Rachel Saltz

Nureyev, directed by the brother-and-sister team of Jacqui Morris and David Morris, suffers from a common documentary-film problem: great story, not-so-great storytelling.

This kind of fantasy-spectacle is Mr. Varman’s forte, not storytelling. When the singing and dancing and action stop, which is less often than you might think, so does “Kalank.”

Super Deluxe, though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act.

The moral seems as tacked on as the villain. But it’s a sweet thought and not entirely out of keeping with a movie that for all its crassness, comic and commercial, is basically good-spirited.

The makers of the Bollywood movie Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga have a touching, if slightly demented, belief in the transformative power of art. How to combat ugly stereotypes and entrenched beliefs? Put on a show!

Mr. Bhansali is painting with a broad brush.

The movie, written and directed by Neeraj Pandey, is not hagiographic or overly obvious. Instead, it’s something of a quiet muddle, with too many squandered or dramatically blurry scenes.

Mr. Roshan, an appealing dancer, works hard to twinkle his way into our affections and make Sarman something more than a cardboard hero. He can’t, but the effort is appreciated.

Based, sometimes loosely, sometimes carelessly, sometimes pointlessly, on “Great Expectations,” the Hindi movie Fitoor is at all times more Bollywood than Dickens.

Ms. Kongara seems to know the clichés of fighter movies and is mostly unembarrassed to embrace them. That keeps the film humming along, as does Mr. Madhavan, who grows in stature along with Adi.

There’s plenty of story here, but Bajirao Mastani has more visual pop than narrative traction.

The director, Sooraj R. Barjatya, courts and embraces cliché at every turn, which is both the movie’s charm and its limitation.

Although Brothers is a remake of Gavin O’Connor’s 2011 “Warrior,” its plotting, timeouts for montages and a song or two — Kareena Kapoor appears as a spangly item girl, the sole female in a sea of leering chorus boys — are echt Hindi movie. Even more so is its emotional appeal.

For much of its first half, Bombay Velvet hums with the kind of energy found in movies by the 1970s American directors....Mr. Kashyap is perhaps too faithful to his Bollywood imperatives, though. In the grand tradition, his film is overlong (149 minutes) and overplotted.

This movie, as the title suggests, is set up to be Piku’s story: How will she make a life? But the filmmakers let Mr. Bachchan overwhelm the story. Ms. Padukone, an always likable performer, remains in his shadow, just as Piku remains in Bhashkor’s, liberated but without real agency.

Mr. Puri works hard, but the strain shows and so do the movie’s seams. And Mr. Khurrana, who rides the line between ingratiating and annoying, has trouble carrying the movie.

I is exuberant and unselfconscious but too cartoonish to engage your emotions. The onslaught of images and music will engage your senses, though, even as you’re left giggling at the too-muchness of it all.

Kill Dil has excellent songs by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, and one memorable, stakes-clarifying dance sequence that juxtaposes two styles.

This is a sympathetic, even sweet, account, but it’s too soft.

Ms. Kapadia, now 57 and a Bollywood star since she made a splash in “Bobby,” at 16, inhabits and enhances her role. So, too, does the younger star Deepika Padukone, who plays her widowed daughter-in-law with an uncloying sweetness. But the men flounder.

Short and sweet and limited.

The movie is so eager to convince us of Tagore’s greatness as a universal soul (it was Tagore, by the way, who gave Gandhi the name “mahatma,” or great soul) that it fails to give us the man or a clear sense of context.

The action sequences mostly have tension and punch, even if the movie is old-school long — 2 hours 41 minutes — and the plot doesn’t bear too much scrutiny.

While Ms. Collette grounds Ellie and her emotions in a tough-minded plausibility, she can only hint at what the script fails to deliver: the complexities of a flawed woman’s midlife crisis.

The 1980s sequences, with their tears and epiphanies, are less vivid and less convincing. An inviting sense of mystery hangs over the events of 1947, Ms. Kurys’s origin story.

2 States is an effort to go beyond formula while also embracing formulaic elements, including some nice song-and-dance sequences. The mix isn’t right yet. But that ambition provides its own tensions and energies, which help 2 States from feeling becalmed.

Gunday, directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, may be preposterous, but it’s rarely dull. And when Mr. Khan and Ms. Chopra are on screen it’s something more. It’s downright enjoyable.

The cinematographer Anil Mehta’s lovely, unfussy images ground the film and show us a good bit of India... Mr. Ali’s story, though, wanders too long and too far, sometimes coming off like a forced mash-up of “It Happened One Night” and “Patty Hearst.”

“Dhoom 3” is very much the Aamir Khan show.

Mr. Marie, making his debut as a director, swathes their tale in a thick coat of style that teeters between cool and mannered.

It hits its themes too squarely on the nose and hits them for about an hour too long.

The movie chugs along for most of its 2 hours and 20 minutes searching for comedy and characters in a frantically overplotted story.

The script, written by Mr. Gupta with Parveez Sheikh, has some engaging mysteries and witty payoffs. But the story is stretched too thin, blunting some of its more interesting ideas.

Somm, though an entree into a little-known world, rarely finds a second dimension.

Too often it calls to mind the much better “Delhi Belly,” which had a genuinely madcap script and sharper things to say about being young, urban and Indian.

“Re-emerging” can be pedestrian as filmmaking, though it remains interesting as long as it remains in Nigeria.

May not be fully satisfying as a documentary. But it has what any good movie needs: a star — the ever-game soprano Natalie Dessay.

The film needs an injection of Bollywood’s unembarrassed, anything-goes, bigger-than-life spirit, which embraces willy-nilly — as does Mr. Rushdie’s novel — the vulgar, the fanciful and the frankly unbelievable.

It’s a remarkable story, even if The Revolutionary, a no-frills documentary drawn from five years of interviews, isn’t much of a movie.

Mr. Mortensen keeps you watching, even when the movie’s storytelling underwhelms. But Everybody Has a Plan is less about story than about texture and atmosphere. They stay with you, as does the haunted visage of Agustín, drifting on the delta waters.

The most interesting thing to watch in I, Me aur Main, the directorial debut of Kapil Sharma (his father, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space), is the changing moral landscape.

If only Red Flag were funnier and tighter and had a sharper idea about what it means to blur the lines between self-interrogation and self-absorption. As it is, the movie throws off too few sparks.

Ambitious but uneven, Kai Po Che (based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life”) mixes, not quite successfully, traditional Bollywood storytelling with something less conventional.

A mix of gently outraged populism and low-powered romantic comedy, Vishal Bhardwaj's Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola might have been better with a chunk lopped off its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

The reunion of Ms. Caplan and Mr. Starr, cast mates on Starz network's "Party Down," seemed intriguing. That series, though, with all the fizz and social comedy that this movie lacks, was a better showcase for them.

Aging is probably the real theme here, but it's approached sidelong and has no punch. Still, only the nostalgia has any real conviction.

An unpleasant comedy about friendship, aims to be a female twist on the bromance. Crude and knockabout, it nonetheless has - like many a bromance - a sloppy, sentimental heart.

Fast and mostly fun, the movie also seems compulsively too much, throwing everything it can think of at you, lest it fail to entertain.

The slick filmmaking - the movie has a glossy, Hollywood-ready feel that sometimes tips into the cutesy - works against its themes.

Inoffensive and low-key, Gayby is too diffuse to have much pop when it comes to the topics at hand: love and friendship, and how unconventional modern permutations might help rewrite the script of romance.

Bel Borba Aqui gives us plenty to look at, but not much to think about.

Pulpy but attenuated, Heroine tries to do too much: deliver an exposé of the back-stabbing film business while also drawing a portrait of a woman caught in its vice.

The film world setting could be better exploited and Shanaya's jealousy made less mechanical, but Raaz 3 delivers other goods: some horror thrills, some true-love-versus-evil thrills and some unusually steamy bits.

As storytelling, "The Global Catch" often falls short. It has too much to cover to be comprehensive and can seem a bit random. As a consciousness raiser, the film fares much better.

Ridiculous and undeniable, it's a punchy cartoon, rightly confident of its power to entertain. Why resist?

Ms. Rohrwacher combines a documentary impulse (effective in family scenes) with a more allegorical one. Her film gets clunky when allegory has the upper hand, and that means Corpo Celeste often stumbles, along with its 12-year-old heroine, Marta (Yle Vianello).

His (Rivera) movie hits its targets, but softly, more in amusement than in anger.

The talented Mr. Ross makes Dre's panic and adrenaline-fueled behavior all too believable. You watch as he sees his horizons dim. What could be sadder?

The filmmakers have no patience for details, either basic or telling. Their elliptical method starts to seem lazy, and Jean's plight, a journey from bad to bad, starts to seem a stacked deck. Through it all Mr. Genty holds your attention with his sober dignity. Too bad the filmmakers frequently let that slip into pathos.

Occasionally funny, though its dirty riffs - most provided by Kevin Hart as the Happily Divorced Guy - are as formulaic as its earnest parts.

Through it all Mr. Allman, who played the skeevy Tommy on "True Blood," is a pleasant presence but blank. And Don's crisis of faith, which should be the movie's core and engine, is never really convincing. It's spelled out but dramatically inert, lost among the yuks of the Reed kookiness.

When a small drama sputters to life at the end, it's too late. You've already been lulled into dreamland.

Though Weil remains fascinating, Ms. Haslett's film, even when it uses more traditional documentary techniques, mostly isn't.

The happy surprise of Ek Main aur Ekk Tu a Bollywood romcom that bears a vague resemblance to "What Happens in Vegas," is that it's not crude, sniggering or vindictive. Instead it's rather sweet and sometimes even a little unexpected.

A wearisome mix of miserableness and dark humor.

Deliberately small-scale, Five Time Champion has tough-minded moments but too often veers toward the sweet and even the treacly. It's pleasant enough, but too careful to be very involving.

The movie goes mushy when it should be critical, and leaves you with questions that it's not prepared to answer.

Mr. Quandour's utopian vision may seem improbable - that fairy tale quality again - but his odd, guileless, folkloric movie doesn't feel cloying so much as something from a different world.

For a mockumentary to work, the writing has to be spot on. But the script by Alan Grossbard, who shows a fond familiarity with, if not great insight into, the racing milieu, has too many half-baked characters and goes soft just when it should get sharp.

If the storytelling disappoints (shocking!), the film mostly doesn't. It relies on action and effects and Bollywood's trump card, star power, to carry the day. This is Mr. Khan's movie, and once he sheds Shekhar's droopy locks, he shines as the deadpan, action-hero robot with digital snot and smooth moves on the dance floor.

Chalet Girl may not be particularly creative or genre busting or even a great example of a romantic comedy. But its premise might make you smile.

The movie plods along self-consciously, and when the big twist occurs (you'll most likely see it coming), it complicates the plot, but not Butch, who remains a paragon. That's the problem with Blackthorn: it goes all mushy when contemplating its grizzled, out-of-time hero.

What should be rousing stuff - a republic is born! the chains of feudalism thrown off! - remains a kind of lavishly illustrated history lesson. Even the irrepressible Mr. Chan (this is his 100th film) seems subdued.

Mr. Sarmah's film is well intentioned, but it comes off as a kind of Cliffs Notes to enlightenment.

Has a complicated story to tell, about black surfers and, more broadly, about African-American history and the history of surfing. Great topics all, but that's a lot of ground to cover and, unsurprisingly, the film often feels a bit scattershot.

At times you wish Mr. Marx had sharper storytelling skills (or a better editor). Some important details seem clear only in retrospect, and some remain murky. Still, Mr. Marx shines a light on a place and a way of life that are rapidly changing.

The fine-boned, delicate-looking Ms. Casadesus, now 97, is a pleasure to watch. And the not-delicate-looking Mr. Depardieu does his usual excellent job. But their scenes together, if sweet enough, aren't particularly convincing or moving.

Full of indie mannerisms - compulsive swearing, jokey violence, quirk-laden characters - Flypaper can't quite manage to find a style or a comic groove of its own.

Worse, you never root for Ms. Calderon's Luz, who goes from sullen to more sullen to a bit less sullen. She has discipline - to lift, she has to keep her weight down and train constantly - but not much compassion and no joy.

Intermittently absorbing, if deliberately stripped of drama.

More and more, Bollywood movies are urban tales for urban audiences. What feels most backward-glancing about Singham is its uncomplicated, even cartoonish insistence on the benefits of village soil over city dirt for cultivating bedrock Indian values.

Undone by its very premise: that the two stories it tells can coexist in the same film.

It's hard to completely dislike a movie in which Mr. James makes like Fay Wray, hitching a ride on the back of his gorilla pal, Bernie (voiced by Nick Nolte), as Bernie clambers up a bridge.

Unless your idea of a good joke is a golf ball thwacked into an unsuspecting crotch or the old frying-pan-in-the-kisser gag, you probably won't like this movie.

Mr. Arbeláez cites Iranian film as an influence, and it's evident in his movie's subdued lyricism and its focus on the boys, whose games and projects - they keep trying to rescue the ball - are treated with a sweetness that steers clear (mostly) of sentimentality.

At one point the lions make a meal of a lovely young zebra they've just killed. That spelled the end for the little boy sitting next to me. "I'm too scared," he said, and he dragged his mom out of the theater. Sorry, kid, it's a jungle out there, even in Disneynature.

The film mixes period footage with visually unappealing contemporary interviews. If you're expecting voluble, outsize personalities with colorful war stories, you'll be disappointed.

Korkoro (the word means freedom in Romani) has an unexpectedly leisurely quality as it shows the texture of Gypsy life - the music-making, the intense bonds with horses and the natural world - and its awkward fit with modernity.

The movie too often fails to reward the close watching it requires. While its stillness powerfully suggests stasis, its fragmentary approach doesn't achieve a cumulative power.

Ms. Rao gives the city an immediacy it doesn't usually have in films. But she has more feel for mood than for storytelling.

Mr. Liechti clearly finds value and even a measure of spiritual grace in this man's radical renunciation of life. You'll be pardoned for finding it numbing.

Walkaway is a pleasant enough time-pass, as they say in India, but stays too near the surface to be memorable.