Stephen Holden

Cézanne et Moi offers a pungent, demystifying portrait of the rowdy late-19th-century Parisian art world where famous painters and poets mingled and jostled for position at dinner parties and art openings filled with shoptalk, backbiting and intrigue.

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.

Frantz takes pains to show both sides’ lingering hostility after a devastating and (the movie implies) senseless war.

At first Apprentice seems to be a basic revenge film in which Aiman stalks the man who killed his father. But it becomes psychologically more complex.

Donald Cried is an acutely insightful, exquisitely written and acted triumph for Mr. Avedisian, who understands how the past permanently clings to us.

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.

[An] exquisite, beautifully shot meditation on love clouded by fear and doubt.

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.

Their ordeal feels cruel, unnecessary and infuriatingly real.

This movie, directed and produced by Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards, digs deeply enough into Mr. Giordano’s world to convey the drudgery and headaches of being a bandleader.

What makes the pain of this film bearable is Daniel’s unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance.

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.

Most of the humor is too lighthearted to offend all but the most reverent believers, and the movie’s inventiveness rarely flags.

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.

Even in the throes of grief, Mr. Cave retains his mystique as a rock shaman.

Mr. Byrne’s film is a sober, evenhanded recapitulation of Sands’s imprisonment and death that places him in a historical context.

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.

The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.

Because “Merrily” was a musical about the ravages of time on friendship and youthful ideals, the documentary tells parallel stories — one fictional, the other real — of disappointment and disillusion. They give the film a double shot of poignancy.

[Ms. Steinfeld] manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.

The tone of the narration is so wrenchingly honest that the film never lapses into self-pity or relies on mystical platitudes.

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.

It is the film’s cosmic dimension that makes it so special.

The narrowness of its perspective and its relatively brief 82-minute length disappoint. Yet Don’t Call Me Son still manages to be a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves.

Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.

The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.

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.

The movie, directed by Gavin O’Connor (“Tumbleweeds”), makes little sense. The screenplay, by Bill Dubuque, is so determined to hide its cards that when the big reveal finally arrives, it feels as underwhelming as it is preposterous.

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 movie is not really about deciding whether you’re gay or straight — those terms are never spoken. It’s about the chemistry of two people at a moment in time.

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.

As it seesaws between Greta’s conscious and unconscious minds, the movie begins to feel like a waking dream.

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.

Chronic ends with a sudden, terrible slap in the face that is a final blow to your equilibrium. It is left up to the viewer to decide whether it is a cheap stunt or an ultimate moment of truth. I vote for the latter.

Ms. Rabe’s beautifully balanced performance reminds you that people never really grow up.

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.

As I Open My Eyes is best when it observes the fraught but loving mother-daughter relationship between Hayet and Farah.

The characters have enough dimension to avoid appearing to be symbols of a social tragedy, and the movie’s relative gentleness makes the harsher realities of Brandon’s world all the more distressing.

We’re all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, White Girl is a contact bummer that’s hard to shake.

As a drama about adult responsibility, selfishness and moral obligations, however, it never wavers in its commitment to examine what it means to raise a child.

If the movie, loosely based on two books by Fatima Elayoubi, tells a familiar story of immigrants struggling to make something of themselves in an alien culture (Fatima speaks some French but reads only Arabic), it does so in a tone that is kindhearted but clearheaded, and the performances are low-key and believable.

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.

The film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream.

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 voice casting and the visual representations of the characters the boy encounters on his journeys are superb.

Indignation might be dismissed as a small, exquisite period piece, but it is so precisely rendered that it gets deeply under your skin.

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.

Don’t Think Twice, which has a warm heart, could have been a much nastier movie. Yet its disappointed show-business hopefuls dreading their expiration dates make no bones about their insecurities.

It is so vague, cliché-ridden and devoid of surprise and suspense that once you grasp its premise, watching it is like leafing through a design magazine kept in a refrigerator.

Robert is not a Shakespearean figure like Walter White, but the film at least grants him the moral stature of an incorruptible man risking his life in a dangerous job. The Infiltrator is still a good yarn that, when it catches its breath, allows Mr. Cranston to convey the same ambivalence and cunning he brought to “Breaking Bad” and “All the Way."

The spectacle of actors of the quality of Russell Crowe, Aaron Paul, Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer and Jane Fonda earnestly struggling to wring eye moisture from hammy, flat-footed dialogue (credited to Brad Desch, an unknown), while maintaining some dignity, is depressing proof that an actor is only as good as his or her material.

Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.

Blistering.

Time and again, Microbe and Gasoline risks cuteness without going overboard. Too easily taken for granted, its accomplishment is its ability to gaze steadily with warmth but minimal sentimentality at the world through unjaded 14-year-old eyes.

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.

In withholding biographical information about the characters, the movie supplies just enough material to prompt you to fill in the blanks.

For philistines mystified by the value attached to so many artworks that to an untrained eye look worthless, Mr. Cenedella comes across as a reassuring voice of sanity.

Charles Ferguson’s latest documentary, Time to Choose, is a sobering polemic about global warming that balances familiar predictions of planetary doom with a survey of innovations in renewable energy technology that hold out some hope for the future.

Yes, the documentary is undeniably uplifting. But …

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.

Infuriating and depressing but rivetingly watchable.

Unlike the juicy, overripe prose in the novel from which it was adapted, Mr. DeCubellis’s screenplay is utterly lacking in style. Mr. Brody captures his character’s attitude, but the colorless screenplay robs the character of literary imagination.

Whether or not you accept the tenets of Christianity, Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo García’s austere depiction of the temptations of Christ, offers a quietly compelling portrait of the human side of Jesus.

Like most of Mr. Davies’s films, Sunset Song makes you see the world through his sorrowful eyes. He is a die-hard romantic, whose acute sensitivity to the passage of time conveys a bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty, which, for him, is synonymous with melancholy.

A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.

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.

It infuses a too-familiar story with so much heart that you surrender to its charm and forgive it for being unabashedly formulaic.

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.

It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.

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.

A low point in the director’s career, this sleek chilly film isn’t acted so much as posed.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.

Neon Bull is a profound reflection on the intersection of the human and bestial.

Mr. Paradot’s performance is so viscerally intense that there is no escaping its force.

The movie partly resists the temptation to follow a predictable feel-good route to a fairy-tale ending. That said, it has enough conveniently timed little triumphs to send up warning signs.

In Mr. Hawke’s extraordinary performance, this glamorous enigma becomes a credible, if pathetic character who lives for only two things: to play the trumpet and to shoot heroin.

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

As with Mr. Farhadi’s other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.

Marguerite overstays its welcome by at least 20 minutes. What redeems it is Ms. Frot’s subtle, deeply compassionate portrayal of a rich, lonely woman clutching at an impossible dream until reality intrudes.

A grim, suspenseful farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication.

You come at the story, such as it is, as a visitor from the outside world, picking up information as the movie goes along. This approach impedes comprehension, and at moments you may be tempted to sit back and not try to make the pieces fit. For those unwilling to make the effort, Songs My Brothers Taught Me has other rewards.

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

Viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman whose tribe is on the verge of extinction at the hands of Colombian rubber barons in the 19th and 20th centuries, Embrace of the Serpent, a fantastical mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of first-world culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically.

If Race is a standard inspirational biopic that exalts the legend of an athletic hero, at least it doesn’t soft-pedal the racism that Owens encountered at every turn.

Touched With Fire is an actor’s field day, and both Mr. Kirby and Ms. Holmes boldly meet the challenge of playing bright, high-strung artists struggling with depression.

There’s much in the movie to admire until it runs headlong into a stone wall.

Zoolander 2 has enough plots for several movies. They are so jammed together that they more or less cancel each other out.

This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it.

Beyond the arty trappings and flamboyant showmanship that are typical of Mr. Greenaway, 73, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a brazen provocation.

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