Rachel Saltz

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

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

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

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.

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.

Race 2, directed by Abbas-Mastan, has little to offer besides its loving gaze at wealth and flesh.

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.

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.

Himmatwala feels timid and overeager. Except when it’s terrible.

Brian Herzlinger’s How Sweet It Is, an ode to the healing powers of musical theater, misfires so badly at the beginning that it takes a while to notice when it goes from godawful to sweetly awful.

The plot of Aurangzeb is inevitably too complicated, and the themes presented more interestingly than they are wrapped up. But for much of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, it ably weaves Bollywood tropes...with contemporary outrage at the rules of the game.

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.

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.

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

Besharam is frequently crude, but it’s also unusually clean in its plotting. And it has a kind of unblushing vitality that is especially strong in the dance numbers, which feature big crowds, lots of color and an old-fashioned Bollywood desire to please.

Mr. Mehta has done something difficult. He has made a film of conviction that’s neither plodding nor preachy.

If Bullett Raja had more spark, it might be fun to contemplate its barely hidden crisis-of-masculinity subtexts.

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 cramped first half, mostly in the Singh apartment, is crudely unfunny.

It holds your interest, even if Jean-Marie remains what he must be to Mr. Cohen: an enticing puzzlement, his faith a mystery.

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.

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.

During its 159 minutes, this movie bombards you with eager-to-please but clueless shtick.

A star can lift a movie like Kick, making its silliness sublime. That doesn’t happen here.

Mr. Deshmukh’s setup can be overly fussy — some of the con machinations seem needlessly complicated and hard to follow, or maybe not quite worth following — but his payoff works. And his cast, too, hits the right notes and finds an easy rhythm.

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.

Though the political backdrop often overwhelms or distorts the family drama, Mr. Bhardwaj provides the occasional sharp reminder of how cinematically he can construct Shakespearean moments.

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

Mr. Hirani remains an excellent storyteller, weaving his disparate story strands into a convincing, satisfying whole — a rare Bollywood feat.

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.

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.

The twisty story has a kink or two too many, a problem of whodunit plotting rather than of Bollywood excess. And the war comes across here as a kind of heightened backdrop rather than real crisis. But these aren’t fatal deficiencies in a film more attuned to movie-made ideas of history and style than to history itself.

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.

The hapless secret agent heroes of Kabir Khan’s revenge thriller Phantom, could have used some pointers before being sent into the field.

Through it all, Mr. Taylor’s creative mysteries remain intact; a master of the casual and the vernacular (a good way to learn about movement, he says, is to watch football halftime shows), he nonetheless approaches the mystical.

With its light silent comedy, Mr. Wenders’s film presents movie history as a meeting of the inventive and the inevitable — a playful lark.

Mr. Khan is this movie’s best weapon. Playing a familiar character type, the world-weary detective, he gives a performance, full of small, sly details, that doesn’t seem familiar at all.

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

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

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.

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

Because the filmmakers have given their characters labels (rebel, guru, villain) instead of personalities, the movie’s bid for epic resonance feels particularly hollow.

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.

Avoiding flabby subplots, Mr. Dholakia keeps Raees taut and suspenseful, even at two and a half hours, though it probably has a song too many

If “Badrinath” ends up being less about female empowerment than about schooling gents on a cardinal rule, its pop comes from Ms. Bhatt.

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!

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.

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

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.”

The movie is crisply, sometimes stylishly shot (Madhie did the cinematography), but it’s too muddled to be slick and too lacking in charm to establish any emotional stakes.

Dabangg 3 is earnest, and it earnestly wants to deliver thrills. To do so, though, it would have to provide that other essential Bollywood ingredient: emotion. What’s missing are the tears. The movie hardly leaves a trace.