Short and sweet and limited.

The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.

Ms. Myers too often tells rather than shows, and she doesn’t have the cinematic skill set to transform her idea into a fully satisfying movie, especially at this low-budget level.

Best of all, Mr. Law doesn’t skimp on wide-screen compositions; this is one movie designed for the theater, not the couch.

It’s all too dumb and ribald for most tastes, but if you liked all the zombie comedies that came before, well, here’s another one.

“Skull Island” has momentum, polish and behemoths that slither and thunder. The sets and creature designs are often beautifully filigreed, but the larger picture remains murky.

If the twisty finale underwhelms, Mr. Carreté’s enigmatic style and textured images offer their own doomy rewards.

This New York drama in some ways finds new names for age-old insecurities among men and women, though it doesn’t entirely deliver on its promising buildup.

The voice-over-driven readings and the illustrative footage — unwisely augmented with new sound effects — lack a fundamental filmic momentum.

Some of this seems like stoner’s paranoia, and some of the film’s talking heads, mainly comedians, don’t make the best advocates. Over all, though, its experts... argue forcefully for decriminalization.

Mr. Clayton and Miss Kerr have neglected to interpret the tale and character with sufficient incisiveness and candor to give us a first-rate horror or psychological film. But they've given us one that still has interest and sends some formidable chills down the spine.

There’s so much great vintage footage of Ali... and he’s so charismatic, it would be hard to watch the movie and not take something from it.

Anne Hathaway made a splash in Disney’s “The Princess Diaries,” and the rangy Ms. Kapoor (who descends from a Bollywood dynasty) shares some of her early incandescence, along with a Julia Roberts-like smile.

It’s all mellowly funny rather than creepy, something like a stand-up conceit elaborated into scenes.

Mr. Payet, who is one of the film’s directors and screenwriters, is a comedy star in France, and this movie is facile with its comic rhythms and dramatic flow.

This tribute is overlong and too reverent, conveying little sense of Xiao Hong the person and even less of her talent.

The notion of an undercover agent with an untrustworthy mind is a great gimmick — and on a commercial level, Dying of the Light sometimes plays as just another high-concept vehicle for a comically overacting Mr. Cage. But Mr. Schrader’s vision is strong enough to rage against the hackier calculations.

Suicide Squad is a so-so, off-peak superhero movie. It chases after the nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool” and the anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” but trips over its own feet.

It’s tough being a hitmaker who isn’t weighed down by corporate expectations, but for a while, Mr. Gunn does a pretty good job of keeping the whole thing reasonably fizzy, starting with an opener that winks at the audience with big bangs and slapstick.

I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.

[An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.

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

The concert itself was a bold, life-affirming project, but with a couple of additional extended music sequences, Mr. Xido’s film might have been more powerful and way more hardcore.

This film, somewhat clumsy yet full of illuminating interviews, seems mostly like an exercise in building national pride, but it holds lessons for anyone trying to resist an overwhelming force.

Bathed in a nostalgic glow that just avoids maudlin, the group’s problems — a sexless marriage, an unexpected job loss — bark but don’t bite. Scenes flirt with cliché, yet the writing has spark.

Butter on the Latch thrives on its casually true snapshots of confusion and connection.

Driven by mostly Spanish-language folk music, the movie provides a potent if piecemeal counterbalance to the sensationalism of “Breaking Bad.”

Mr. Pailoor (who wrote the screenplay with Anu Pradhan) shows a taste for blunt metaphor... It’s hard to find fault with the performances, though, particularly Mr. Seth’s.

Ariel Vromen has directed a decent, fast-paced action movie, and Mr. Costner is enjoyable to watch as Jerico Stewart.

The plot favors simplicity over rationality with a cheerful insouciance that’s hard to dislike.

The sense of an invisible world being revealed is more potent than the film’s fairly standard portrayal of closeted life.

This quiet romantic drama never soars but keeps its sense of humor and its balance while taking its subject matter for granted in the best possible way.

Kill Dil has excellent songs by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, and one memorable, stakes-clarifying dance sequence that juxtaposes two styles.

This affectionate documentary is more of a bonbon for longtime fans than an entryway for a broader audience.

This sly documentary rises above its speculative hook by shifting to show the very human, and very mortal, sides of these would-be warriors of eternity.

The plotting is somehow both flat-footed and operatic in its absurdity. Character arcs are tangled, flattened and foreshortened. Common sense is knocked silly. But Mr. Fuqua has never been a director to let ridiculousness get in the way of visceral action.

It’s all handsomely managed, polished and professional, but the pieces are too neatly manufactured to feel as if anything is truly at stake.

It’s a cornball odd-couple comedy: Prim older woman meets a brassy young gay man. Still, it’s extraordinary just watching the peerless Ms. Rowlands wring the most out of the repartee in this adaptation of a play by Richard Alfieri.

Directed breathlessly by John Erick Dowdle (“As Above/So Below”), the movie is filled with jittery shots from hand-held cameras, and hurtles along at a pace that is especially helpful in racing past the holes in the paper-thin plot.

It reminds you that today’s horror movies still owe a great debt to Val Lewton, the producer of cheapie classics like “Cat People” (1942) and a virtuoso of shadows who realized that audiences could be entertained if the characters they watched looked like them. “Unfriended” doesn’t have Lewton’s poetry. Yet the filmmakers understand that one way into an audience’s head and nervous system is to fill the screen with the kind of “insipidly normal characters” (as the critic Manny Farber described Lewton’s) you’re happy to see shiver and scream.

Mr. Cheney’s movie, while teasing at times, does its celebrating and debunking in mild-mannered fashion, making points without seeming to try to score them.

The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.

Shot in sunny locales, Difret has an earnestness that hovers between plain-spoken and pedestrian, and there are scenes and sequences that just don’t come together as written and edited, no matter how admirable the film’s existence is.

Corny twists and exchanges ensue in the wobbly story, but, delightfully, Daniel Benmayor’s film shows love not just for stunts but for the dynamic surfaces of the city.

The nerd in me wants a bit more rigor, a bit more plausibility underneath the exuberant fakery. Maybe in the next episode.

The movie is funny without being much good; mostly, it’s another rung on Ms. McCarthy’s big ladder up. It’s a fitful amalgam of bouncy and slack laughs mixed in with some blasts of pure physical comedy and loads of yammering heads. There isn’t much filmmaking in it, outside of Ms. McCarthy’s precision comedic timing and natural screen presence.

The tedium, I would argue, is not incidental but essential, because this is not really a spy thriller or even a foot-chase and fist-fight-driven action movie, but rather a somber meditation on the crisis of the Gen-X professional in the throes of middle age.

I’m curious, and inclined — as I was in 2009 — to give this grand, muddled project the benefit of the doubt. Cameron’s ambitions are as sincere as they are self-contradictory. He wants to conquer the world in the name of the underdog, to celebrate nature by means of the most extravagant artifice, and to make everything new feel old again.

There’s nothing wrong with being uplifting, but something less predictable would have been refreshing.

These fond recollections of derring-do hail from a different era, and the movie’s one-sided view of history is bound to start arguments. The film is best appreciated as a straightforward testimonial: old war buddies’ hurrah against anti-Semitism.

The best animated movies for children are sublime. This one generally settles for noisy, though it throws in a positive message at the end.

The animated feature The Boss Baby has some hilarious moments. If, that is, you’re a grown-up.

The Overnight ends just as it starts to get interestingly messy, tapping into something real and sweetly touching.

Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.

Sarah Silverman burns through the indie drama “I Smile Back” without making the slightest move to gain our sympathy.

The lesson may not be particularly original, but the film has some striking moments as it follows him to his destiny.

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

Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed.

The plot undermines the film’s power. At the end you may be impressed at the skill on display, but you may also wish that you were more fully moved by the spectacle of a soul laid bare and transformed.

These drifting, unresolved stories may lack dramatic punch, but Mr. Nikolic, who teaches film at the New School, draws lovely performances from his cosmopolitan cast and oodles of atmosphere from a spare piano-and-strings soundtrack.

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.

It’s impossible not to be moved by Lili’s self-recognition and by her demand to be recognized by those who care most about her. But it’s also hard not to wish that The Danish Girl were a better movie, a more daring and emotionally open exploration of Lili’s emergence.

The survey, pockmarked with sometimes dopey animations and music, feels scattered and less than the sum of Mr. Miller’s many parts. But it has its heart in the right movie-mad place.

Fetishizing the tired tokens of the American gangster movie, The Connection is a slickly styled, overlong pastiche. Yet its denizens have a retro glamour and the soundtrack a shameless literalness that’s rather endearing.

Mr. Chen, who teamed with Mr. Yen for the superior “Bodyguards and Assassins,” scatters references to Hong Kong martial arts classics. But while he has impressive fists of fury in both Mr. Yen and Mr. Wang, Kung Fu Killer lacks the brio and spice of its ancestors.

Ray remains an unanswered, not especially compelling, question, but Mr. Keaton comes close to making you believe there’s soul to go with the fries and freneticism.

The new movie is as moth-eaten as the serapes strewn through the 1960 film, but there’s no denying the appeal of the image of Mr. Washington riding a horse, shooting a Colt and leading a posse of vigilantes to save a mostly white Western town.

The documentary, directed by Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, revisits those tender years and what came after with a lot of obvious enthusiasm and not an ounce of critical distance, as if they too were just two more friends playing along.

Each narrative fissure further thwarts meaning. The most you can ask from a movie as nullifying as this one is that it offer wit and visual panache, which it does.

There may be little to give you the collywobbles, but there’s quite a lot to enjoy, with Ms. Morton heading the list. Swaddled in thick cardis and shapeless scrubs, she makes Katherine a well of overanxious care and castrating comments.

This nonjudgmental documentary moves between New York City and the rain forests of the Central African Republic, where Mr. Sarno primarily lives. Both places are tugs of war between abundance and lack.

The film may leave you hungry for deeper insight into some its most renowned purveyors.

The fragmented and existential atmosphere, reminiscent of a Paul Auster novel, is an interesting reward for sticking with the tale.

The scriptwriters, Kane Senes (who also directed) and John Chriss, keep the family secrets too bottled up, but the actors, who include William Forsythe as the McCluskey patriarch, play it with dark vigor.

Maintaining a sunny, scrubbed-clean tone, Ms. Hencken allows no possibility of dazed groupies or drunken meltdowns — and only the briefest whiff of cocaine — to darken her portrait.

The director’s discipline is remarkable, and also a bit constricting.

Marveling without questioning, the movie is content to package the phenomenon and coast on its feel-good wave. Yet, somewhere around the midpoint, I began to wonder who was most thrilled by all this fuss.

It may leave many bases uncovered (a section on groundbreaking European legislation is inadequately explained), but it will also leave you looking a lot more closely at what you put on your skin, in your mouth and underneath your sink.

The director Mark Neveldine deploys queasy lighting and a trembling score, but his best choice is to let Ms. Dudley stare at us. She conveys unnerving shifts in self-awareness and sinister intent with her eyes.

The Secret Life of Pets is adequate animated entertainment, amusing while it lasts but not especially memorable except as a catalog of compromises and missed opportunities.

The director, Wes Ball, knows how to move his camera around a futuristic medical compound, and the filmmaking brio — especially the sights of Earth’s last city, shot in Cape Town — mitigates the eye rolls prompted by the plot.

Does it add up? Not really, but it passes the time nicely, working best when Mr. Monahan keeps it vague and off-kilter as his characters roam among the Hollywood ghosts.

Mr. Cruise’s brisk, ingratiating performance — all smiles, hard-charging physicality and beads of sweat — does a lot to soften the edges. But Mr. Liman doesn’t press Mr. Cruise to dig into the character, and the actor mostly hurdles forward in a movie that never gets around to asking what makes Barry run and why.

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.

For much of its first half, Bombay Velvet hums with the kind of energy found in movies by the 1970s American directors....Mr. Kashyap is perhaps too faithful to his Bollywood imperatives, though. In the grand tradition, his film is overlong (149 minutes) and overplotted.

The film’s messages about friendship, acceptance and being yourself are clear enough for the young, and grown-ups can read the story as a warning about conformity and about going to war on false pretenses.

The horror of where rationalism can lead (the death camps, for one) hangs over Irrational Man and helps hold you as does Mr. Phoenix, even with some bad writing and Mr. Allen’s narrative laxity and lack of interest in how real people live.

If you go, expect a diverting summer action adventure with occasional laughs, not a diverting stoner comedy with occasional action.

This isn’t exactly “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”; it’s more like a film version of a TV series you could comfortably let your tweens watch.

Zoom, crash, repeat with squealing, burning and flaming tires — it’s all predictably absurd and self-mocking, and often a giggle when not a total yawn.

Mr. Nossiter’s main point is that traditional farming methods have become revolutionary in a country that, we’re told, has grown progressively less agrarian. Mr. Nossiter champions that activism in this mellow, unfocused film.

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.

The droll, shape-shifting Two Shots Fired, the newest movie from the Argentine filmmaker Martín Rejtman (the subject of a current retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center), accomplishes the strange feat of constantly thwarting expectations without ever varying its tone or moving the needle of excitement.

It is possible to admire the craft and sensitivity of Louder Than Bombs without quite believing it. The characters are so carefully drawn that they can feel smaller than life, and the dramatic space they inhabit has a curiously abstract feeling.

Once the violence starts, Green Room settles into horror movie logic, becoming steadily more gruesome and less terrifying as the body count grows. You know some people are going to die, and figuring out who and in what order feels more like a brainteaser than like a matter of deep moral or emotional concern.

Like its hero, Disorder has plenty of technique but not enough purpose.

While the movie creates an intriguing emotional space in which characters at the end of their ropes can open up, there’s the distinct sense of a missed opportunity.

The film is intriguing, but ultimately opaque, a lovely, inert object that offers, in the name of movie love, an escape from so much that is vital and interesting about movies.