Stephen Holden

Into the Woods, the splendid Disney screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, infuses new vitality into the tired marketing concept of entertainment for “children of all ages.” That usually translates to mean only children and their doting parents. But with Into the Woods, you grow up with the characters, young and old, in a lifelong process of self-discovery.

If You Don’t, I Will is a dour, acutely observed comedy about marital boredom that doesn’t glamorize or overdramatize the characters’ angst. Its lived-in performances evoke an excruciating stalemate that can be ended only by a radical break.

Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.

We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.

After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.

Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.

Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.

Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.

What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”

Ms. Benoit’s screenplay is unapologetically schematic in its depiction of a cross-section of Haitian exiles, but each story forcefully registers.

Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.

This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.

A juicy neo-noir like Bad Turn Worse doesn’t have to make total sense to grab you.

Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.

Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Plummer make an especially compatible match, because his understated portrayal of a despairing misanthrope reins in her scenery-chewing exhibitionism.

West, for all its intensity, becomes too bogged down in detail to be as strong as it might have been.

In its stunted theatrical version, the second half is a sketchy digest of events that leaves you feeling cheated.

[An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.

If it weren’t for the diligent performances of its stars, who inject some emotional depth into this bogus claptrap, Before I Go to Sleep would be an unwatchable, titter-inducing catastrophe.

Margaret Brown’s quietly infuriating documentary film about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, includes depressing information that many would probably be happier not knowing.

Life of Riley is neither especially profound nor riotously funny. An element of caricature is palpable in the performances but restrained.

What makes 1,000 Times Good Night more than a dramatic essay on wartime journalism is Ms. Binoche’s wrenchingly honest portrayal of a woman of conscience driven by a mixture of guilt, nobility and self-importance, reckoning belatedly with her destructive impulses.

This brilliant, viciously amusing takedown of bourgeois complacency, gender stereotypes and assumptions and the illusion of security rubs your face in human frailty as relentlessly as any Michael Haneke movie.

The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.

Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.

Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story.

Despite holes in the storytelling, Ms. Swank and Ms. Rossum keep it real.

There are interesting ideas here, but they are swallowed up in dull, poorly choreographed shootouts and other action nonsense.