Stephen Holden

The movie plays like a made-for-television quickie.

Whether or not you wince, this meticulously acted movie, which won Ms. Soloway a directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, paints an accurate picture of how a segment of youngish, educated, affluent, white Americans converse. It is anything but inspiring.

The glimmers of wit and carnival humor in the “Fast & Furious” franchise are nowhere to be found in Getaway.

For all its flaws, the movie, filmed with nonprofessional actors, is steadily gripping.

An awkward, long-winded mash-up of therapy session, horror movie and survival tale with pretensions of psychological depth.

The movie’s only fresh element is the wintry setting, which shrouds everything in a mood of weary fatalism. Otherwise, it’s the same old, same old, efficiently discharged and utterly disposable.

Like it or not, Paradise: Faith sticks in your head. The fierce, indelible performance of Ms. Hofstätter, a regular in Mr. Seidl’s films, may make you cringe with revulsion, but it is utterly riveting.

[A] beautifully acted movie.

Mr. Oldman and Mr. Ford are the only actors in the film, directed by Robert Luketic (“Legally Blonde”), skillful enough to navigate the yards of jargon-packed boilerplate in Jason Hall and Barry L. Levy’s thudding screenplay.

At a certain point, Mr. Norris forsakes realism for theatricalized fantasy, and Broken ultimately loses its stylistic cohesion, if not its humanity.

The film’s vision of a long-married couple keeping each other going with mutual love and support, and a shared resistance to outside interference, is more vital than a thousand movies populated by hot, squirming teenagers.

The movie is so devoid of emotion that its ritualized gore acts as a narcotic. Filmed in shades of red, with a minimal screenplay, Only God Forgives looks like a ghoulish fashion shoot in hell. Three words should suffice: pretentious macho nonsense.

In critical ways, the movie is a mess. The basketball scenes are so sloppy and haphazard that the would-be slapstick registers as confusion. But away from the court, the actors bring their caricatures to folksy comic life.

"Hee Haw” meets “Pulp Fiction” at the meth lab: That describes the style of Pawn Shop Chronicles, a hillbilly grindhouse yawp of a movie that belches in your face and leaves a sour stink.

Sebastián Silva is extremely perceptive about body language, and the characters’ physical presences are as revealing as their words. The performances give you an almost uncomfortable sense of proximity.

The Hunt doesn’t know where to stop. It is undermined with a short, unsatisfying epilogue whose shocking final moment isn’t enough to justify its inclusion.

Although Stuck in Love is an indie film, it hews slavishly to Hollywood formulas.

Had The Look of Love focused more acutely on the father-daughter relationship or explored Mr. Raymond’s relationships with his two sons, only one of whom appears briefly, it might have amounted to something more substantial than a keenly observed period piece that keeps a celebrity journalist’s distance from its subject.

Once again, the lesson that more is not necessarily better, something rarely learned by blockbuster sequels, is forgotten.

Gideon’s Army is a bare film with no narrator and a minimal soundtrack. That’s all it needs to grab you by the throat.

There are a lot of truthful notes in Some Girl(s), but there are also false ones that let you know that you are being played with. You’d best beware.

Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.

The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.

Each thread of the plot is followed to its dangling, ragged conclusion in a movie that may be painful to watch but that maintains a chilly integrity.

This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.

This smart, sober movie makes you feel the full weight of the challenges he faces.

A fascinating but rambling documentary.

Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.

After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.

[A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.

The best way to enjoy The Kings of Summer is to view it as a likable comic fantasy dreamed up by filmmakers (Chris Galletta wrote the screenplay) who are close enough to adolescence to infuse their ramshackle story with a youthful, carefree whimsy.

Mark Kendall’s quietly moving documentary, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus, is as modest and farsighted as its cast of Guatemalans who make a living resurrecting discarded American school buses.

Long before the story culminates with a preposterous final revelation, whatever hopes you had that Now You See Me might have had anything to say about the profession of magic, rampant greed or anything else have been dashed.

The movie takes no political positions. With an icy detachment, it peers through the fog of war and examines the slippery military intelligence on both sides to portray a world steeped in secrecy, deception and paranoia.

As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.

The acting, especially Ms. Moore’s, is solid. But her strong, sympathetic performance fails to transform The English Teacher into anything more than a sitcom devoid of laughs, except for a soupçon of literary humor. It is a movie at odds with itself.

The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.

To describe And Now a Word From Our Sponsor as a one-joke skit stretched well beyond the breaking point isn’t entirely fair, because when used ingeniously, which is very seldom, the joke lands.

Every detail of What Richard Did rings true.

What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.

As Love Is All You Need ties up its loose ends, it settles into a rom-com formula with a predictable, upbeat ending. It feels good, sort of.

If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.

If the narrow biographical focus of “The Iceman” prevents it from being a great crime movie, on its own more modest terms it is an indelible film that clinches Mr. Shannon’s status as a major screen actor.

The glum, episodic and unbelievable Arthur Newman is the film equivalent of a dysfunctional computer sloppily assembled from discarded parts of other machines.

To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.

If At Any Price overstates its points, they are still worth making. And the hot-wired performances by Mr. Quaid and Mr. Efron drive them home in a movie that sticks to your ribs and stays in your head.

Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.

Although this documentary has a powerful political subtext, it is best described as a conceptual art piece about confinement, attached to a dual biography of the artist and the prisoner.

At a certain point, Antiviral doesn’t know where to go or how to break out of its vacuum-sealed sepulcher, and Syd, even when vomiting blood, remains as incorporeal and creepy as a ghost. This is a movie that drinks its own tainted blood.

Watching it is like receiving a hard slap in the face from someone who expects you to laugh it off, even though the sting lingers.

The film ominously conveys a world of too much information but too little communication, where people have become slaves to glowing hand-held devices that were designed to make life easier but have made it busier and more complicated.

This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.

An indelible, gripping documentary portrait.

Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.

The movie, like its subject, refuses to stir up unnecessary melodrama. There are many small conflicts and psychological undercurrents, but the closest thing to a narrative theme is the effect Andrée has on the Renoir household.

Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.

Enough films about human trafficking have been made in recent years that the outlines of Eden should be painfully familiar. But that familiarity doesn’t cushion this movie’s excruciating vision.

Its most consistent pleasures derive more from its performances than from storytelling.

Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

Because Mr. Carell doesn’t go in for the kind of all-out caricature that Mr. Ferrell embraces with a manic glee, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has an underlying soulfulness that cuts against its farcical aspirations. This is not to say that Mr. Carell isn’t just fine, only that his performance, as impressive as it is, lacks a shark’s bite.

Electrick Children is well acted and refreshingly nonjudgmental, but its narrative continuity is tenuous at best. As it jounces along toward a pat, unsatisfying ending, it leaves essential questions unanswered. But the movie’s underlying sweetness leaves a residual glow.

Mr. Jones’s performance is the only spark within this otherwise dull, well-mannered exercise.

An alternate title for Gut Renovation, Su Friedrich’s cranky, sarcastic documentary polemic about the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood, might be “The Rape of Williamsburg.”

[A] tiny, beautifully acted movie.

Molly’s Theory of Relativity is an intentionally uncomfortable movie to watch. The fifth feature from Jeff Lipsky, this eccentric, often high-pitched family comedy might be described as a surreal, post-Freudian gabfest.

Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.

For all its violence and road rage, Snitch doesn’t disintegrate into noisy popcorn nonsense.

The weakest parts of Safe Haven are its action sequences, in which the illusion of reality is shattered by ham-handed editing, garish special effects and comic-book dialogue.

For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.

The Playroom captures the malaise of mid-’70s suburbia with a merciless accuracy not seen since Ang Lee’s 1997 film, “The Ice Storm.”

The film sustains an air of overarching mystery in which the viewer, like the title character, is in the position of a sheltered child plunked into an alien environment and required to fend for herself without a map or compass.

The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.

The tone of Knife Fight is mean until the movie flips a switch and turns pious and mawkish as Paul tries to make amends for past sins. Whether playing it sleazy or noble, Mr. Lowe brings little emotional weight to his role.

This well-acted film captures a generational and occupational sliver of New York life that rings true.

What began as a reasonably hardheaded look at profound and rapid cultural change turns into a feel-good fantasy of salvation.

Evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread.

The film's biggest weakness is its unsympathetic main character, a snippy, nervous, expressionless control freak who gets more despicable as the story unfolds.

Like a Bela Tarr film it leads you to consider the breadth of eternity, the limits of human consciousness and the possibility of reincarnation.

Except for Ms. Janney's monstrous mother and an Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen), Struck by Lightning gives its characters no dimension.

There isn't a dishonest moment in Fairhaven, Tom O'Brien's piercing, wistful portrait of three longtime buddies in their mid-30s who reunite around a funeral in a southeastern Massachusetts fishing community.

The Baytown Outlaws" avidly subscribes to the grindhouse aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. If it has the right spit-in-your-face attitude, it has neither the stamina nor the wit to go the distance, although it makes it about two-thirds of the way.

The film is inspiring because it has a semi-happy ending attached to a love story.

By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat.

It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.

The chief pleasures of this mild-mannered dud lie in watching two resourceful comic actors go through their paces like the pros they are.

Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.

Most of the modest pleasures are in the ways the men expertly play off one another and invest their shallow characters with more depth than any filmmaker could reasonably expect.

An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants Marco.

Is the movie psychologically accurate? Yes. But that doesn't keep it from being a little dull.

Mr. Burns shuffles this dense material with the dexterity of a card shark. The pace, although swift, is never rushed. The writing and acting give you vivid enough tastes of the characters - there are seven children, two parents, and assorted spouses, lovers and friends - so that each registers as a singular flavor.

If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.

If the actors playing the brothers show little fraternal similarity, their performances are convincingly natural.

Parked collapses into sentimentality that not even an actor of Mr. Meaney's dignity and restraint can redeem from mawkishness.

The movie's other master stroke is the artfully unhinged lead performance of Louisa Krause as the despicable King Kelly, a character who would have been ready-made for Tuesday Weld.

It is cleverly conceived, well acted and seasoned with blips of mildly acidic wit.

At the very least 28 Hotel Rooms, the first feature written and directed by Matt Ross, is an impressively executed acting exercise for Chris Messina and Marin Ireland.

Once Price Check darkens, it loses its comic footing, along with its nerve, and becomes a wishy-washy potpourri of elements that fail to mesh: backing away from its satirical potential, it sputters toward an evasive and unsatisfying ending. Ms. Posey, however, blithely sails above the fray.