Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.

By its end, “Misericordia” emerges as a drama by turns chilling and absurd, with some of its twists daring us toward incredulity. Yet Mr. Guiraudie’s mix of mischief-making and straight-faced conviction keeps us continuously unsettled, and continuously curious.

“Snow White” is the fairest of them all, in the sense that fair can mean mediocre.

The almost nonstop fighting and Mr. Quaid’s low-key charm are enough to make the movie a serviceable action offering. Moreover, the script, though focused on wacky spasms of violence, has a strong human element at its core.

While Mr. Holland is a clear talent with a screen presence at once natural and vivid, his character is passive to the point of emptiness. Any interesting resonances that might have been found in the idea of an actor having to relearn his own character, so to speak, are unfortunately absent here.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Messrs. Soderbergh and Koepp have followed one of (Elmore) Leonard’s Laws—“Leave out the parts that people skip”—to construct an electric, fast-paced thriller that amounts to one climactic scene piled atop another.

The compositions and palette are occasionally stunning (the cinematographer is Scott Siracusano), and while the story lacks a certain momentum, the intention, quite successful, is to keep a viewer curious.

The film is at its best in the way it keeps building the stakes of the character clash, thanks in large part to the virtuosity of the two lead actors.

With “Seven Veils” Mr. Egoyan has done something more interesting, weaving a new narrative into and around the opera until the two become a dense, dark thicket of their own.

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

There are many more questions in “CHAOS” than hard answers, but one thing is clear, namely the hypnotic quality of Mr. Morris’s filmmaking, enhanced to no small end by the dread in Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score and even in the demo recordings by Manson of his songs (which might have been sung by someone like Johnny Mathis, weirdly enough).

Last Breath, which runs a compact 91 minutes, doesn’t feel like a finished film: The dialogue is strictly functional, and there is so little time for establishing character that none of the three principals really makes an impression.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

It’s decently entertaining action; Mr. Campbell knows what he’s doing in that regard.

Ex-Husbands is more a poignant reflection than a fleshed-out story. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions to the various predicaments it considers. But Mr. Pritzker has a sagacious understanding of our various stumbles and humiliations, how we prove unable to make a marriage work or even communicate effectively with our children or parents.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

Much of “Over 30 Years Later,” without the surprise factor, seems very soft.

The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.

The performances are admirably committed, the scenario likably loony, and the jokes come in swift succession.

If “Brave New World” isn’t an event film, at least it’s competently executed, without resorting to played-out gimmickry such as skipping across the multiverse. And it gives the audience plenty of analogues for real-world problems.

The new movie has all the oft-mocked pretension of classic art film and none of the poetry. It’s a work of almost ostentatious mediocrity.

On a scene-to-scene basis, it’s an impressively taut film, but it left me wishing for a more compelling conclusion than “people are nasty to one another.”

The intricately choreographed fight scenes are amusing enough, not that they have a lot of impact given the overbearingly silly musical score and the lurching, chaotic plot.

The heart of the film is the emotional triangle of Petey, Li’l Petey and Dog Man, as the two erstwhile enemies both find something like love for the kitten (voiced by Lucas Hopkins Calderon and full of disarming innocence) and something like forgiveness for each other.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

As a document of Liza’s triumphs, talent and temperament, though, “Liza” is, like its subject, disarmingly sweet and completely lovable.

The plot is so cleverly constructed that its undertones sneak up on you. Their subtlety makes them that much more effective.