Stephen Holden

In their intensity, the actors’ incisive, impeccably coordinated performances are pitched slightly above normal conversation but not so much that “What’s in a Name?” shatters credibility.

This modest film observes evacuees from Futaba, a small town near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, making do in their temporary shelter. Partly because this version of the movie was drastically edited to 96 minutes from 145, it feels sketchy and disjointed.

After barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires.

The movie’s observations of the wolf pack mentality of privileged teenage boys who view every conquest as proof of their prowess is casually devastating.

The Last Days on Mars ultimately can’t transcend its pulpy roots.

Mr. Elba’s towering performance lends “Long Walk to Freedom” a Shakespearean breadth.

Frozen, for all its innovations, is not fundamentally revolutionary. Its animated characters are the same familiar, blank-faced, big-eyed storybook figures. But they are a little more psychologically complex than their Disney forerunners.

Narco Cultura feels like two short films sandwiched together to make a feature. One is a shallow pop-music documentary focusing on Mr. Quintero. The other is an equally superficial portrait of the embattled Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.

Moment by moment, it all adds up. The scenes of the family huddling and hugging, greeting and parting, and reaffirming primal bonds are quietly moving.

Even through improbable moments and abrupt changes of pace and tone, Ms. Dench and Mr. Coogan hold the movie together.

This catastrophe of a movie zigzags drunkenly between action-adventure and surreal comedy with some magical realism slopped over it like ketchup.

12-12-12 is not really a concert movie so much as it is a densely compacted scrapbook of moments onstage and off.

Despite the intensity of their performances, Ms. Watts and Mr. Dillon are only fleetingly convincing as these desperate young Americans trying to maintain a foothold.

The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.

A documentary necessarily conveys a point of view, and although Mr. Wiseman, as is his wont, is neither seen nor heard in a film that proceeds without commentary or subtitles, his spirit is palpable. Without overtly editorializing, the film quietly and steadfastly champions state-funded public education available to all.

As long as Go for Sisters is focused on its characters, it remains on firm ground. But the flimsy detective story draped over them is underdeveloped and too sluggishly paced to take hold.

More glaringly than most sports documentaries, The Armstrong Lie reinforces the sad truth that the adage “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” doesn’t apply to professional sports. Maybe it never did. Winning is everything.

Containing enough characters and subplots for three movies, the novel has been nearly suffocated by Mr. Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and his screenwriter, David Nicholls, in an effort to get everything in.

This dull, dawdling film, adapted from Françoise Dorner’s novel “La Douceur Assassine,” eventually succumbs to sentimentality.

Delivers its Holocaust-related story with the clunking force of a blunt instrument slammed into the skull.

Filmed without a trace of sentimentality, Big Sur is an achingly sad last hurrah.

Its indictment of capitalism is so shrill and one-note that it may just as easily set off fits of giggling, because its characters are so ridiculously evil.

That the movie exists at all attests to the courage of the participants to see it through to the end. Out Loud bleeds with sincerity.

I Am Divine doesn’t dwell on Milstead’s growing pains. It is an aggressively upbeat show-business success story that focuses on his self-reinvention.

Seduced and Abandoned may be the year’s most entertaining put-on.

Written and directed by Bernard Rose (“Immortal Beloved”), 2 Jacks has a pleasing circular structure, and it doesn’t push the parallels between old and new Hollywood to absurd limits.

Ms. Binoche’s portrayal of Camille is one of the most wrenching performances she has given.

All too soon, Machete Kills collapses into a deranged, directionless splatter comedy that exhausts its bag of tricks, many of them recycled from this grindhouse auteur’s 2010 spoof.