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).

Despite this labyrinthine self-consciousness, the film, like its subject, keeps careful note of dates and places.

Green’s narrative confidence quickly kicks in, as well as the sharp dialogue by screenwriter Peter Straughan (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”). More importantly, the film indulges in the unabashed goofiness that stoked Green’s “Pineapple Express,” and which Sandra Bullock demonstrated to raucous effect in “The Heat.”

Underneath its mea culpas lies a subtext that exonerates the post-Third Reich generations of its past.

Perhaps Poe’s tone poses a problem; the edge-of-hysteria voice does not hold up well over the course of a feature-length film.

Immersive, enlightening documentary.

Greer and Lyonne play off each other well; the combination of readily corruptible innocence and reluctantly innocent corruption elevate the material. Their badinage and interactions suggest a genuine sisterly relationship, with a long history of resentments, betrayals, and co-dependence. Too bad the filmmakers try too hard at making you laugh, and not hard enough at making you feel.

Shot in a rich palette, the film does provide diversion with some of its funkily detailed sets and supporting actors.... Otherwise, the film distinguishes itself for its miscasting and misuse of its cast.

This is no exercise in miserabilism. Instead Moverman and Gere take a problem and elevate it into a universal experience, turning social issues into existential insights.

Lawrence is an impeccable, commanding subject, not just because of his credentials but because of his presence and demeanor.

Some of Tarantino’s taste for brutish resolutions seems to have slipped into her otherwise nuanced, sensitive, and unflinching adaptation of this YA novel by French author Anne-Sophie Brasme.

Barber, who directed the neglected, unabashedly satisfying vigilante thriller “Harry Brown” knows how to get the blood pumping and stoke an audience’s craving for righteousness, vengeance, and vicarious sadism. What he lacks is the woman’s touch, if by that one means nuance, ambiguity, and empathy.

After a period of creative drought, Zhang’s homecoming is a cause for celebration.

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

Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall reduces these events to a backdrop for caricatures that were already passé in William Friedkin’s “The Boys in the Band” (1970).

The film veers from farce to tragedy and relates a twisted variation on the American Dream.

A kitchen, a guestroom, and swimming pool become battlegrounds. Though hardly revolutionary, “Mother” subverts conventions — both cinematic and social.

Güeros is brutal, ironic, madcap, and grim. Shot by Damian Garcia in black-and-white with the pristine spontaneity of Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard, it is “Bande à part” (1964) meets “Los Olvidados” (1950).

What Meet the Patels could use is a little more meat.

It takes a woman to make a great film about the all-male bastion of the French Foreign Legion. Claire Denis did so in her elliptical desert updating of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” in “Beau Travail” (1999), and her fellow French director Sarah Leonor nearly equals that feat in The Great Man.

More conventional in approach than Linklater’s 12-year filmmaking odyssey, “Identity” demonstrates its boldness not with stylistic originality but with political acuity.

It consists of a series of episodic encounters, misadventures, and musings redeemed in part by the presence of two scenic wonders, the unspoiled 2,190-mile grandeur of the Appalachian Trail and the spectacular crapulousness of Nick Nolte.

Much of Meru is about that second attempt, filmed with such grandeur and intimacy that sometimes attempting to figure out how they made the incredible shots almost spoils them.

Like her subject, Kempner’s film doesn’t try to be flashy or stylish. She adheres to the Ken Burns school of old footage, photos, period ads, newspaper stories and cartoons.

A fascination with serendipity, irony, and absurdity like that in Werner Herzog’s documentaries propels “Friends” into unexpected territory.

No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton starts out strong, peaks quickly, and then gets tangled in complications and compromise and falls apart.