Stephen Holden

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.

The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.

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.

What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

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.

For all its disorganization and lack of an ending or even a sense of direction, Appropriate Behavior is alive. The screenplay is packed with smart remarks, clever and unpredictable turns of phrase that knock you off balance.

Valley of Saints finds a poignant humanity in this chaste romance, which awakens in Gulzar a wondrous sense of possibility, along with a new awareness of the world’s complexity.

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.

The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.

Into the Woods, the splendid Disney screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, infuses new vitality into the tired marketing concept of entertainment for “children of all ages.” That usually translates to mean only children and their doting parents. But with Into the Woods, you grow up with the characters, young and old, in a lifelong process of self-discovery.

If You Don’t, I Will is a dour, acutely observed comedy about marital boredom that doesn’t glamorize or overdramatize the characters’ angst. Its lived-in performances evoke an excruciating stalemate that can be ended only by a radical break.

Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.

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.

After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.

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.

What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”

Ms. Benoit’s screenplay is unapologetically schematic in its depiction of a cross-section of Haitian exiles, but each story forcefully registers.

Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.

This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.

A juicy neo-noir like Bad Turn Worse doesn’t have to make total sense to grab you.

Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.

Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Plummer make an especially compatible match, because his understated portrayal of a despairing misanthrope reins in her scenery-chewing exhibitionism.

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.

Margaret Brown’s quietly infuriating documentary film about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, includes depressing information that many would probably be happier not knowing.

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

What makes 1,000 Times Good Night more than a dramatic essay on wartime journalism is Ms. Binoche’s wrenchingly honest portrayal of a woman of conscience driven by a mixture of guilt, nobility and self-importance, reckoning belatedly with her destructive impulses.

This brilliant, viciously amusing takedown of bourgeois complacency, gender stereotypes and assumptions and the illusion of security rubs your face in human frailty as relentlessly as any Michael Haneke movie.

The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.

Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.

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

Despite holes in the storytelling, Ms. Swank and Ms. Rossum keep it real.

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

For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.

It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.

Art and Craft adds fuel to the argument that the art market is a rigged game manipulated by curators and gallerists spouting mumbo-jumbo.

It is as intimate and honest a portrait of a rock artist’s creative roots as any film has attempted.

If The Green Prince sustains the tension of a well-executed thriller, it is achieved at the cost of a dispassionate objectivity.

The Skeleton Twins is a well-written and acted movie about contemporary life that doesn’t strain for melodrama and is largely devoid of weepy soap opera theatrics. A small, precise, character-driven vignette, it has no pretensions to make any kind of grand statement about The Way We Live Now.

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.

The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.

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

A soulful cinematic tone poem.

It is hard to imagine that any other actress could muster the stubborn ferocity that Isabelle Huppert brings to the role of Maud.

More than in any of his previous films, Mr. Swanberg and his cast have refined a seemingly effortless style of semi-improvised storytelling so natural that it barely seems scripted. Life just happens.

Like its gyrating, spasmodic staccato beats, Get On Up refuses to stand still. It whirls and does splits and jumps, with leaps around in time and changes in tempo that are jarring and abrupt and that usually feel just right.

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.

Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.

If there is any humor to be gleaned from this concept, it is nowhere to be found in a movie so shoddily made that there is little continuity between scenes and not a laugh or even a titter.

[A] small, beautifully made film.

If the title role of Gabrielle weren’t so fully embodied by its star, Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, this French Canadian movie about love among the disabled would fall on the condescendingly mushy side of the line between heartwarming and saccharine.

This is civilized human behavior captured with a clinical precision and accuracy.

Its portrayal of impoverished, careworn people barking at one another and protecting their territory in a daily struggle is bracingly hardheaded.

Exhibition is an exquisitely photographed film that requires unusually close attention for it to reveal itself.

A Summer’s Tale has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.

The storytelling is infuriatingly coy, as if Mr. Haggis were trying to fool you (and himself) into thinking that he has something to say. Third Person finds Mr. Haggis, like Mr. Neeson’s screen alter ego, running on empty.

Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.

As Frankie, Mr. Marlowe delivers a quiet, moving performance of such subtlety and truthfulness that you almost feel that you are living his life.