The subject matter is worthy of serious dramatic interrogation, and there’s a good movie in here someplace. But “After the Hunt” feels like a messy first-draft script, shoddily directed, rather than an accomplished feature from a veteran filmmaker.

For all of the care and imagination that have been lavished on the production, which was designed by Arthur Max and photographed by Dariusz Wolski, the film’s impact is best expressed by frequent aerial shots that are visually impressive and emotionally remote.

This film is what it is, a particularly generic genre piece that the bean counters at a once-great studio must have had reason to believe would turn a profit, mostly in the foreign market. Very possibly it will.

The movie isn't deep, or particularly intricate; it doesn't play all that much with the potential for mistaken identities, and the cruelty it depicts becomes repetitive or, worse still, desensitizing. But The Devil's Double does give us indelible images of Uday's decadence - the filmmakers say they're understated - and a double dip of dazzling acting.

With a screenplay by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee from his 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians is a parable of depressingly timeless relevance, which means it’s faithful to its source material.

A Working Man is watchable enough, with the occasional interjection of humor, but it’s a formulaic punch-’em-up that simply jams in as many fights as it can with little effort expended on plausibility.

Qualifies as a pleasant time-killer, but it's 20,000 leagues beneath what it might have been.

Mr. McCanlies's style lurches between the lyrical, the fantastical (flashbacks to the uncles' youth) and the clumsily antic, and Mr. Osment's performance is woefully stiff and inexpressive.

Dopamine could do with a bit more of whatever hormone governs pacing, but Mr. Decena is a director with a future. He knows how to connect with his actors.

300 presents a dual clash of civilizations. An action adventure that pits thousands of Persians against 300 brave Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, it also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.

This is filmmaking by the numbers meant to succeed by the numbers.

One of the many stylistic distinctions of this outwardly modest production is the complex voice that the filmmaker has found for his young hero.

A deeper problem in The King Is Alive is an almost total absence of spontaneity.

How do I count the ways this movie goes wrong?

The previous episode, “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” was as fresh and enjoyable as this one is semicoherent and dispiriting.

The heart of the Gru-niverse is slapstick and capers, but the balance is all off here.

The movie's tone is at war with its subject, and sometimes with its wavering self.

Motion is in copious supply -- a frenzied shootout at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum grows interminable -- but the workings of the abstract plot are unfathomable, the characters are unpleasant and a couple of assassinations leave us as cold as the corpses.

The Producers is nightmarish, in its febrile way, a head-bangingly primitive version of an overrated Broadway show that grew out of a clumsy 1968 movie with an inflated reputation.

Once Nacho gets the wrestling bug, though, it's all about Jack Black the irrepressible clown, and the comedy dies a slow death for lack of fresh ideas.

The Drop finds its humor in cringe comedy and the kind of cultural caricature that isn’t just tiresome but offhandedly so.

The brightest touch in the whole tale is a transvestite hooker’s little papillon, decked out in a DayGlo pink vest, but even the pooch seems glum, pricked-up ears notwithstanding.

A textbook case of a film that's befuddled by its subject.

This ripoff, directed by Jerry Zucker, has a few funny moments, but it's a sad sad sad sad example of what Hollywood is currently serving up -- and what audiences are swallowing -- as summer entertainment.

Unforeseeably bad things can happen to good performers.

The great lesson of the film is that humor, honest feelings and genuine exuberance trump technique.

Safe House is a sturdy enough thriller, but one that consistently defaults to the less interesting of its two lead characters.

Labor Day, adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard, is the kind of movie that turns clarity into stultification; everything is perfectly clear and almost everything — pie-making excepted — is perfectly lifeless.