Peter Keough

So here’s a tip: Don’t desert this film before giving it a chance. You might not want seconds, but eventually it dishes up a satisfying slice of life.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

Escape From Tomorrow, Moore’s sometimes surreal, sometimes sophomoric, black comic phantasmagoria, makes for a bumpy theme park ride.

Though Derrickson offers some new twists on old tricks, and evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible, the story soon devolves into variations of many movies we have seen before.

Though engrossing and aesthetically admirable, at times the humorless artiness verges on absurdity. It’s hard to take a film too seriously when plum jam and Bach’s “Chaconne” vie for equal cinematic significance.

A grade A, meat-and-potatoes genre flick.

In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.

The performances are meticulous and passionate, the narrative low-key and obliquely sensitive enough to conceal, until the traumatic incidents keep piling up, the film’s contrivance.

Anchoring this diverting, disparate collage are interviews with those who still believe in Van Tassel’s faith and message.

Another problem with “Inequality” is that it offers nothing new or surprising.

Entertaining if inconsequential gangster farce.

All in all, maybe the best 90 minutes of romantic comedy in theaters this fall. Unfortunately, the film is 122 minutes long.

Writer-director Zach Clark doesn’t rise much above that level of subtlety in his lampoon of the phony goodwill and soulless commercialism of the Yuletide season. Luckily, he has a cast that elevates the puerility into genuine pathos and absurdity.

Despite the music, and no matter how the film’s editors slice it, the attempt to get a rise out of the audience by way of the endangered child device verges on emotional pornography.

The Visitor arrived at the height of a sci-fi and horror film revival, when “serious” directors... embraced genre conventions and made them their own. Paradise stole from them all. But unlike these directors, his ambition was coupled with delusional ineptitude.

Occasionally the camera gets jumbled around, blacks out, and hisses with static as if it had been tossed in a dryer. Then it regains composure and reveals — an old playbill! A figure in a mask with a noose! The birth of a new franchise and the death of a great genre.

Intentionally or not, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down is the comedy hit of the summer. No other film equals its comic sophistication. Each nutty scenario is surpassed by the next, ludicrous story lines coalesce with expert orchestration, and absurd details return with perfect timing to build to a crescendo of hilarity.

Has its moments of grace, but too often resorts to conventions and a tone of high lugubriousness.

One of the advantages of time travel in a found-footage film is that it makes the chronology and causality so confusing that the problem of who’s shooting what becomes secondary. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow fast-forwarding through all the boring bits. For starters, I could have done with far less Lollapalooza.

The story gets both complicated and predictable.

Despite the derivativeness, Chism shows talent and shrewd instincts in the timing and direction of the comedy — she handles the requisite dinner table disaster scene with aplomb.

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.

It is at least 10 movies in one, some of them ingenious parodies, but all adding up to a cluttered, confused anticlimax.

As a portfolio of visionary images of surreal landscapes and hallucinatory flora and fauna, the movie sometimes dazzles. But as a metaphorical narrative, it often fizzles.

The Captain pretends to be a serious movie about the banality of evil; sometimes, despite itself, it is.

The voice-over narrator (Perrin) recites environmentally pious platitudes that offer little enlightenment about what’s on the screen. This is annoying when something strange and unfamiliar is being shown.

Lassgård won’t let you off easy: A scene in which Ove weeps hopelessly before the magnitude of his loneliness will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who has suffered a loss. His Ove is a man indeed.

Westmoreland’s narrative is cluttered with undeveloped subplots and loose ends. He compensates by evoking the era with images drawing from painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Toulouse-Lautrec and soundtrack music that ranges from Strauss-like waltzes to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”