Stephen Holden

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

That Borgman restrains itself from turning into a full-scale horror movie makes it all the more unsettling, although it has its bumpy moments.

The sequel is much more than a collection of outtakes from the first film, augmented by footage shot later.

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

With its free-floating imagery, Elena unfolds like a cinematic dream whose central image is water, which symbolizes the washing away of grief. But more than that, it represents the stream of life, with beautiful images of women floating through time.

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.”

As the movie’s resident live wire, Mr. Johnson, obviously having the time of his life, is a hoot, and the feisty camaraderie among these three men gives Cold in July a euphoric goofiness.

A small miracle of a film.

Words and Pictures has a host of flaws, but the performances by Mr. Owen and Ms. Binoche have a crackling vitality, and the screenplay’s strongest moments set off the kind of trains of thought that dedicated teachers hope to spur in their students.

Heavily seasoned with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde, this entertaining documentary portrays Vidal as a pessimistic political prophet with streaks of paranoia and misanthropy, but a truth teller nonetheless.

This warm-blooded paean to globalization is just enough in touch with reality to keep your eyes from rolling. For Chinese Puzzle genuinely likes people. It overlooks the faults and misbehavior of its eccentric characters to express a lighthearted optimism that doesn’t feel forced or manipulative. It is in love with life.

Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.

In its demystification of these youthful slum dwellers, the film makes their embrace of terrorism frighteningly comprehensible. Because it follows its main characters over 10 years, from childhood into adulthood, it gives their fates a sense of tragic inevitability

As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.

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.

Decoding Annie Parker is considerably better than the kind of disease-of-the-week fare that used to be a television cliché.

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.

This female revenge comedy is so dumb, lazy, clumsily assembled and unoriginal, it could crush any actor forced to execute its leaden slapstick gags and mouth its crude, humorless dialogue.

The screenplay ultimately bears out Alceste’s observations about treachery, selfishness and deceit, but with such charm and zest that their sting tickles more than it hurts.

Small Time is agreeably sentimental meat-and-potatoes fare with strong dashes of humor, executed with a sincerity that’s hard to resist.

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.

Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.

Mr. Cage gives his most committed performance in years as this divided soul, but it still looks like acting when compared with Mr. Poulter’s embodiment of pure evil.

The Galapagos Affair would be a much stronger film were it not padded with the dull reminiscences and speculation of the settlers’ descendants.

This remarkably terse movie doesn’t waste a word or an image. It refuses to linger over each little crisis its characters endure. And its detachment lends a perspective that widens the film’s vision of people reacting to events beyond their control.

The movie’s eerie, climactic image challenges our conventional notions of human identity and leaves us reflecting on the possibility that every being in the universe is an alien in disguise.