Peter Keough

Engrossing and occasionally moving, it doesn’t electrify like that other film about the press taking on a chief executive, Alan Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” (1976).

In short, the film inserts us into a solipsistic universe of Norman Lear, one that also overlaps many of the most significant social, political, and show-biz issues of the second half of the 20th century.

The best part of Ron Howard’s long-winded and fitfully moving Pavarotti occurs at the beginning with footage from 1995 of the world-famous tenor — who died in 2007, at 71 — visiting an opera house built in the middle of the Amazon jungle. The legend has it that Enrico Caruso had performed there 100 years before.

More problematic for Hudlin is the nature of the case — only by proving that a rape victim is a liar can Friedman and Marshall win an acquittal for their client. Fortunately, the case (in the film, if not in real life) is resolved in such a way that racism and misogyny are found equally guilty.

Like other offbeat and original efforts such as Spike Jonze’s “Her,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” and Richard Ayaode’s dour “The Double,” it juggles genres, reverses expectations, and resorts to fantasy in order to explore the enigmas of gender, identity, and love.

If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.

Unlike “Belle,” however, in this case Asante does not allow her story to be overwhelmed by period decor and costumes.

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.

In the war between zombies and vampires for the domination of American popular culture, the zombies currently seem to have the edge. So suggests a montage in Rob Kuhns’s amusing but perfunctory documentary about the origins of the 1968 ur-text of zombiedom, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

By the movie’s end, viewers will have had a soul-searing brush with the unthinkable that far exceeds any real horror film of recent memory, and surpasses in its impact more traditional features and documentaries about the subject.

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.

For answers, prepare to sit through two hours of complications, though you will probably figure it out before the spectacular ending.

What follows is no “Citizen Kane,” or even “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), Todd Haynes’s arty tale of a reporter trying to track down a missing glam rock star, in which Collette also starred, playing the missing man’s alcoholic wife.

The movie, though, is not so good. If it came down to acting instead of chess, we might have lost the Cold War.

Oblique, often beguiling, and portentously cryptic.

The story offers many opportunities for glibness and sentimentality. Walsh falls for none of them. She enhances the grimness of Lewis’s surroundings, but does not exploit it.

Despite outstanding performances, the characters lose subtlety as they grow more extreme, and their secrets when spelled out become anticlimactic. Maybe with a little more mystery, the evil would seem less banal.

Because it stoops to obvious editorializing (a voice-over of Margaret Thatcher on capitalism?), it never quite rises to the top.

Though it touches on the usual themes of youthful innocence and imagination challenged by misfortune, and on occasion achieves moments of supremely subtle, sublimely exquisite detail, “Momo” strains when it comes to evoking whimsy and magic.

David Sedaris contributes a story about talking to a hotel clerk over the phone, which doesn’t add much to the discussion but is very funny.

What they don’t quite make clear, and perhaps it is impossible to do so, is what really happened in this odd episode of international espionage epitomizing movie-mogul tyranny.

John Landis’s “Animal House” (1978) this is not.

Belle has the pace and sumptuous cinematography of a Merchant and Ivory production, but none of their memorable characters, subtle performances, or literate dialogue.

The creepiest part of XX, a quartet of short horror films by women, might be the Jan Svankmejer-like stop-action segments between each of them. Sofia Carrillo’s animated antique dolls and little furniture walking on stilt-like legs are the stuff of nightmares.

For the next two decades, the end notes reveal, Baker made the best music of his career. The film does its job if it encourages people to give that music a listen.

Puzzle is neither puzzling nor much fun. It reminds you how much better Julie Delpy told the same story in “2 Days in New York.”

It answers most questions by the end, except the most important one: Is the devil in Miss Sloane, or is Miss Sloane the devil?

Ironically, the phoniness that iconic teen romantic Holden Caulfield despised pervades Jim Sadwith’s Coming through the Rye, a semi-autobiographical tale of hero worship and literary integrity.