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.

What distinguishes Breathe In from countless similar movies about marital discontent and disruption is the restraint with which the story is handled, the subtlety of its performances and its almost perverse refusal to turn into a prurient, heavy-breathing examination of adultery and its consequences.

As the local boys (there are no girls) explore the natural world in summer, this gorgeously photographed movie bombards you with imagined scents of ripeness and decay.

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.

Instead of being contemptuous and sardonic, the portrait of inchoate adolescent longing in Paradise: Hope is poignant.

[A] small, likably sentimental film.

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.

Because the film, which affects the style of “United 93,” offers no new insights, theories or important information, you’re left wondering why it was made.

A sardonic, smart screwball comedy.

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.

Once again, the lesson that more is not necessarily better, something rarely learned by blockbuster sequels, is forgotten.

Gideon’s Army is a bare film with no narrator and a minimal soundtrack. That’s all it needs to grab you by the throat.

There are a lot of truthful notes in Some Girl(s), but there are also false ones that let you know that you are being played with. You’d best beware.

Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.

The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.

Each thread of the plot is followed to its dangling, ragged conclusion in a movie that may be painful to watch but that maintains a chilly integrity.

This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.

This smart, sober movie makes you feel the full weight of the challenges he faces.

A fascinating but rambling documentary.

Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.

After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.

[A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.

The best way to enjoy The Kings of Summer is to view it as a likable comic fantasy dreamed up by filmmakers (Chris Galletta wrote the screenplay) who are close enough to adolescence to infuse their ramshackle story with a youthful, carefree whimsy.

Mark Kendall’s quietly moving documentary, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus, is as modest and farsighted as its cast of Guatemalans who make a living resurrecting discarded American school buses.

Long before the story culminates with a preposterous final revelation, whatever hopes you had that Now You See Me might have had anything to say about the profession of magic, rampant greed or anything else have been dashed.

The movie takes no political positions. With an icy detachment, it peers through the fog of war and examines the slippery military intelligence on both sides to portray a world steeped in secrecy, deception and paranoia.

As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.

The acting, especially Ms. Moore’s, is solid. But her strong, sympathetic performance fails to transform The English Teacher into anything more than a sitcom devoid of laughs, except for a soupçon of literary humor. It is a movie at odds with itself.

The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.

To describe And Now a Word From Our Sponsor as a one-joke skit stretched well beyond the breaking point isn’t entirely fair, because when used ingeniously, which is very seldom, the joke lands.

Every detail of What Richard Did rings true.

What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.

As Love Is All You Need ties up its loose ends, it settles into a rom-com formula with a predictable, upbeat ending. It feels good, sort of.

If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.

If the narrow biographical focus of “The Iceman” prevents it from being a great crime movie, on its own more modest terms it is an indelible film that clinches Mr. Shannon’s status as a major screen actor.

The glum, episodic and unbelievable Arthur Newman is the film equivalent of a dysfunctional computer sloppily assembled from discarded parts of other machines.

To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.

If At Any Price overstates its points, they are still worth making. And the hot-wired performances by Mr. Quaid and Mr. Efron drive them home in a movie that sticks to your ribs and stays in your head.

Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.

Although this documentary has a powerful political subtext, it is best described as a conceptual art piece about confinement, attached to a dual biography of the artist and the prisoner.

At a certain point, Antiviral doesn’t know where to go or how to break out of its vacuum-sealed sepulcher, and Syd, even when vomiting blood, remains as incorporeal and creepy as a ghost. This is a movie that drinks its own tainted blood.

Watching it is like receiving a hard slap in the face from someone who expects you to laugh it off, even though the sting lingers.

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.

Like a Bela Tarr film it leads you to consider the breadth of eternity, the limits of human consciousness and the possibility of reincarnation.

Except for Ms. Janney's monstrous mother and an Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen), Struck by Lightning gives its characters no dimension.

There isn't a dishonest moment in Fairhaven, Tom O'Brien's piercing, wistful portrait of three longtime buddies in their mid-30s who reunite around a funeral in a southeastern Massachusetts fishing community.

The Baytown Outlaws" avidly subscribes to the grindhouse aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. If it has the right spit-in-your-face attitude, it has neither the stamina nor the wit to go the distance, although it makes it about two-thirds of the way.

The film is inspiring because it has a semi-happy ending attached to a love story.

By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat.

It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.

The chief pleasures of this mild-mannered dud lie in watching two resourceful comic actors go through their paces like the pros they are.

Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.

Most of the modest pleasures are in the ways the men expertly play off one another and invest their shallow characters with more depth than any filmmaker could reasonably expect.

An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants Marco.

Is the movie psychologically accurate? Yes. But that doesn't keep it from being a little dull.

Mr. Burns shuffles this dense material with the dexterity of a card shark. The pace, although swift, is never rushed. The writing and acting give you vivid enough tastes of the characters - there are seven children, two parents, and assorted spouses, lovers and friends - so that each registers as a singular flavor.

If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.

If the actors playing the brothers show little fraternal similarity, their performances are convincingly natural.

Parked collapses into sentimentality that not even an actor of Mr. Meaney's dignity and restraint can redeem from mawkishness.

The movie's other master stroke is the artfully unhinged lead performance of Louisa Krause as the despicable King Kelly, a character who would have been ready-made for Tuesday Weld.

It is cleverly conceived, well acted and seasoned with blips of mildly acidic wit.

At the very least 28 Hotel Rooms, the first feature written and directed by Matt Ross, is an impressively executed acting exercise for Chris Messina and Marin Ireland.

Once Price Check darkens, it loses its comic footing, along with its nerve, and becomes a wishy-washy potpourri of elements that fail to mesh: backing away from its satirical potential, it sputters toward an evasive and unsatisfying ending. Ms. Posey, however, blithely sails above the fray.

The glue holding the film together is Adam Newport-Berra's elegant hand-held cinematography, which captures changing shades of winter and the frightened faces in natural light with an astonishing intensity.

The grittier side of Coming Up Roses, which Ms. Albright wrote with Christina Lazaridi, is unconvincing boilerplate grunge.

It must be said that Café de Flore is true to its hyper-romantic belief system. And unlike most movies in the "Touched by an Angel" school of storytelling, it doesn't descend into cheap sentimentality. It may be hokum, but it is sophisticated hokum.

For all the alarming statistics cited in the film, Burn is not a depressing movie. The firefighters interviewed are remarkably resilient men who talk enthusiastically about the adrenaline rush of their work. And the film makes you thankful for members of this macho breed, who relish risking their lives to save others.

Instead of turning soft and squishy, this examination of karma gets tougher as it goes along. Its refusal to settle into a cozy niche may be commercially disastrous, but I take it as a sign of integrity.

It would be shortsighted to dismiss this deeply felt, musically savvy film, set in a refined cultural precinct of Manhattan, as sudsy melodrama.

In simple, blunt language he exalts "quality," "warmth," "feeling," "truth" and "beauty," without trying to define or elaborate on those concepts.

Once the film softens, it starts to come unglued.

Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.

If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.

It would be tempting to dismiss Nobody Walks as a trivial erotic divertissement, even more so because it doesn't apply the kind of symbolic gloss found in a '60s film of serial seduction, like Pasolini's "Teorema." Banal as its situation may be, it picks at every scab you may have left over from wounds suffered during the mating games of your youth.

The Sessions is a pleasant shock: a touching, profoundly sex-positive film that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest.

The connections made in Photographic Memory are more tentative than those found in Mr. McElwee's earlier films, which also seek answers in roundabout ways while maintaining an acute eye for light, color, space and atmosphere.

Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.

The degree to which Smashed refuses to indulge a voyeuristic taste for the kind of sordid details exploited by reality television amounts to an unspoken declaration of principle. In lieu of self-pity, Smashed substitutes tough love.

How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.

It is an emotional journey for these grown children, now in their 40s and 50s, who engage in sometimes heated conversations, several taking place on the actual sites where Joseph and other prisoners endured unimaginable suffering.

Scrupulously apolitical, The Waiting Room is the opposite of a polemic like Michael Moore's "Sicko." But by removing any editorial screen, it confronts you head-on with human suffering that a more humane and equitable system might help alleviate.

At a certain point this would-be shocker suddenly jerks into high gear and becomes a blatant, incompetent rip-off of "Psycho."

In the words of Mr. Kramer: "The government didn't get us the drugs. No one else got us the drugs. We, Act Up, got those drugs out there. That is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim."

Wavering between light comedy and drama with wonderfully natural performances, 17 Girls doesn't judge anyone's behavior.

The fatal flaw of this well-acted movie, whose creators are sex industry veterans, is its refusal to examine Angelina's occupation from outside the bubble. You might even call it a recruitment film.

Except for a subplot about a missing cat that suggests that Fred may be considerably dottier than he appears, the movie gets almost everything right about the uncomfortable moment when grown children are forced to be their parents' parents.

An unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn't aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like "The Big Chill," "American Graffiti" or "Diner." But it has enough markers - a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar - to suggest an approximate date.

The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.

A small gem of bleak, neorealist portraiture.

A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.

Bachelorette is more tartly written, better acted and less forgiving than male-centric equivalents like the "Hangover" movies.

A clever, entertaining yarn that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

The optimism and good humor of John Lavin's crude, endearing documentary Hollywood to Dollywood are so unquenchable that its disturbing underlying theme - growing up gay in the South is no picnic - is partly obscured by its openheartedness.

Ultimately, even after momentarily falling apart in a fit of paranoia, Martin remains a cipher in a movie that never fulfills its potential as melodrama. If The Good Doctor isn't a bad movie, it tells only half the story.

Doesn't aspire to be more than a broad, sloppy, old-fashioned sitcom with a sexy gimmick. But it is quite funny.

These episodes, some staged as surreal dream sequences, inject this otherwise prosaic-looking movie with a visual pizazz that makes Sleepwalk With Me more than just a glorified stand-up act.

With the exception of Marie Little White Lies focuses mostly on the men: whiny, strutting little boys whose exasperated, tight-lipped wives put up with their bad behavior and sometimes have to act like mommies.

The movie feels like a grown-up version of little boys making whooshing noises and staging collisions while playing with toys on a living room floor. It belongs to the same star-and-his-pals-cutting-up genre as the lesser comedies by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.

In many ways Sparkle is a bumpy ride. The editing is haphazard, the cinematography too dark, and there are holes in the story. If the new songs on the soundtrack are effective Motown pastiches, most of them pale beside their prototypes. But diluted Motown is better than none.

Once Why Stop Now? has exhausted its bag of tricks, there is a screeching of brakes as it approaches the edge of the cliff. Having expended all that stamina, the film collapses from exhaustion and settles for an abrupt, feel-good ending that is as perfunctory as it is preposterous.

If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.

Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.

For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.

Ms. Pineda and Ms. Troncoso give wonderfully natural performances in which they convey the impulsiveness and insecurity of adolescence. You are uncomfortably reminded of what it feels like to be 15.

Mr. Trump comes across as an insensitive, lying bully who will do whatever it takes to realize his dream of creating what he promises will be the world's greatest golf resort.

The movie builds to a human-versus-alien showdown so sloppily staged that it makes little visual sense. The bargain-basement pyrotechnics suggest that much of The Watch was filmed on autopilot on a strict budget.

Their eloquent monologues, interspersed with vicious verbal skirmishes, are artfully constructed, occasionally poetic expressions of pain, delivered in well-formed sentences that suggest the movie might have originated as a two-person stage drama.

Above all, this beautifully photographed documentary is a poetic meditation on refined sensory perception.

Ruby Sparks doesn't try to pretend to be more than it is: a sleek, beautifully written and acted romantic comedy that glides down to earth in a gently satisfying soft landing.

Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.

Awesome also describes this 16-hour, four-opera masterwork about the creation and destruction of the world, a work that Wagner considered unstageable in his time.

This 2 ½-hour film, which is described by Mr. Tiravanija as "not a documentary and not a narrative" but "more of a portraiture," rewards concentration once you adjust to its glacial pace and its radically minimalist aesthetic. It has no screenplay or story line.

Although it only glosses the mechanics of local politics, it exudes an endearingly scruffy charm.

Like "My Architect," Nathaniel Kahn's film about his father, Louis I. Kahn, this documentary is a son's attempt to forge a posthumous bond with an elusive parent.

In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.

The insensitivity of the news media and law enforcement is an implicit acknowledgment of the gap between men and women on the issue; in the film's view men just don't get it. And the submerged rage that wells up in Nira and Lily is boiling hot. The film is less successful in depicting their personal lives.

Ms. Madsen, radiant and tousled, without a trace of narcissism, conveys maternal devotion, undaunted courage and a serene sensuality. Real, if idealized, grown-ups: We haven't seen them much in the movies lately, but here they are.

If it feels uncomfortably real, it's because its vision of decadence (if you'll pardon the word) is almost unwatchably creepy. Crazy Eyes awakens the same queasiness. Yes, it feels true. But why bother?

Collaborator has the tone and structure of an extended one-act play. Its uniformly wooden dialogue lends it the stage-bound feel of a tortured writing exercise.

The most gripping scene in this near-perfect little sports comedy is a fraternal arm-wrestling contest that reaches apoplectic intensity.

Mr. Young's passionate cracked whine assumes an oracular power.

If its tone is considerably tougher than that of movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels, it is still a grown-up soap opera. And as the overly determined plot progresses, it feels increasingly Sparks-like, although there are no dewy young lovebirds to swoon over.

The movie filmed with nonactors, doesn't try to counteract stereotypes of the Roma people as shiftless, thieving hustlers. But it goes a long way toward explaining the antisocial behavior.

A goal of this practical program of discipline and reflection is to cultivate an inner guru so that you don't need someone like Kumaré.

Natalia Almada's eloquent documentary portrait of a sprawling graveyard in Culiacán, Mexico, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The rapidly expanding cemetery has become the burial ground of choice for the country's slain drug lords.

Three-Headed Bird Village - the setting for Xiaolu Guo's stingingly funny satire, UFO in Her Eyes - is a quiet agricultural hamlet in the Guangxi province of southern China that is uprooted by instant globalization.

That time machine - a wonderful-looking gizmo with some lasers stolen from a medical laboratory - really exists. Whether it works or not, you'll have to see for yourself. It's worth the wait.

Stylistically a formulaic, middle-drawer television movie about intergenerational strife and forgiveness. Every plot turn is groaningly predictable. But at least the lead performances set off sparks.

Although this is potentially juicy stuff, it is as dry and tasteless as a shrunken piece of fruit left in the refrigerator far too long.

Once the plot has sprung into action, High School is a bumpy ride that takes a few amusing dives but never coheres into anything special.

Even at 143 minutes, For Greater Glory cannot satisfyingly fill out the stories of a half-dozen secondary characters, and there are frustrating gaps in the biographies of Gorostieta and José. The jamming together of so much history and melodrama makes for a handsome movie that is only rarely gripping.

Much of the skimpy, waterlogged dialogue in Peter Vanderwall's screenplay is heavy with portent. Excerpts from Homer's "Odyssey" and Longfellow's "Children's Hour" add to the tonnage.