Rachel Saltz

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.