Peter Rainer

Kore-eda has a gift for portraying goodness that is quite rare. He does so without a whisper of banality.

Which is not to say the movie is anything less than diverting. It’s just that diverting is often all it is.

The result is that the wonderment, with nothing serious at risk, seems lackluster.

With all this working against it, Les Cowboys strikes a fresh chord. The rise of jihadism has infused this revenge scenario with (all too literally) new blood.

The mordancy of this movie will not surprise Solondz devotees, but unknowing audiences expecting a raunchy teen comedy from the film’s title should be forewarned. This is not “American Pie” in a kennel.

In supporting roles, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Rachel, the equally valiant house slave Newton makes his common-law wife, and Mahershala Ali as Moses, the leader of the renegade slaves, provide some powerful moments.

The film’s most joyous performer is the bagpiper Cristina Pato, known as “the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia,” who is such a powerhouse that she could probably upstage the Rolling Stones (in their prime).

There are some rollicky moments in Finding Dory, which comes 13 years after the markedly better “Finding Nemo,” both directed by Andrew Stanton.

Vitkova’s direction is big on long lingering shots of dreariness. With a 2-1/2-hour running time, that’s a lot of dreariness.

My worst fears were confirmed almost from the start. In order to inject some pep into the proceedings, Law has been encouraged to play Wolfe as a motormouthed rhapsodist who seems less inspired than unhinged. He’s exhaustingly exuberant.

What separates Charles Ferguson’s Time to Choose from the many other documentaries about climate change is that, after dutifully presenting many of the usual horrifying climate statistics, it lays out a series of possible solutions, already available, to the crisis.

The only real acting in this movie comes from Janet McTeer and Charles Dance as Will’s aggrieved parents. They bring some ballast to this blubberfest.

What The Witness makes clear, especially for people who know very little about the Kitty Genovese case, is that the scenario of 38 apathetic witnesses was a gross misrepresentation of what actually occurred.

The filmmakers are clearly on Wise’s side, but they are also eminently fair.

Princess, as a singer, is the real deal, with a throaty resonance that at times recalls Nina Simone. What Kutiman, whom she eventually meets in Israel, has given her is a newfound and miraculous platform for her talent.

Some of the franchise stalwarts, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, are given too little to do. Most are given too much.

The only heartfelt moment of this movie for me came in the end credits, with its dedication to the late Alan Rickman, who provided the voice for the blue butterfly (and former caterpillar) Absolem. What a voice, what an actor, what a loss.

Writer-director Rebecca Miller never wrests her movie free of its associations with the films of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, and some of it plays like a generic indie film rom-com.

The violence is cartoonishly garish and the yuks are few. Crowe, looking (deliberately I presume) flabby and somnolent, is more dead than deadpan, and Gosling, who appears at times to be doing a Lou Costello impression, is, to put it mildly, not in his element.

What’s clear is that many of Weiner’s supporters within the mayoral campaign stuck with him only because of Abedin’s connection to the Clintons. Hey, it’s politics.

Lanthimos doesn’t have the directorial energy to stir this thick allegorical stew. Lacking any of the conventional action-thriller movie skills, his deadpan style may be the only one available to him.

Money Monster turns into an unintentional parody. Investing in this movie would not be a safe bet.

For most of the movie, Dheepan, for all its flaws, is hard-hitting in ways that count. It has the intimacy of a personal drama but the amplitude of a much larger immigrant odyssey.

A slight but winning documentary.

The action, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, is thuddingly effective without being terribly imaginative, but at least it’s not in the clobber-the-audience “Transformers” category.

Irons gives a deft performance as a man who is both entranced and flummoxed by his disciple, but the role itself is in most ways skimpily conceived. Hardy’s homosexuality, for one thing, is never really touched upon, as if that would somehow taint the proceedings.

A documentary about the alternately celebrated and reviled German-born philosopher who gave us the catchphrase “the banality of evil.”

The movie captures so well the push-pull of family dysfunction that, after a while, even the Fangs’ extreme eccentricities seem routine. And that’s the point: The filmmakers are trying to demonstrate that, no matter what we think our family dynamic may be, we’re all on the same strange spectrum.