Hardy once again shows what quiet force and phenomenal range he has.

It’s an idea that could make for decent genre viewing, if only its cast had some range, and its indie reach didn’t exceed its mainstream-polished grasp.

The Last of Robin Hood plays like a laboratory control experiment gone wrong: What would happen if you made a movie with a great cast and terrible everything else?

The idea that documentarian Jeffrey Radice would make the episode both the hook and the opener for his film is to be expected — it’s an attention-grabbing story. But a hook is all it is.

Lem’s story is merely a springboard for Folman’s wildly sprawling meditations on what the advent of virtual performance means — for artistic integrity, creative spirit, celebrity culture, human identity, even our hold on reality.

Thunder falls into the common mistake of many children’s films — it underestimates its audience.

One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.

Maybe not entirely depersonalized, however. Hogg has a point of view and a point to make, cryptic though they may be.

Though it touches on the usual themes of youthful innocence and imagination challenged by misfortune, and on occasion achieves moments of supremely subtle, sublimely exquisite detail, “Momo” strains when it comes to evoking whimsy and magic.

Like other offbeat and original efforts such as Spike Jonze’s “Her,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” and Richard Ayaode’s dour “The Double,” it juggles genres, reverses expectations, and resorts to fantasy in order to explore the enigmas of gender, identity, and love.

Some might find the dual conclusions too blunt in their irony, but “Norte” does not try to be consoling. Crazy as Fabian’s ideas seem, they might be the ones that prevail.

If The Trip to Italy begins shakily, it ends with expansive bliss, a father and son reconnecting off the shores of Capri as Gustav Mahler’s art song “Ich Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (I Am Lost to the World)” sends everyone heart-stoppingly home.

The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.

Sadly, the film rapidly devolves into an AARP version of a Jason Bourne-like vendetta, only bloodier and less meaningful.

The government, even under the new, more moderate leadership of President Hassan Rouhani, has reason for concern. Unlike Rasoulof and Panahi’s previous, more metaphorical films, this one confronts its subject head-on with unflinching candor.

Huppert’s amazing performance not only masters the physical rigors and deformations of her character, but more importantly captures her cold capriciousness and the enigmatic innocence that one of Maud’s friend’s labels “perverse.”

It makes for a structurally glitchy inspirational exercise whose climax carries all the goosebump-making drama of a Pats preseason game.

Violette demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn’t the only one who suffers for it.

Though at times Siddharth can resemble a well-photographed report on India’s social and economic ills, Mehta subtly employs different styles to sustain the poetry, poignancy, and drama.

Walking a line between droll comedy and a darker, more unsettling drama that the filmmakers aren’t quite up to, Frank is an entertaining curio with flashes of inspiration. That’s also a pretty good description of Frank’s music.

A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.

You could argue that the only thing that’s automatic about A Dame to Kill For, really, is some of the firepower that its hardcases are packing.

It’s a preposterously overstuffed strategy that, go figure, not only works, but even cures a thing or two that ailed the previous movies.

Land Ho! is a hot spring of a movie: It fizzes a lot, and you come out feeling better than you went in.

Gibney lays out the full picture, availing himself of terrific concert footage, archival materials, and interviews with Fela’s colleagues and family members (including eldest son and musical heir Femi Kuti). The portrait that emerges is of a larger-than-life personality who seems to have been closer to those who didn’t know him than those who did. (Again, much like Brown.)

Rich Hill might fairly be called “Boyhood: The Documentary,” and, not surprisingly, it offers a reality harsher than — if just as compassionate as — Richard Linklater’s dreamy time-lapse drama.

The opening and closing scenes of this film evoke those in “Crimson Gold.” They are long shots of the outside as seen through a security gate. In “Crimson Gold,” the view is of a chaotic street in Tehran. Here, it is the empty sea. This difference demonstrates what Panahi has been deprived of, and what the world has lost because of it.

None of this is as riotously zany as it wants to be.