The bigger and truer stars of this enjoyable, sometimes accidentally entertaining movie are the five horses that take turns playing Secretariat.

Maddeningly, purposefully evasive.

The beat-up poetry, soused look and bad habits of She's So Lovely are often dated. The showy bravado is not.

Mr. Parker is an eclectic film maker. He seems to have no readily identifiable obsessions that define supposedly more serious directors. He's a very able technician who needs a good screenplay, which is what's missing here.

“Speer” is an intriguing document, highlighting the ease with which the most reprehensible figures are able to whitewash their legacies. But once you settle into its wavelength, the documentary begins to feel simplistic, like a one-track excuse to roll out rare film clips and testimony.

The problem with Nymphomaniac: Volume II lies not in its display of erect penises and reddened buttocks, but rather in its dull narrative and overworked ideas.

Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.

The effect is a movie that resembles nothing so much as the centerpiece of the Malus menu — a hot dog made with elevated ingredients.

Yet for all its studied snobbery and brittle entitlement, the film is never mean-spirited: even Ralph's monstrous parents are treated with more compassion than they deserve. Clearly, Mr. Grant's memories are more fond than bitter - even if the same probably can't be said of the Swazis.

The French filmmaker Simone Bitton takes a measured look at the barrier in her documentary Wall, a film that considers hard-core political realities alongside agonizing personal truths.

Carlitos’s sole reason for living is moving from one transgression to the next. The same might be said of the movie, which superficially probes his amorality while exploiting it for slick thrills.

A satisfying thrill ride, at least on a par with the earlier installments.

For much of the movie, Junn is a one-dimensional grump who pulls this schematic if unfocused movie down with each frown and harrumph.

Maybe, beneath the stylistic flourishes and bursts of operatic emotion, it is a simple story of psychological struggle, about a man in midlife reckoning with the damage of his past. But to settle on that interpretation is to deny or discount the splendid strangeness of Mr. Sorrentino's vision - and also, therefore, of the curious corners of reality he discovers along the way.

Although there's a lot more science-fiction than there is first-vintage James Bond in You Only Live Twice, the fifth in a series of veritable Bond films with Sean Connery, there's enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun.

The whole film seems to have a vague heaviness to it. The best Muppet movies have been great because they had charm. There’s no charm here, really; just self-referential jokes, decent but not memorable songs, and lots and lots of cameos.

These confrontational comedians — however serious the message, it’s always imparted with liberal dollops of humor — are experts at merging shock and showmanship.

The film is a brightly rendered, sentimental ode to adolescence that hits all the right emotional buttons, even as it risks being forgotten itself.

The sad news is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as fun — or funny — as those commercials. This project doesn’t seem to have brought Lopez any closer to serenity or levity. It’s an occasion for even more toil.

Mr. Howard has made Ransom in the same clean, swift, logical style that sent his "Apollo 13" into orbit, resulting in a spellbinding crime tale that delivers surprises right down to the wire.

Bloom is an alluring actress, especially when playing more subtle dramatic beats. While she’s unable to elevate a rote script, Bloom, and her character, understand how to catch the gaze of an audience in a way that the camera does not.

It is an overlong, overlabored essay on the torments of conscience and love which Mr. Hitchcock has beautifully filmed in Technicolor but pointed in glaring blacks and whites.

With its icy cynicism and desolate settings, the film evokes the work of the young Roman Polanski in his sadistic trickster mode.

At the end Ms. Maclean forsakes all the unsettling subtlety and nuance she has had so clearly in her command to serve up a finale that I found frankly confounding, despite its having been foreshadowed.

What’s most striking about Extract, beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy.

Abominable is an exceptionally watchable and amiable animated tale.

With the ferocity of a drill instructor and the boundless confidence of a self-help guru who combines psychobabble clichés with embarrassingly explicit confessions, Ms. Lynch's Gayle redeems the movie from utter banality.

A trade-off for this fleet-of-foot adaptation is the full range of the play’s philosophical soundings and emotional palette. But their “Hamlet” surges with its own energies — palpably a matter of life and death.

In general, and in spite of its deft use of archival video clips and interviews, Giuliani Time offers a superficial reading of recent New York history, zeroing in on the headlines while often missing the context.

Like Lou Ye's "Suzhou River," a Hitchcock homage similarly set in Shanghai's demimonde, So Close to Paradise offers an intriguing and sometimes self-canceling mixture of emotion and style.

As a musical experience, it is generous and moving. But as a documentary, “Sing Me the Songs” is an awkward hybrid of concert film and rock-star biography.

Mr. Forster, who previously directed “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” has been soundly defeated by The Kite Runner. Despite the film’s far-flung locations (it was shot primarily in China), there is remarkably little of visual interest here; the setups are banal, and the scenes lack tension, which no amount of editing can provide.

Even with its tepid lead performance, Criminal is a clever and diverting caper film. At least, it is as long as you don't think too hard about it.

As flatly directed by Christian Vincent, Haute Cuisine is a reserved, très simple tale that raises the occasional smile and tummy rumble but keeps hiccuping because of the drawn-out parallel story about her subsequent tour of duty.

Simultaneously rowdy and slick, Buffaloed is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance.

It’s true that every documentary about a musician made with their involvement functions, on some level, as a piece of marketing, an attempt to write the narrative of their life. That mode can get a bit wearying. But when the results are this endearing, it feels like a little celebration instead.

Once Avery's mission assumes a Freudian dimension, the allegory loses its moral force and changes from a meditation on justice, power and inequality into a gory melodrama.

A film with a counterproductive tendency to take its time...but unassumingly strong, moving performances and Darabont's durable storytelling make it a trip worth taking just the same.

Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.

One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.

Amusing but sloppy and overcomplicated.

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

The movie is as blunt as its title. It portrays such behavior as "evil" without offering any deep insights or revelations, beyond handing out the plot equivalent of a lollipop at the end of the movie as compensation for the vicarious anguish.

The filmmakers, who made “Leviathan,” the striking 2012 immersion into commercial fishing, seem to be arguing that Sagawa needs to be understood beyond moralistic preconceptions. Caniba did not make the case for me. I consider Sagawa repellent, and the movie an exercise in intellectualized scab-picking.

This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.

A middling superhero movie! I wish I could say that was incredible.

Reitman uses Altmanesque sound design and serpentine camera movements to convey the chaos and kineticism of a process in constant, frantic motion. But after a while, once we’ve met the principal players, the speechmaking starts and a potential comedy of political manners turns into a pious, tendentious morality play.

Rather than finding an interesting, resonant ambiguity in his experience, Ms. Kim and Mr. Dano settle for a kind of suggestive vagueness, losing the thread of their character in the snow, steam and cigarette smoke that provide the film's main visual motif and perhaps also its dominant metaphor.

The film, which is better written than staged, could have been funnier if its actors weren't playing against type.

Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.

It doles out information so arbitrarily that you are robbed of the twin pleasures of figuring out clues and figuring out you've been fooled.

The terrain is so familiar that it has a slightly stifling effect, even in Mr. Plympton’s demented hands. We long ago loved these characters to death.

Harnessing the twin virtues of drollness and economy, Mr. Tully keeps scenes brief and melodrama on the margins.

Unfolding like a medieval horror movie, Delta is sometimes laughable but often admirable.

A lovely drift of a movie, Go Go Tales commands your attention even as it lulls you along. Conspicuously inspired by John Cassavetes's "Killing of a Chinese Bookie," among other touchstones, it is a sincere and inspired meditation on art and creation, but in a loose, funny key.

Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.

The wonder of Mighty Joe Young is the mobility of the mechanical star, but even that novelty wears thin after a while.

When it’s not being overly promotional, it can be interesting.

The result is a good-looking but overstuffed genre pileup that confuses as often as it compels.

The whole thing is in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff.

Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.

Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show.

Not everything that happens in Fighting entirely makes sense -- it’s a fable, after all, and a fable doesn't necessarily have to -- but it breathes with a rough, exuberant realism that you rarely see in movies of its kind.

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.

Stargirl was published twenty years ago, and its age occasionally shows in this adaptation; some of the story beats and character qualities (particularly those of the rather precious title character) have congealed into cliché. But Hart (who wrote the screenplay with Kristin Hahn and Jordan Horowitz) is such an enchanting filmmaker, her storytelling style so warm and welcoming, that those concerns fade.

Three Men and a Baby follows the French film as faithfully as it possibly can, and it too revolves around one lone idea: that there's humor in the spectacle of a grown man, heretofore ignorant of his own gentler nature, discovering that he can indeed administer formula and change diapers. The hilarity inherent in this has its limits, but it's a premise with enough timeliness and warmth to account for the first film's success. And in terms of success, this glossier, more effervescent remake will undoubtedly outstrip the original.

This unremarkable story, along with cheap-looking visual effects and Soto’s colorless direction, is a prime example of somnambulist filmmaking that lulls the audience into a mindless stupor. At least the Reyes family is a force to be reckoned with; their chaotic ensemble scenes are the most delightful, and truly unexpected, of the movie.

Crowding the screen with jarring sounds and disturbing visuals, Bateman experiments with so many cinematic frills and fancies that Munn’s touching work is too often obscured.

Unlawful Entry manages to be more gripping than it is convincing, thanks to the story's inevitable movement toward a violent showdown.

The movie depicts Mr. Ducasse’s sweeping streak — he prepares food for the homeless in Brazil and concocts a deluxe restaurant at Versailles — competently if not brilliantly. A screening of the film accompanied by a tasting menu afterward, though — that would be something.

The result is a personal film that feels oddly impersonal. The tonal clutter overwhelms Keshavarz’s genuinely interesting story.

Despite swooping camera movements and elaborate stagecraft, the film produces detachment rather than immediacy.

More of a sketch than a fully developed portrait.

A mildly amusing Japanese appropriation of 1950's American detective movies.

Wargnier's sumptuous, moving new film, captures both the hope of the returning Russians and their brutal betrayal.

Works best when it sticks with the gentle humor and pathos of its literary source.

Mr. Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.

The freer and more sophisticated approach of "Divine Intervention" makes these traditional-minded documentaries look somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned by comparison, but both have a value as reportage that Mr. Suleiman's film does not pretend to have.

It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.

As a portrait of anxious, status-conscious Brooklyn parents living in a chiaroscuro of self-righteousness and guilt, Carnage misses its mark badly.

What sustains The New Age through these falterings are its edgy stars, its lively unpredictability, and the essential seriousness of Mr. Tolkin's thoughts. Even when working in an atypically upbeat mode, in a film that never dares follow its dark prophecy to the bitter end, he sustains a disturbing frankness. [16 Sept 1994, p.C5]

For all Mr. Boyle’s labors Trance principally comes off as a showcase for his brio, a spirit that animates all his choices, visual and otherwise.

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

Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.

A movie of epically assaultive noise and nonsense.

Although Mr. Leguizamo wisely underplays a role that is just short of saintly, the character is still a filmmaker's bogus, bleeding-heart contrivance in a movie that is much less truthful than it pretends to be.

These tales of upward mobility seem at odds with Mr. Pérez-Rey's choice to include a clip from the 1983 remake of "Scarface," in which Al Pacino, playing a Marielito thug, introduces a machine gun as his "little friend."

Mixes method and madness to chart the evolution of a counterculture phenomenon.

If only for its portrait of a land and a fascinating culture, Oka! is worth the journey.

If Mr. D’Ambrose doesn’t quite earn his pretensions, it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker thinking so far outside the box.

If anything, it has hauled back much too briskly on the strings of the heart and has strained a few muscles in the process.

The movie turns out to be a predictable and somewhat sentimental lower-depths love triangle, but Ms. Braga almost makes it work.

Like Mr. Wenders's previous film, last year's "Until the End of the World," this one begins as a swirl of dazzling ambition and at midpoint turns into a mess. Even so, and even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it is one of the more intriguing messes on screen.

A documentary that presents the sexual exploitation of young women as a systemic cancer that feeds on public misconception as much as male appetites.

Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, Zeros and Ones lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.

In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.

It’s sweet, personal and tedious.

This implication that virility trumps effeteness is, amid an otherwise straightforward comedy, an uncomfortably regressive way to tell the story of how people vie for power in hard times.