Stephen Holden

Cézanne et Moi offers a pungent, demystifying portrait of the rowdy late-19th-century Parisian art world where famous painters and poets mingled and jostled for position at dinner parties and art openings filled with shoptalk, backbiting and intrigue.

Ms. Chastain’s watchful, layered performance helps keep the film on an even keel, but it is not enough to prevent The Zookeeper’s Wife, with its reassuringly cuddly critters, from feeling like a Disney version of the Holocaust.

Frantz takes pains to show both sides’ lingering hostility after a devastating and (the movie implies) senseless war.

At first Apprentice seems to be a basic revenge film in which Aiman stalks the man who killed his father. But it becomes psychologically more complex.

Donald Cried is an acutely insightful, exquisitely written and acted triumph for Mr. Avedisian, who understands how the past permanently clings to us.

Mr. Phillips’s self-deprecating humor is amusing but not funny enough to give him the edge he needs to rise up and conquer.

As one comic after another recalls triumphs, misadventures and painful lessons learned, the stories become redundant.

[An] exquisite, beautifully shot meditation on love clouded by fear and doubt.

It is too flat-footed and sloppy to explore the obvious parallels between then and now, and the movie is peppered with gratuitous star cameos that distract rather than enlighten. At least it means well.

Their ordeal feels cruel, unnecessary and infuriatingly real.

This movie, directed and produced by Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards, digs deeply enough into Mr. Giordano’s world to convey the drudgery and headaches of being a bandleader.

What makes the pain of this film bearable is Daniel’s unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance.

Passengers increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

As it drags along, the movie makes you feel trapped in the shoes of someone destined for failure.

Most of the humor is too lighthearted to offend all but the most reverent believers, and the movie’s inventiveness rarely flags.

The best thing about All We Had is Ms. Holmes’s stormy portrayal of a desperate, foolishly trusting woman who rushes from man to man seeking security, only to find herself used and betrayed while her daughter looks on with increasing dismay.

Even in the throes of grief, Mr. Cave retains his mystique as a rock shaman.

Mr. Byrne’s film is a sober, evenhanded recapitulation of Sands’s imprisonment and death that places him in a historical context.

Partly because Miss Sloane is more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.

The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.

Because “Merrily” was a musical about the ravages of time on friendship and youthful ideals, the documentary tells parallel stories — one fictional, the other real — of disappointment and disillusion. They give the film a double shot of poignancy.

[Ms. Steinfeld] manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.

The tone of the narration is so wrenchingly honest that the film never lapses into self-pity or relies on mystical platitudes.

Written and directed by Tim Kirkman (“Dear Jesse,” “Loggerheads”), Lazy Eye has realistic dialogue and believable performances by its stars. But unless you consider subjects like saltwater swimming pools and the movie “Harold and Maude” fascinating topics, “Lazy Eye” has little to say.

It is the film’s cosmic dimension that makes it so special.

The narrowness of its perspective and its relatively brief 82-minute length disappoint. Yet Don’t Call Me Son still manages to be a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves.

Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.

The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.

To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.

American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty amid an ugly presidential campaign.

The movie, directed by Gavin O’Connor (“Tumbleweeds”), makes little sense. The screenplay, by Bill Dubuque, is so determined to hide its cards that when the big reveal finally arrives, it feels as underwhelming as it is preposterous.

Although Mascots is neither as funny nor as satirically acute as its forerunner, it would be churlish to complain too loudly. And the sharpest verbal jokes in the screenplay by Mr. Guest and the actor and writer Jim Piddock are as inspired as ever. Mr. Guest’s gift for the archly comedic mot juste is undiminished.

Nostalgia gives way to melodrama, and dramatic truth to soapy histrionics, and Blue Jay falters on a formulaic revelation about mistakes made and lessons learned too late.

The movie is not really about deciding whether you’re gay or straight — those terms are never spoken. It’s about the chemistry of two people at a moment in time.

The absence of an emotional catharsis in the film, efficiently directed by Mick Jackson (“The Bodyguard,” “Temple Grandin”) from a screenplay by the British playwright David Hare, leaves a frustrating emptiness at its center.

As it seesaws between Greta’s conscious and unconscious minds, the movie begins to feel like a waking dream.

The heavy-handed man-beast comparison is one of several grossly overstated themes in a movie that abruptly changes direction as it goes along while taking shortcuts that leave its characters underdeveloped and crucial plot elements barely fleshed out.

Chronic ends with a sudden, terrible slap in the face that is a final blow to your equilibrium. It is left up to the viewer to decide whether it is a cheap stunt or an ultimate moment of truth. I vote for the latter.

Ms. Rabe’s beautifully balanced performance reminds you that people never really grow up.

Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.

As I Open My Eyes is best when it observes the fraught but loving mother-daughter relationship between Hayet and Farah.

The characters have enough dimension to avoid appearing to be symbols of a social tragedy, and the movie’s relative gentleness makes the harsher realities of Brandon’s world all the more distressing.

We’re all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, White Girl is a contact bummer that’s hard to shake.

As a drama about adult responsibility, selfishness and moral obligations, however, it never wavers in its commitment to examine what it means to raise a child.

If the movie, loosely based on two books by Fatima Elayoubi, tells a familiar story of immigrants struggling to make something of themselves in an alien culture (Fatima speaks some French but reads only Arabic), it does so in a tone that is kindhearted but clearheaded, and the performances are low-key and believable.

The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.

The film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream.

Overseen by a director not known for his human touch and lacking a name star, except for Mr. Freeman, Ben-Hur feels like a film made on the cheap, although it looks costly.

The voice casting and the visual representations of the characters the boy encounters on his journeys are superb.

Indignation might be dismissed as a small, exquisite period piece, but it is so precisely rendered that it gets deeply under your skin.

The movie comes alive only when the camera lingers over the actual paintings and allows their power to speak for itself.

Quitters is repellent but believable, which makes it a little scary.

Don’t Think Twice, which has a warm heart, could have been a much nastier movie. Yet its disappointed show-business hopefuls dreading their expiration dates make no bones about their insecurities.

It is so vague, cliché-ridden and devoid of surprise and suspense that once you grasp its premise, watching it is like leafing through a design magazine kept in a refrigerator.

Robert is not a Shakespearean figure like Walter White, but the film at least grants him the moral stature of an incorruptible man risking his life in a dangerous job. The Infiltrator is still a good yarn that, when it catches its breath, allows Mr. Cranston to convey the same ambivalence and cunning he brought to “Breaking Bad” and “All the Way."

The spectacle of actors of the quality of Russell Crowe, Aaron Paul, Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer and Jane Fonda earnestly struggling to wring eye moisture from hammy, flat-footed dialogue (credited to Brad Desch, an unknown), while maintaining some dignity, is depressing proof that an actor is only as good as his or her material.

Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.

Blistering.

Time and again, Microbe and Gasoline risks cuteness without going overboard. Too easily taken for granted, its accomplishment is its ability to gaze steadily with warmth but minimal sentimentality at the world through unjaded 14-year-old eyes.

Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.

Ms. Seydoux’s triumph is her skill at imbuing Célestine with an almost angelic radiance that clashes with her underlying coarseness.

In withholding biographical information about the characters, the movie supplies just enough material to prompt you to fill in the blanks.

For philistines mystified by the value attached to so many artworks that to an untrained eye look worthless, Mr. Cenedella comes across as a reassuring voice of sanity.

Charles Ferguson’s latest documentary, Time to Choose, is a sobering polemic about global warming that balances familiar predictions of planetary doom with a survey of innovations in renewable energy technology that hold out some hope for the future.

Yes, the documentary is undeniably uplifting. But …

The best and maybe the only way to appreciate Alice Through the Looking Glass is to surrender to its mad digital excess and be whirled around through time and space in a world of grotesque overabundance.

Infuriating and depressing but rivetingly watchable.

Unlike the juicy, overripe prose in the novel from which it was adapted, Mr. DeCubellis’s screenplay is utterly lacking in style. Mr. Brody captures his character’s attitude, but the colorless screenplay robs the character of literary imagination.

Whether or not you accept the tenets of Christianity, Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo García’s austere depiction of the temptations of Christ, offers a quietly compelling portrait of the human side of Jesus.

Like most of Mr. Davies’s films, Sunset Song makes you see the world through his sorrowful eyes. He is a die-hard romantic, whose acute sensitivity to the passage of time conveys a bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty, which, for him, is synonymous with melancholy.

A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.

The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.

The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.

It infuses a too-familiar story with so much heart that you surrender to its charm and forgive it for being unabashedly formulaic.

The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography.

It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.

When it deepens its intellectual focus, Hockney begins to lose coherence, with rushed sequences that cover his stage designs, his landscapes and his experiments with photography.

This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.

A low point in the director’s career, this sleek chilly film isn’t acted so much as posed.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.

Neon Bull is a profound reflection on the intersection of the human and bestial.

Mr. Paradot’s performance is so viscerally intense that there is no escaping its force.

The movie partly resists the temptation to follow a predictable feel-good route to a fairy-tale ending. That said, it has enough conveniently timed little triumphs to send up warning signs.

In Mr. Hawke’s extraordinary performance, this glamorous enigma becomes a credible, if pathetic character who lives for only two things: to play the trumpet and to shoot heroin.

The Program, much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort.

As with Mr. Farhadi’s other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.

Marguerite overstays its welcome by at least 20 minutes. What redeems it is Ms. Frot’s subtle, deeply compassionate portrayal of a rich, lonely woman clutching at an impossible dream until reality intrudes.

A grim, suspenseful farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication.

You come at the story, such as it is, as a visitor from the outside world, picking up information as the movie goes along. This approach impedes comprehension, and at moments you may be tempted to sit back and not try to make the pieces fit. For those unwilling to make the effort, Songs My Brothers Taught Me has other rewards.

Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.

Viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman whose tribe is on the verge of extinction at the hands of Colombian rubber barons in the 19th and 20th centuries, Embrace of the Serpent, a fantastical mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of first-world culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically.

If Race is a standard inspirational biopic that exalts the legend of an athletic hero, at least it doesn’t soft-pedal the racism that Owens encountered at every turn.

Touched With Fire is an actor’s field day, and both Mr. Kirby and Ms. Holmes boldly meet the challenge of playing bright, high-strung artists struggling with depression.

There’s much in the movie to admire until it runs headlong into a stone wall.

Zoolander 2 has enough plots for several movies. They are so jammed together that they more or less cancel each other out.

This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it.

Beyond the arty trappings and flamboyant showmanship that are typical of Mr. Greenaway, 73, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a brazen provocation.

The Finest Hours is a moderately gripping whoosh of nostalgia that shamelessly recycles the ’50s cliché of the squeaky-clean all-American hero.

Despite its deficiencies, Naz & Maalik feels authentic, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Cook bring their characters completely alive.

So long as the camera is studying Franny maniacally bestowing his largess or throwing temper tantrums, The Benefactor is mesmerizing. But Mr. Gere’s flamboyant performance is the sole raison d’être for this melodrama.

This comic take on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is infused with a gleefully absurdist sense of humor while retaining a childlike sense of wonder.

Lacking epic pretensions and modest in scale, running under 90 minutes, Anesthesia is really closer in spirit to Rodrigo García’s delicate 2005 gem, “Nine Lives.” And it doesn’t waste a word or an image.

Daddy’s Home is an ugly psychological cockfight posing as a family-friendly comedy. Laugh-free — except for some farcical, life-threatening stunts at the expense of Will Ferrell’s character, Brad — it is best avoided unless a movie that has the attitude and mind-set of a schoolyard bully happens to be your thing.

Where to Invade Next is a sprawling, didactic polemic wittily disguised as a European travelogue.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is moderately effective agitprop.

Dreams Rewired is mostly content to entertain. Its explanations of how new inventions work are simplified to the point of superficiality.

The performances are so crackling that you can imagine Ms. Salazar and Mr. Pally, given richer material, becoming a slapstick comedy team: the spitfire and the nerd.

What makes A Royal Night Out palatable are the lead performances.

In Ms. Smith’s tough, levelheaded performance, Mary is an irascible termagant full of batty notions clutching on to life as best she can. She is hard to like, and that’s good.

Watching it is like slowly leafing through a giant scrapbook whose contents include the individual stories of a large extended family.

Although Ms. Berg’s enthralling film tells a story somewhat similar to “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s recent documentary portrait of Amy Winehouse (who also died at 27), the demons that devoured Winehouse came from outside as much from within. Not so with Joplin.

This calm, hardheaded film never sacrifices its toughness for a swooning, misty-eyed moment of hope.

Sad to say: There is far more crackle in an average episode of “Law & Order.”

The movie never bothers to show you life inside a shelter dormitory or tries to convey a broader vision of the city’s street culture. It is too busy showcasing its star Jennifer Connelly (Mr. Bettany’s wife) in degrading situations.

Its abrasive portrait of contemporary New York as a place of noise and nerve-rattling turmoil captures the mood of the city more accurately than any recent film I can think of. And the jagged camera work exacerbates the film’s jarring sense of immediacy.

In Jacir Eid’s extraordinary performance, Theeb exhibits the composure, bravery and cunning of a little savage driven by animal instinct.

Ms. Chaplin, in one of her most touching screen performances, imbues Anne with a world-weary melancholy that makes your heart sink.

Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary portrait Tab Hunter Confidential is as mild-mannered and blandly likable as its subject.

More than most docudramas about fairly recent events, it is so well written and acted that it conveys a convincing illusion of veracity.

Xenia has been called a farce. But it is much more than that. Both the story and the performances are packed with raw emotion.

Trash is a shameless bid to recycle the mystique of “Slumdog Millionaire,” its likable, overrated prototype.

Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.

On one viewing, at least, it is a typically impenetrable Maddin film: zany one minute, pompous the next. Ardent Maddin admirers, of whom I am not one, might discern a grand design of what often feels like a post-Freudian horror comedy.

It is content to be a chilly, disquieting study of a society in a state of denial until the truth is bared.

Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.

Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.

The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.

The New Girlfriend never pretends to be more than what it is, a delicious and frothy fantasia with a teasing erotic frisson.

The Fool is a hard movie to shake.

Breathe conveys an uncanny insight into the psychology of late adolescence, when lingering childhood fantasies can combust with burgeoning adult sexuality in a swirl of uncontrollable feelings.

This warm, robust movie ultimately transcends the formulas with which it flirts to become a far more subtle and honest result than a machine-tooled tear-jerker like “The Theory of Everything.” When the film doesn’t try to build up the usual suspense found in movies about competition, you sigh with relief.

Welcome to Leith wisely resists the kind of gimmickry that might have resulted in a stylistic hybrid of “The Blair Witch Project” or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Buoyed by the wonderfully natural performances of its young leads, La Jaula de Oro is a compelling social-realist drama that owes much to the style of the British social-realist filmmaker Ken Loach.

Blind evokes a dreamy, dour fusion of Charlie Kaufman and Ingmar Bergman. Its few flashes of wry humor are outweighed by mystically beautiful images.

One of the worst films to sport the label “romantic comedy.”

As this movie, directed by Isabel Coixet, tracks the deepening friendship between people from different cultures and backgrounds, it acquires an unforced metaphorical resonance.

The kidnapping and ensuing complications make for a harrowing spectacle of cruelty and bumbling from which the camera doesn’t shrink.

As the movie fizzles, Mr. Clement’s endearing performance breathes what little life is left into a movie that, much like the insufferable Charlie, can’t make up its mind about where to go or how to get there.

Wildly entertaining, sexy and beautifully shot in the Canadian heartland.

Far from romanticizing creativity and the artistic process, Mr. Baumbach’s films portray the world of painters, filmmakers and literati as an overcrowded, amoral jungle of viperish entitled narcissists stealing from one another for fame and profit.

The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.

Underneath it all, The Gift is a merciless critique of an amoral corporate culture in which the ends justify the means, and lying and cheating are O.K., as long as they’re not found out.

This lean character-driven movie has such an acutely observant screenplay that it is easy to empathize with people struggling to make a decent living by hook or crook. Its psychological precision elevates it to something more than a genre piece.

The nuanced performances of Ms. Smulders and Ms. Bean are flawless. Yet the movie’s calm levelheadedness is a subtle detriment. Everything is a little too easy.

This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.

The main, and perhaps the only, reason to see the revenge thriller Lila and Eve, a shallow, cut-rate “Thelma and Louise,” is for the thunderous lead performance of Viola Davis.

Alleluia is a fever dream of sex, jealousy and murder whose intensity leaves you spellbound.

[A] quiet, devastating critique of the antiquated Indian legal system.

As Maria crumples before our eyes, many will find Stations of the Cross heartbreaking and infuriating. Others may laugh out loud at her mother, a walking nightmare of pious, punishing rectitude.

Mr. Thorpe’s explorations of a painful subject are an exercise in healing. His discovery of how many gay men share his anxiety and discomfort leads him to greater self-acceptance.

As truthful as it is, Boulevard conveys little insight into characters who are believable and well acted but incapable of change.

It uses a terrific score of bluegrass and old-timey songs, many of them written by Nick Hans, to underscore the connection and to evoke a fundamental American spirit epitomized by traveling musicians with banjos, fiddles and guitars.

The screenplay is vague not only about politics but also about the history of Jimmy’s unconsummated relationship with his former sweetheart, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now married, whose wide Susan Sarandon eyes express a wistful sadness.

The movie’s extreme compression is its biggest failing. The business end is so minimally sketched, you are left wanting to know a lot more.

7 Minutes knows exactly what it is: a directorial calling card to the Quentin Tarantino school of blood-bath cinema.... This film is a nasty piece of work.

Mr. Schoenaerts’s dour André may make conceptual sense, but he leaves a hole in this handsomely mounted costume drama that would have profited from more intrigue and a steamier erotic atmosphere.

Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.

“Saturday Night Live” deserves much better than the documentary equivalent of what a book editor would surely dismiss as a rushed, careless clip job.

The Yes Men Are Revolting, their third film, has a personal poignancy that is missing in the forerunners, “The Yes Men” (2003) and “The Yes Men Fix the World” (2009).

The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.

Testament of Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.

Think of Gemma Bovery as an airy puff pastry, dripping with honey.

[A] wonderful, lighter-than-air movie.

For all its sensitivity to the subject, The Farewell Party makes a number of tonal missteps of which the most glaring is the insertion of a musical number that upsets the movie’s otherwise sensible balance between the comedic and the morbid.

For its first two-thirds, the film, written and directed by Thomas Cailley, seems to be groundbreaking. Then it slides into comforting familiarity.

Because the film doesn’t begin to explore the wider implications of that loss of trust, its findings don’t add up to more than a sardonic gloss on a provocative subject.

The glorious cinematography, by Robbie Ryan, sharply illustrates the disparity between the rugged majesty of the landscape and the savagery of its outlaws and adventurers, who resemble vermin scuttling through the underbrush of a perilous no man’s land.

Mr. Hawke’s anguished performance gives Good Kill a hot emotional center.

A modest, quietly touching portrait of an older woman radiantly embodied by Blythe Danner.

As much as the film is shadowed by a keen awareness of mortality, One Cut, One Life often pulses with an almost ecstatic vitality. In its vision of human existence, life is as messy and unpredictable as it is precious.

Ms. O’Kane’s brusque performance portrays Christina as a woman who acts on her principles and has little time for making nice. She is a compelling embodiment of the adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Bravetown, directed by Daniel Duran from a screenplay by Oscar Orlando Torres, can sometimes drown in its own tears.

5 Flights Up would be nothing without its stars, whose humanity warms up a movie that otherwise portrays New Yorkers as coldblooded, slightly crazy, hypercompetitive sharks.

When the banter sputters, there is always the glorious scenery along the Trans-Canada Highway to divert you.

The strongest elements of this film, which adds nothing new to the subgenre, are its atmospheric, smeared-lipstick cinematography and Mr. Ferdinando’s portrayal of an arrogant, double-dealing crook.

As an instructional movie on the sport, Ride offers some useful tips, but beyond that, it feels like a slightly bizarre vanity project.

Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.

As crude as many of these works are, they exert an eerie cumulative power.

The steady performances of Tom Wilkinson, playing a kindly priest, and Emily Watson, an angelic mother, in Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy do little to offset the cloying sweetness of a movie that has the haranguing inspirational tone of a marathon Sunday-school lesson.

Black Souls is an ominous, well-acted portrait of an ingrown feudal society of violence, retaliation and deadly machismo.

About Elly is gorgeous to look at. The ever-changing sky and sea lend it a moodiness so palpable that the climate itself seems a major character dictating the course of events; the weather rules.

It is up to its fine cast to build what little sense of mystery is conjured and to bring a sense of coherence to a narrative mishmash that is all smirking attitude with no subtext. Think of it as a goof.

Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.

Lone Scherfig (“An Education”), the Danish filmmaker who directed the movie from a screenplay by Ms. Wade, has coaxed wonderfully nasty performances from a young cast.

Man From Reno fascinates. It invites you to go back, decipher its clues and discern a grand design, if there is one.

As a piece of storytelling, A Wolf at the Door may be a tawdry little shocker. But on a visceral level, it is a knife to the gut.

Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Grodsky have an extraordinary ear for the rhythms and nuances of everyday speech, as voices overlap, conversations take random directions, and casual remarks carry loaded subtexts.

She’s Lost Control sustains a mood of deepening alienation, but the attitude of the movie is too detached for it to be emotionally gripping, and its ending is botched.

What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.

The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.

It Follows recycles familiar teenage horror tropes — a girl alone in a house, evil forces banging on a door — but its mood is dreamy. Seldom do you feel manipulated by exploitative formulas. The violence, when it comes, is sudden, and the camera doesn’t linger over the gore.

With its casual deadpan attitude, Buzzard offers a nightmare portrait of arrested development and anomie for the age of inequality.

In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.

Explores interlocking themes of sexuality, immigration and power dynamics with a cleareyed sensitivity and refuses to demonize even its shadiest characters.

On one level, Bluebird is a bitter slice of life about hardy, stoic New Englanders battling the elements and a crumbling regional economy. On another, it’s a poetic meditation on the human struggle to make sense of a cruel and indifferent universe.

Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.

In Mr. Jordan’s portrayal of Jamie, this handsome talented musical theater performer (“Newsies”) goes for the jugular in taking down his character and making him insufferable.

That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.

Ms. Hamilton’s straightforward documentary skillfully interweaves reminiscences by members of the group with re-enactments of the burglary.

Mike Binder’s steady, well-intentioned exploration of the racial tensions affecting two branches of a Southern California family, is notable for what it doesn’t try to do.

My Name Is Hmmm ... has its magical moments, but they are sabotaged by the director’s showy, ham-handed technique applied to a frustratingly threadbare screenplay that leaves you wanting more.

The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.

Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.

What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched.

As the pace picks up, whatever spell the movie cast is shattered, and Still Life melts into a heap of sentimental slush.

For all its disorganization and lack of an ending or even a sense of direction, Appropriate Behavior is alive. The screenplay is packed with smart remarks, clever and unpredictable turns of phrase that knock you off balance.

Valley of Saints finds a poignant humanity in this chaste romance, which awakens in Gulzar a wondrous sense of possibility, along with a new awareness of the world’s complexity.

With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.

The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.

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.

For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.

It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.

Art and Craft adds fuel to the argument that the art market is a rigged game manipulated by curators and gallerists spouting mumbo-jumbo.

It is as intimate and honest a portrait of a rock artist’s creative roots as any film has attempted.

If The Green Prince sustains the tension of a well-executed thriller, it is achieved at the cost of a dispassionate objectivity.

The Skeleton Twins is a well-written and acted movie about contemporary life that doesn’t strain for melodrama and is largely devoid of weepy soap opera theatrics. A small, precise, character-driven vignette, it has no pretensions to make any kind of grand statement about The Way We Live Now.

Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.

As the truth tumbles out, the dialogue and the carefully timed revelations make My Old Lady seem increasingly stagy. But the performances go a long way toward camouflaging the screenplay’s clunky mechanics.

The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.

Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.

A soulful cinematic tone poem.

It is hard to imagine that any other actress could muster the stubborn ferocity that Isabelle Huppert brings to the role of Maud.

More than in any of his previous films, Mr. Swanberg and his cast have refined a seemingly effortless style of semi-improvised storytelling so natural that it barely seems scripted. Life just happens.

Like its gyrating, spasmodic staccato beats, Get On Up refuses to stand still. It whirls and does splits and jumps, with leaps around in time and changes in tempo that are jarring and abrupt and that usually feel just right.

You can only imagine how much stronger the movie might have been had it fleshed out subsidiary dramas whose outlines are barely discernible.

As both an actor and a playwright, Wallace Shawn, at his most audacious, goes for the jugular, but in sneaky roundabout ways.

Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.

If there is any humor to be gleaned from this concept, it is nowhere to be found in a movie so shoddily made that there is little continuity between scenes and not a laugh or even a titter.

[A] small, beautifully made film.

If the title role of Gabrielle weren’t so fully embodied by its star, Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, this French Canadian movie about love among the disabled would fall on the condescendingly mushy side of the line between heartwarming and saccharine.

This is civilized human behavior captured with a clinical precision and accuracy.

Its portrayal of impoverished, careworn people barking at one another and protecting their territory in a daily struggle is bracingly hardheaded.

Exhibition is an exquisitely photographed film that requires unusually close attention for it to reveal itself.

A Summer’s Tale has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.

The storytelling is infuriatingly coy, as if Mr. Haggis were trying to fool you (and himself) into thinking that he has something to say. Third Person finds Mr. Haggis, like Mr. Neeson’s screen alter ego, running on empty.

Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.

As Frankie, Mr. Marlowe delivers a quiet, moving performance of such subtlety and truthfulness that you almost feel that you are living his life.