Rachel Saltz

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.

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.

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.

A dramatic life does not necessarily a dramatic film make.

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

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

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.

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

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.

India’s Daughter is a portrait of a place and time. And for all of its horrors, the movie has a positive message, too: Out of tragedy — and this case is just one of many — can come galvanizing change.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If the movie gets a bit gooey at times that’s probably an occupational hazard when considering the sublime. And Ms. Honigmann’s restraint — there’s something classical in her style, too — keeps the film from floating away. When it threatens to, something piercing or traumatic brings it back to earth, where any account of art belongs.

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.

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

As filmmaking, “She’s Beautiful” is meat and potatoes: It gets the job done without frills.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If A Coffee in Berlin has its own kind of formula and a romanticism that reads as both youthful and obscuring, it nevertheless absorbs you and makes you wonder what Mr. Gerster will do next.

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.

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

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

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.”

One reason Chander Pahar seems so plodding is that Mr. Mukherjee has a habit of telling us what he doesn’t know how to show.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Pitched somewhere between allegory and documentary, the film looks at its characters in a dispassionate, almost deadpan way. They’re something more than specimens under glass but something less than fully rounded people.

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

These mostly silent home movies often have the tug of nostalgia, especially those that show domestic life... But images can be slippery, showing something different from what their creators intended. Even as Mr. Lilti constructs a history...he seems to show its fissures.

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.

In a better movie you might play along with contrived plot twists and fake obstacles, but watching I Do, a movie with thin characters and a languorous pace, you find yourself talking back to the screen.

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.

“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.

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 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.

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

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.

Leonie Gilmour was almost certainly unusual and unusually self-reliant. Too bad that the film that bears her name ultimately reduces her to the mother of her child.

As a director, Mr. Dolan has a freewheeling style, and he’s self-dramatizing enough to want to call attention to it without being too much of a visual show-off.

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.

The interviews are mostly good and instructive, but the well-chosen historical footage is better.

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.

It’s dragged down by non-scene after non-scene, and filmmaking choices that don’t earn their keep.

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.

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

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.

It's very much a Hindi film, but updated and delivered with conviction and style.

By keeping its focus admirably tight, the sober and sobering Israeli documentary The Law in These Parts presents a devastating case against the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

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 filmmakers retain a touching faith that most Americans won't tolerate injustice when they know about it. This film is meant to teach them.

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.

This is an excellent story, and Ms. Draper tells it clearly and stylishly, teasing out the interesting angles and repercussions.

By turns frustrating and moving, Ali Samadi Ahadi's documentary The Green Wave, about the Green Revolution in Iran, gets a jolt from footage shot by the people for the people on the people's cellphones.

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.

Patang ("The Kite"), Prashant Bhargava's first feature, has a lovely, unforced quality. That's because Mr. Bhargava lets his story, set during the annual kite festival in Ahmedabad, India, tell itself, unfolding slowly as he follows filmmaking's most basic and most sinned-against dictum: Show, don't tell.