Sheri Linden

Magic Farm features a stupendous cast fully in sync with Ulman’s deadpan absurdity. The actors effortlessly entwine the droll and the ingenuous, but as Ulman juggles more characters and more plot angles than in her first movie, there isn’t necessarily more payoff.

The romance at the movie’s core doesn’t deliver the intended emotional impact, but there’s a tender, potent resonance to other aspects of the story.

Veering between strained slapstick and thoughtful tête-à-têtes, this boomer-focused reunion comedy strands a game cast of accomplished septuagenarians in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and predictable beats.

It’s a handsome period piece that’s often too smooth around the edges, but with its old-fashioned sincerity and unforced insistence on team spirit, it has a certain all-ages appeal — assuming audiences of all ages are going to the movies this holiday season.

It’s Hamm’s emotionally wounded small-town top cop who gives the film its engine, especially in his dealings with Mohammed and Fey’s characters. The schemes and cover-ups and collateral damage spin round with little dimension, or, as Police Chief Sanders sums it up, “Just a bunch of people that deserve each other.”

On the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

Signed, sealed and delivered, Book Club: The Next Chapter is an unabashed love letter to four great movie stars. As a vehicle for their talents, it’s less of a sure thing.

At times disarming, at others plain silly, it takes a few daring leaps without quite avoiding middle-of-the-road sitcom territory.

Shepard’s reach might exceed her grasp, but there’s no question that she takes risks and is a filmmaker of notable promise.

There’s so much potential heart and heartbreak in Firebird’s tale of forbidden passion that the screenplay and the cautious pacing become frustrating; with every ache measured and spelled out, the film’s dogged striving for poetry too often leaves it feeling disappointingly prosaic.

Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell (Casino Royale, The Protégé) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

Hall and Brown are a glorious kick to watch, their physicality at times bordering on slapstick.

We know the achievements and victories of the era Nagy depicts, and yet, because she and her fine cast bring the story to such vivid, immediate life, the final moments of Call Jane are powerful with unanticipated joy.

Though it’s not without cinematic touches and affecting, sometimes harrowing moments, and even with a convincingly fragile and unmoored Amanda Seyfried at its center, the drama is often hampered by an instructive sensibility that gives it the air of a feature-length PSA.

Pig isn’t the gripping mystery Sarnoski might have intended, but as a crawl through the underbelly of a hipster city’s glamorous foodie culture, it’s a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients. Through it all, Cage plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham.

The preceding journey might have been smoother, but the doc is a reminder that we still know so little about the oceans and their inhabitants, and an illustration of how much hope we attach to them.

Effectively moody but offering frustratingly skin-deep chills, The Woman in the Window underestimates its hero in more than ways than one.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

The story itself finally feels lost beneath the levels of artifice rather than heightened by it.

The unconsummated attraction between best friends played by Carice van Houten and Hanna Alström clearly is meant to be its emotional pulse. Yet however sensitive the two leads' performances, The Affair rarely gathers the necessary intensity.

Breaking News in Yuba County features a pitch-perfect Janney at the center of a game cast of well-knowns. Yet as it fumbles through its unwieldy mix of crime-caper farce, social commentary and black comedy, the genre it most solidly nails is the one that poses the burning question "Why did so many accomplished actors sign on to this?"

Elegy . . . embraces the emotional messiness of a heart-wringing country song, but lacks a haunting refrain to get under your skin.

The drama works only in fits and starts. The vague danger that shapes it, and the narrative's underlying emotional intricacies, are too often explained rather than felt.

A dramatic thriller tackling serious themes — the aftermath of war, the cost of retribution and the possibility of redemption — the movie can't always get out of its own way, as reliably effective as Rapace is.

Like many a stage mother, Thom Fitzgerald's comic drama is pushy. It tries too hard, in all too obvious ways, to win over the audience.

Turning his famous furrowed brow away from the realm of life-and-death nail-biters, Neeson elevates the proceedings with his dry delivery and nimble comic timing. Made in Italy makes you wish the actor did more comedy.

Rey, whose previous features include Unexpected and Empire Builder (released when she was married to fellow director Joe Swanberg and used his last name), has a knack for recognizing everyday stabs of awkwardness and turning throwaway lines into grace notes.

Where the movie hits flat notes is in the way it spells out its points rather than letting friction percolate through the action.

Though its running time is brief and a lot of the writing is sharp, the tug-of-war between a onetime literary lion and his wide-eyed No. 1 fan lacks the necessary tension to make the drama's outcome matter.

As a glimpse at the nitty-gritty of building a music career in the '60s and '70s, the film is instructive, though the record-by-record trajectory could have been tighter. Tracing the ups and downs and stops and starts, Firmager sometimes lands in the weeds and loses the beat. The film is strongest in its portrait of the formative years of Quatro's career and their emotional residue, which turns out to be the core of this chronicle.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

Good-looking and technically well crafted, the film struggles to get past pastiche and conjure an involving world of its own.

As a harmless time-waster, Good Trip has its charms, but also its oversold shtick.

Even though the movie poses questions worth pondering, it's self-inoculated against doing the pondering. With all the long, loving glances at the orderly pastel interiors of Jean's home, and the constant nudging reassurance of the score, the narrative has been too padded against sharp angles to register a seismic jolt.

A less muddled, less self-conscious Queen & Slim could have been an indelible waking dream. Instead, it's hit-and-miss. But Waithe and Matsoukas are on to something, and it's the undercurrents rather than the filmmakers' more obvious exertions that hit the mark.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

But for all its vividly detailed eccentricity, the movie, like Abby, connects the dots rather too easily. As Clifton Hill digs deeper into exceedingly sordid stuff, it doesn't dish up the kind of aha moments or chilling frissons that would lift the story from clever contrivance — until a final, delicious twist pulls the rug out from under this richly atmospheric but not always convincing tale.

What's missing in this Kitchen is heat. A B-movie summer diversion at best, it's more a collection of genre tropes than an involving crime drama.

It works mainly in fits and starts, though there's no question that the movie's depiction of the effects of Soviet rule on a nomadic population will be eye-opening for many Western viewers, and deeply resonant for Kazakhstanis.

Though the screenplay ... ultimately conforms quite plainly to formula and grows less interesting as it proceeds, there’s a gutsiness to Larson’s headlong leap into material that walks a fine line between risky fantasy and feel-good reassurance.

[Gottsagen's] sensibility infuses the modern-day fable with an engaging forthrightness. But the unequivocal material often sticks close to the surface, and the film built around him, for all its physical sweep, can feel constricted by obviousness.

Hart has fashioned a tale of matriarchal inheritance, but one whose fierce message is undercut rather than deepened by its child's-book clarity. The intriguing setup receives underpowered execution, the intended jolts landing all too softly.

Reaching for a memorable blend of whimsy and portent, Stine has come up with something that feels scattered and decidedly lite. Yet the glimmers of promise in Virginia Minnesota suggest that with a more streamlined, focused narrative, he could spin a Midwestern yarn to remember.

For all its winking jabs, this blend of giddy bits and teachable moments eventually follows the same old playbook.

The filmmaker's grip on the storytelling could be tighter, especially in the second half, which at times seems to lose focus, much like the floundering protagonist. But when it clicks, the film is a provocative combo of emotional fumbling, droll asides and shrewd insights.

It's great to look at, nearly giddy with pop-culture love, and its particulars are intriguing. But those pieces — by turns weird, soulful and exhilarating — merely accumulate, when they should be generating magic.

It’s Wang’s eye for social realities, brought to life by her cast, that gives her film its edge.

Newcomer Myles Truitt inhabits the role with an earthbound soulfulness — what you might call the opposite of heroic flash — and even when the film’s progress feels more mechanical than organic, he’s easy to root for.

The child's discovery of the beauty of nature, the workaday brutalities of farm life and the adult world's disappointments and betrayals rings true, to a point, and the young actor in the role is memorably guarded and watchful. In Hjörleifsdóttir's adaptation, though, the themes are too studied and neat, playing out in a way that can feel oppressive rather than revelatory.

The movie is a testament to the star power of Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, who, as the longtime friends at the center of a run-of-the-mill comedy, are the only reasons to see it.

At various moments throughout the movie, Turner and McDermott suggest something far more complicated and messy than the noir-tinged exercise that unfolds.

The film veers between inspired and strained and finally settles into the realm of self-improvement pop psychology.

Chilling Kafkaesque encounters give way to portrayals of thuggish cops bordering on caricature. In distractingly blunt ways, the film emphasizes what's already powerfully clear: the monstrousness of Mariam's situation and her courage.

At its most hopeful, the film traces a story of medical diplomacy, involving a young Gaza boy's life-saving surgery by an Israeli doctor. At its most searing, it illuminates the seeds of hatred and the depths of suffering and mistrust.

Mistaking provocation for insight, and failing to sell the presumed heroism of its cunning central character, the movie grows less involving with each step. It can't make Erica Vandross' fate matter, but in Deutch it gives us a motor-mouthed wonder who commands attention.

The knack for biting dialogue that Mills brought to Guidance is still evident, although his new effort can’t match the bracing sting of his wickedly funny debut.

The handsomely downbeat atmospherics overwhelm its themes of love, parenthood, crime and punishment. The narrative doesn't quite coalesce, and except for a few late-in-the-proceedings moments, it doesn't deliver the grim, indelible shivers of the best noir.

As the writer-director's sly gaze shifts into an insistently upbeat appeal for female empowerment, the movie loses its comic steam.

The actors can't turn the strained stabs at poetry into the affecting meditation that was clearly intended.

Adding wrestling to the rom-com mix doesn't quite disguise how by-the-numbers this girl-meets-girl story is. But with its likable characters, local color and cross-cultural sparks, "Signature Move" has unsentimental sweetness and pluck.

Montiel treats his story's happily unsung oddballs with sincere affection. He doesn't hold them up to ridicule, or insist that they snap out of their quirkiness and conform. But he doesn't quite know what to do with them.

The ace cast provides delicious moments, to be sure, but mainly they're playing caricatures in search of a compelling plot.

However nuanced and artful, the nightmarish unease is laid on so thick that, in combination with the cryptic narrative, it gradually turns to murk.

The starry chemistry of leads Ansel Elgort and Chloë Grace Moretz injects a modicum of energy into the coming-of-age drama, whose elements of romance, crime and smart-kid angst never coalesce.

The directors and screenwriter Karen Croner are attuned to the different ways that Phil and Sandy selfishly draw their kids deeper into the domestic mess.

The movie delivers a modicum of magic without getting pious or gushy. It never soars, though, or burns especially bright.

It’s the glimmers of penetrating observation that make the overload of clichés so frustrating in Onah’s first feature, and suggest better things for his second.

Olin could not be more commanding. It's a powerful performance in the service of a movie that's by turns off-putting, bracingly incisive and insufferable.

It's the chemistry between Domhnall Gleeson and newcomer Will Tilston, as the awkwardly matched father and son, that makes the movie more than a mélange of inept parenting and Tigger too.

The sad truth is that we’ve heard countless harrowing stories of the Holocaust, and this one, for the most part, isn’t presented in a way that makes it indelible or urgent.

An affectionate and sometimes vibrantly imaginative biographical sketch, Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards could have used more shoes and fewer people.

Joan’s story unfolds all too neatly, but in Allen’s spark and grace there’s a real sense of discovery.

It arrives not as a lusty tale in full bloom but as a tastefully arranged still life, in search of an animating spark.

A meandering journey, too tepid to stir up the feelings of yearning and rebellion that it aims to evoke.

Had the comedy been sharper, this movie-loving movie might have convincingly meshed its Technicolor caricatures and antifascist heroics.

The intriguingly bonkers premise rests somewhat soundly on matters of climate change, overpopulation and genetic engineering, but its most burning question is “Are seven Noomi Rapaces better than one?” To which the answer is a resounding “Sure, why not?”

Heartfelt, if not entirely satisfying, Walk With Me provides an up-close glimpse of the life of devotion, focusing on the monks and nuns who live at a rural monastery led by Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh.

Garcia never gets a grasp on her protagonist’s contradictions, or those of her story — certainly not enough to pull off the movie’s jaw-dropper of a twist. But she conjures a powerful sensuality, and Cotillard burns ferociously bright, even when the center does not hold.

Despite a few playful flourishes, filmmaker Luc Bondy’s experiment in artifice never takes flight.

Tonal swerves can be a source of useful friction; here they’re simply awkward, and Robespierre’s efforts to meld sentiment and laughs grow increasingly strained.

As clunky as the movie can feel, there’s a winning toughness to its unsentimental view of childhood and its nostalgia for a pre-digital age.

Though handsomely photographed and featuring a compelling cast, the Ireland-set memory piece — adapted by John Banville from his Man Booker Prize-winning novel — will leave audiences wondering how much more satisfying the muted drama might be on the page.

At its strongest, the movie dissects such pat notions as “closure” and “moving on” with wit and intelligence.

A work of deep but unsentimental optimism, Wrestling Jerusalem gives us plenty to wrestle with, but presents it at such a relentless clip, in such self-conscious fashion, that it becomes wearying rather than involving.

Despite the wildly uneven plotting, Gordon’s atmospheric direction in coastal New London propels the drama, as does her sensitivity to what remains unspoken between people. That everyone in the film is drastically off-balance may just be the point.

Rather than explore his place in the arts and balance all that adoration with insight, Corsicato opts for hero worship. The result is a visually exciting but emotionally monotonous film.

A dynamic glimpse of contemporary Los Angeles funneled into an old-fashioned coming-of-age saga, Lowriders isn’t always persuasive, but it has plenty of heart.

Had Mader focused on fewer plot strands, he might have found a more effective balance. Whatever metaphysical poetry Displacement could have held is lost amid its over-explained and underwhelming search for the “negation point.”

Directed by Ido Fluk from a screenplay he wrote with Sharon Mashihi, the film is sensitively observed, its performances convincingly understated. But it rapidly devolves into a standard, and increasingly unfocused, story of materialism and greed.

The real crime in Going in Style is its waste of acting talent.

It’s tricky, to put it mildly, to use suicidal impulses as a story engine for a comedy, and director Rob Spera and screenwriter Jared Rappaport don’t quite pull it off as they navigate the middle ground between dark humor and emotional catharsis.

The drama’s power may dwindle, yet its end-of-the-world scenario remains oddly recognizable.

However heroic a figure Fanning’s Liz may be, however much this fine actress makes us feel her terror and determination, any sense of triumph is steadily, grindingly undone.

The by-the-numbers story never achieves its aimed-for grandeur or intensity, and the striking Turkish locations prove far more interesting than the characters.

Given the scope of the early-1930s atrocity, the most shocking thing about director George Mendeluk’s new dramatization is how utterly devoid of emotional impact it is.

Gael Garcia Bernal’s effortless magnetism is the complicating factor — and the only compelling one — in You’re Killing Me Susana.

Whatever license the word “fable” grants Hamilton, it doesn’t redeem the narrative muddle. But there’s an undeniable gutsiness to her filmmaking. The American dreamscape she creates is memorably unsettling.