Stephen Holden

Even though the plot defies credibility at several points, Out in the Dark is gripping.

Acute emotional honesty and a frustrating narrative coyness coincide in Morning.

The movie never transcends a screenwriting formula that makes you uncomfortably aware of the machinery driving it all.

Newlyweeds, for all its freshness, never really lands. It remains suspended in a haze of secondhand smoke.

Behind the clunky machinery is a lyrical meditation on life, death, heroism, regret and forgiveness written in a florid style that might be described as Tennessee Williams on testosterone.

Subject matter that seemed mildly shocking, even radical, a half-century ago may be impossible to refresh, though the screenplay, by Ms. Coiro, has a firm grasp of its characters.

The movie has holes galore. It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots. It doesn’t even try for basic credibility. But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy.

The close-ups of faces convey reams of inchoate emotion and enhance the stumbling poetry mouthed by characters whose urge to connect conflicts with their innate sense of caution.

The best scenes are the contests in which the competitors hammer away, executing the kind of grand flourishes with each return of the carriage that Liberace exhibited at the piano.

Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton’s earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down.

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.