Stephen Holden

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.