The ideological charge leveled for decades at this strain of filmmaking is that such eye-catching tableaus romanticize poverty, but prettified squalor has become sadly familiar in global documentary filmmaking. In Machines, even at barely more than an hour, the style leads to diminishing returns.

The movie’s driving force is its mythic performance scenes, which are choreographed, sung and acted with clear, balletic conviction by the film’s star, Q’orianka Kilcher.

In a scene puzzlingly late in the film, Mr. Blahnik, who apparently still makes samples by hand, walks through his factory and finesses a sensuous heel out of a stump of wood. More of that would have made this confection about a radiant man into something sturdier.

Part of the pleasure of this film, directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”), lies in the rediscovery of what wonderful actors they can be, and how good they are together.

Police Academy 2 isn't as funny as its predecessor, but as sequels go it's certainly amusing. [31 Mar 1985, p.55]

While it's very much a retread, it succeeds in following up the first film's humor with more in a similar vein.

Freddy Krueger is the most talkative of slashers, and also the most creative. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, he displays a great debt to Dali in concocting surreal visions for his prey. When Freddy enters the dreams of his teen-age victims, ordinary objects become armed and dangerous.

Given the audacity, gusto and hell-for-leather filmmaking on display, the prospect of subsequent installments does not seem unreasonable.

Dumber, less inventive and not as pretentious as “Sicario” (released in 2015, directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Mr. Sheridan), it both advances and retreats, expanding on the original and narrowing its scope.

When eventually, as it must, the story makes its demands on the characters, things slow down considerably. However, The Secret of My Success still leaves you with a good feeling about the idiocies of Big Business.

It is a dreadfully silly film, which is not to say that it is totally bad. Its horrors are not horrible, its terrors are not terrifying, its violence is ludicrous—which may be an advantage—but it does move along. There is not a great deal of excitement, but we manage to sustain some curiosity as to how things will work out. The Omen is the kind of movie to take along on a long airplane trip.

The documentary stirs up most of its sporadic excitement in the surfing footage, of which there is plenty. The imagery, especially the aerial shots, gives a sense of Mr. Hamilton’s precision and how close he comes to wiping out.

Such a dynamic personality as Mr. Turner’s could use a more dynamic documentary to illuminate it. As it is, “Dealt” remains a pleasing — if inoffensive — portrait.

Johnny Dangerously winds down as it moves along, eventually descending to a lowest common denominator of dopey adolescent gags that overpower the parody. Still, even at its thinnest, it remains good-humored and intermittently entertaining.

Bewildering at some points and ineffectual at others, but it isn't dull. Its frankly grandiose style is transporting in its way, as is the story itself, even in this watered-down form.

Even though most of the gags are too familiar or too dumb to be hilarious, Airplane II is too good-natured to be a serious irritant.

Red Dawn may be rabidly inflammatory, but it isn't dull. Mr. Milius does know how to keep a story moving. He might well have turned this into a genuinely stirring war film, if he had not also made it so incorrigibly gung-ho. But the effectiveness of its chilling premise, from a story by Kevin Reynolds, is dissipated by wildly excessive directorial fervor at every turn.

The movie is at its most engaging when examining the near-monopolies controlling chicken farmers in the United States.

The director Sebastián Lelio should have been a good fit for this story if only because of the sensitivity he’s brought to female-driven movies like “Gloria.” Although Disobedience seems to offer him similar material — female desire up against the patriarchy — it defeats him.

While this worthy film sidesteps clichés — there are no horrid flashbacks or emotional speeches — its spareness occasionally feels planned rather than spontaneous. After a powerful first half, later scenes offer diminishing returns.

The screenplay, by W. D. Richter, remains bright and lively throughout, but the plot just isn't full enough to carry a feature film. The characters are vivid, and uniformly well-played, and their pre-pod lives are fairly well established. But an hour into the film, once the menace is identified, the few remaining humans begin fleeing for their lives, and after that it's just run, run, run.

Clearly, the magnet of this picture, which has been a phenomenal success in Italy and other parts of Europe, is this cool-cat bandit who is played by Clint Eastwood, an American cowboy actor who used to do the role of rowdy in the Rawhide series on TV. Wearing a Mexican poncho, gnawing a stub of cheroot and peering intently from under a slouch hat pulled low over his eyes, he is simply another fabrication of a personality, half cowboy and half gangster, going through the ritualistic postures and exercises of each.

It’s more of a document than a documentary; calling it cinema seems like an error of categorization.

As wild as the premise is, Under Siege is almost guiltily enjoyable.

In the final half-hour, things start picking up, not just because of the impending surprise victory of Donald J. Trump and the way these players react to it.

It looks beautiful and moves swiftly but never quite takes full imaginative flight.

A good deal more tolerable than any such gimmick movie has a right to be.

The superb cast provides mild pleasures, as do some aspects of the elaborate mystery itself. And that’s all, folks.