancestral stomping grounds are appealing, but don’t jell into something satisfying.

Richet proves maddeningly loath to edit his material, and his charismatic star, Vincent Cassel, does not delve deep into the character.

Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist’s optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in.

The film's frustrating treatment is actually more like the local reporter who is shown struggling to stay in the loop.

Eventually runs out of gas--or rather, pedal-power--as the filmmakers grope for how to cap the Beavans’ story.

The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration brings out the production’s opulence and hence the regal stage von Stroheim sets for his characters’ attractions and abjection.

The film’s state of play is still less exciting than its famous ancestor (Battle of Algiers) and offspring (The French Connection), but the military junta that ensued in Greece gave the film (shot in Algeria) a sense of urgency approved by Cannes and Oscar alike.

The 20-year-old Hubble Space Telescope--whose repair mission is the subject of this chronicle--turns out to be a bit of a stage hog, and audiences expecting a blissout of swirling galaxies will wonder why so much time is spent on astronauts sweating over screws and bolts.

The facts are more gripping than the filmmaking in Marco Amenta's routine docudrama about tenacious teen informer Rita Atria.

The filmmaker strikes gold in her varied selection of defectors, especially the military man fed up with the myopic chain of command.