Stephen Holden

There are some very good performances and parts of performances in Blood Ties, but the movie fails to convey a sense of tribal identity within this world.

The movie is beautifully acted, and the chemistry between Ms. Devos, who is 49 (her character is 43), and Mr. Byrne, 63, is heated in a sadder-but-wiser, grown-up way.

This gentle comedy, the first feature directed by Rob Meyer, is an eye opener for anyone who takes the everyday natural world for granted. It is also a quiet brief for the cultivation of intellectual curiosity and scientific exploration at an age when hormones rule so much behavior.

Because Ms. Deneuve, 70, is in almost every scene, On My Way feels like Ms. Bercot’s loving character study of a star who has always stood above the fray, a symbol of resilient Gallic femininity.

Better Living Through Chemistry never becomes a full-fledged film noir. It reads as an unabashedly positive infomercial for gorging on the apparently risk-free, liberating products of Big Pharma.

Honey, the impressive debut feature by Ms. Golino, sustains a contemplative mood with undersaturated cinematography that evokes the world as perceived through a light mist.

This proudly old-fashioned movie will pull any trick in the book to hold your attention. And it needs those tricks: Damien Chazelle’s screenplay is sloppy, ludicrous and ultimately devoid of suspense.

Two Lives is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability.

At least Mr. De Niro, who disappears from the movie until the end, seems to be enjoying himself. The force of his bonhomie gives this murky-looking, empty conceit of a film a desperately needed lift of facetious humor.

On a deeper level, Shoot Me is an unflinchingly honest examination of a woman who is aware that the end is approaching.

The movie acts like screwball comedy, but there are no laughs as Daisy and Jay’s connection lurches toward implausible romance.

For the second film, Babak Najafi has succeeded Daniel Espinosa as director. The structure here is more mechanical, and the ambience scruffier, as the complicated story shifts from one disreputable lowlife to another.

Mr. Cusack’s sardonic, understated portrayal of Rat, who is not quite what he says he is, grounds the movie in a wistfully cynical realism.

Love & Air Sex has a spontaneity and cheeky attitude... along with spirited naturalistic performances that infuse the standard rom-com formula with a zany vitality.

The movie is unusual for its absence of gossip. Instead it offers hardheaded commentary about the rigors of a dancer’s life and how everyone who chooses a dance career is aware of its brevity.

The movie’s principal saving grace is Ms. Winslet’s convincing portrayal of Adele, a despairing woman of low self-esteem just a twitch away from a nervous breakdown. In almost every other respect, this overbaked romantic hokum is preposterous.

A vile, witless sex comedy.

Run & Jump is as real and messy as life itself.

Despite the glorious singing heard in archival footage from various periods of her career, the film is frustratingly sketchy.

Unlike such forerunners as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls,” however, this movie, doesn’t have a believable moment in it.

Time slows to a near-standstill as the film peers into humanity’s troubled soul, glimpsed through the individual faces, which sometimes appear to be studying us as intently as we are studying them.

A sweeping but disorganized and sometimes monotonous exploration.

Picturesque seascapes are about the only thing to recommend in Summer in February.

The movie is so incoherent that its screenplay, by Mr. Drolet and Mr. Richards, might as well have been scrawled between takes as it was being filmed.

Free Ride offers an unsettling vision of a demimonde whose inhabitants live with the reality that there may be no tomorrow.

You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of The Invisible Woman and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film.

[An] overlong, drab, not-so-funny sports comedy.

The cosmic and the microscopic are casually — and delicately — juxtaposed in All the Light in the Sky, an evocative, slightly melancholic movie.