Stephen Holden

Ms. Chastain’s watchful, layered performance helps keep the film on an even keel, but it is not enough to prevent The Zookeeper’s Wife, with its reassuringly cuddly critters, from feeling like a Disney version of the Holocaust.

Mr. Phillips’s self-deprecating humor is amusing but not funny enough to give him the edge he needs to rise up and conquer.

As one comic after another recalls triumphs, misadventures and painful lessons learned, the stories become redundant.

It is too flat-footed and sloppy to explore the obvious parallels between then and now, and the movie is peppered with gratuitous star cameos that distract rather than enlighten. At least it means well.

Passengers increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

As it drags along, the movie makes you feel trapped in the shoes of someone destined for failure.

The best thing about All We Had is Ms. Holmes’s stormy portrayal of a desperate, foolishly trusting woman who rushes from man to man seeking security, only to find herself used and betrayed while her daughter looks on with increasing dismay.

Partly because Miss Sloane is more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.

Written and directed by Tim Kirkman (“Dear Jesse,” “Loggerheads”), Lazy Eye has realistic dialogue and believable performances by its stars. But unless you consider subjects like saltwater swimming pools and the movie “Harold and Maude” fascinating topics, “Lazy Eye” has little to say.

To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.

American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty amid an ugly presidential campaign.

Although Mascots is neither as funny nor as satirically acute as its forerunner, it would be churlish to complain too loudly. And the sharpest verbal jokes in the screenplay by Mr. Guest and the actor and writer Jim Piddock are as inspired as ever. Mr. Guest’s gift for the archly comedic mot juste is undiminished.

Nostalgia gives way to melodrama, and dramatic truth to soapy histrionics, and Blue Jay falters on a formulaic revelation about mistakes made and lessons learned too late.

The absence of an emotional catharsis in the film, efficiently directed by Mick Jackson (“The Bodyguard,” “Temple Grandin”) from a screenplay by the British playwright David Hare, leaves a frustrating emptiness at its center.

The heavy-handed man-beast comparison is one of several grossly overstated themes in a movie that abruptly changes direction as it goes along while taking shortcuts that leave its characters underdeveloped and crucial plot elements barely fleshed out.

Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.

The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.

Overseen by a director not known for his human touch and lacking a name star, except for Mr. Freeman, Ben-Hur feels like a film made on the cheap, although it looks costly.

The movie comes alive only when the camera lingers over the actual paintings and allows their power to speak for itself.

Quitters is repellent but believable, which makes it a little scary.

Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.

Ms. Seydoux’s triumph is her skill at imbuing Célestine with an almost angelic radiance that clashes with her underlying coarseness.

The best and maybe the only way to appreciate Alice Through the Looking Glass is to surrender to its mad digital excess and be whirled around through time and space in a world of grotesque overabundance.

The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.

The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.

The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography.

When it deepens its intellectual focus, Hockney begins to lose coherence, with rushed sequences that cover his stage designs, his landscapes and his experiments with photography.

This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.

The Program, much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort.

Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.

The Finest Hours is a moderately gripping whoosh of nostalgia that shamelessly recycles the ’50s cliché of the squeaky-clean all-American hero.

Despite its deficiencies, Naz & Maalik feels authentic, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Cook bring their characters completely alive.

So long as the camera is studying Franny maniacally bestowing his largess or throwing temper tantrums, The Benefactor is mesmerizing. But Mr. Gere’s flamboyant performance is the sole raison d’être for this melodrama.

This comic take on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is infused with a gleefully absurdist sense of humor while retaining a childlike sense of wonder.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is moderately effective agitprop.

Dreams Rewired is mostly content to entertain. Its explanations of how new inventions work are simplified to the point of superficiality.

What makes A Royal Night Out palatable are the lead performances.

In Ms. Smith’s tough, levelheaded performance, Mary is an irascible termagant full of batty notions clutching on to life as best she can. She is hard to like, and that’s good.

Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary portrait Tab Hunter Confidential is as mild-mannered and blandly likable as its subject.

Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.

The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.

As the movie fizzles, Mr. Clement’s endearing performance breathes what little life is left into a movie that, much like the insufferable Charlie, can’t make up its mind about where to go or how to get there.

The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.

This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.

The main, and perhaps the only, reason to see the revenge thriller Lila and Eve, a shallow, cut-rate “Thelma and Louise,” is for the thunderous lead performance of Viola Davis.

As Maria crumples before our eyes, many will find Stations of the Cross heartbreaking and infuriating. Others may laugh out loud at her mother, a walking nightmare of pious, punishing rectitude.

As truthful as it is, Boulevard conveys little insight into characters who are believable and well acted but incapable of change.

The screenplay is vague not only about politics but also about the history of Jimmy’s unconsummated relationship with his former sweetheart, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now married, whose wide Susan Sarandon eyes express a wistful sadness.

The movie’s extreme compression is its biggest failing. The business end is so minimally sketched, you are left wanting to know a lot more.

Mr. Schoenaerts’s dour André may make conceptual sense, but he leaves a hole in this handsomely mounted costume drama that would have profited from more intrigue and a steamier erotic atmosphere.

Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.

“Saturday Night Live” deserves much better than the documentary equivalent of what a book editor would surely dismiss as a rushed, careless clip job.

The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.

For all its sensitivity to the subject, The Farewell Party makes a number of tonal missteps of which the most glaring is the insertion of a musical number that upsets the movie’s otherwise sensible balance between the comedic and the morbid.

Because the film doesn’t begin to explore the wider implications of that loss of trust, its findings don’t add up to more than a sardonic gloss on a provocative subject.

5 Flights Up would be nothing without its stars, whose humanity warms up a movie that otherwise portrays New Yorkers as coldblooded, slightly crazy, hypercompetitive sharks.

When the banter sputters, there is always the glorious scenery along the Trans-Canada Highway to divert you.

The strongest elements of this film, which adds nothing new to the subgenre, are its atmospheric, smeared-lipstick cinematography and Mr. Ferdinando’s portrayal of an arrogant, double-dealing crook.

As an instructional movie on the sport, Ride offers some useful tips, but beyond that, it feels like a slightly bizarre vanity project.

It is up to its fine cast to build what little sense of mystery is conjured and to bring a sense of coherence to a narrative mishmash that is all smirking attitude with no subtext. Think of it as a goof.

Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.

She’s Lost Control sustains a mood of deepening alienation, but the attitude of the movie is too detached for it to be emotionally gripping, and its ending is botched.

What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.

The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.

In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.

Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.

That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.

Mike Binder’s steady, well-intentioned exploration of the racial tensions affecting two branches of a Southern California family, is notable for what it doesn’t try to do.

My Name Is Hmmm ... has its magical moments, but they are sabotaged by the director’s showy, ham-handed technique applied to a frustratingly threadbare screenplay that leaves you wanting more.

Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.

The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched.

As the pace picks up, whatever spell the movie cast is shattered, and Still Life melts into a heap of sentimental slush.

With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.

We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.

Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.

Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.

Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.

West, for all its intensity, becomes too bogged down in detail to be as strong as it might have been.

In its stunted theatrical version, the second half is a sketchy digest of events that leaves you feeling cheated.

[An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.

If it weren’t for the diligent performances of its stars, who inject some emotional depth into this bogus claptrap, Before I Go to Sleep would be an unwatchable, titter-inducing catastrophe.

Life of Riley is neither especially profound nor riotously funny. An element of caricature is palpable in the performances but restrained.

Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story.

There are interesting ideas here, but they are swallowed up in dull, poorly choreographed shootouts and other action nonsense.

Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.

As the truth tumbles out, the dialogue and the carefully timed revelations make My Old Lady seem increasingly stagy. But the performances go a long way toward camouflaging the screenplay’s clunky mechanics.

Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.

You can only imagine how much stronger the movie might have been had it fleshed out subsidiary dramas whose outlines are barely discernible.

As both an actor and a playwright, Wallace Shawn, at his most audacious, goes for the jugular, but in sneaky roundabout ways.

As the movie picks up speed and undergoes sudden, confusing plot reversals, it loses its satirical edge.

After a certain point, watching it is like listening to the ravings of an increasingly incoherent and abusive drunk.

A Million Ways to Die in the West seems serious about only one thing: its contempt for the gun-crazed macho ethos exalted in countless Hollywood westerns. You might call the movie “Revenge of the Übernerd.”

Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.

In the opening images of Devil’s Knot, the camera sets a menacing, Hitchcockian mood by stealthily creeping into the woods where the murders took place. But the movie settles into being a police procedural with the tone of a superior episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”

[A] shallow but enjoyable all-American morality play.

Beneath the Harvest Sky reaches a dramatic climax that is so rushed and confusing, you are left scratching your head. But for all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.

Struggling to get out from under the film’s too-cheery surface is a much more serious movie about grown-ups confronting the depredations of old age.

Ms. Hall’s Lotte is the weak link in the triangle. Despite all her character’s flowery words of longing, she can’t convey the heat bottled under Lotte’s demure demeanor.