The Hunt occupies a special place in the chockablock landscape of movie junk. This gleeful, gross-out gorefest looks as tacky and violent as its trackdown plot would suggest, and lives up to certain parts of its bad reputation. It is also funny, genuinely topical, extremely shrewd and, heaven help us, slyly wise. I liked it quite a lot.

Despite the numerous predictable jokes about geriatric sex, the movie is very appealing for numerous surprising reasons. Many of them have to do with ice fishing in Minnesota. [9 Dec 1993, p.A14]

Yet the nonsense content, being pure, is liberating, and allows us to savor all the machinery as machinery: the train, the plot, the pitch-imperfect dialogue, the huffing-puffing fights, the ridiculous stunts and, yes, the climactic train wreck. Here’s how filmmakers can fill screens when they don’t have a film to make.

Unconcerned with context or tonal nuance, it frames itself as an action thriller with a signature moment that could have been lifted from an old western.

Given that the character is a literal saint, and the script never stops reminding us how brave, honorable, loving and committed Mother Cabrini is, the movie suffers from a certain steadfast tone. It’s warm with fondness but never boiling with passion, and a major star might have succeeded in making Cabrini larger than life. As it is, she comes across as so pure that it’s a little difficult to relate to her.

The film contends admiringly, and convincingly, that Ralph Nader's authentic sense of outrage is the reason he persists when he can't prevail.

Ms. Stewart, who has maintained an impressively adventurous career since her “Twilight” days concluded more than a decade ago, helps keep the film upright, beautifully blending a moody exterior with the care of a lover and the anxiety skittering beneath it all as Lou tries to keep her world from coming completely apart.

American Made is one of the many children of “Goodfellas,” a true-crime story turned first-person narrative told by a charismatic ne’er-do-well surrounded by dubious characters and tantalizing subplots. None of these offspring, including American Made, have matched the chilling grandeur of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece, with its multifaceted characters and visual fluidity.

Watching this surrealist silliness, I would have welcomed the sight of a geezer on a riding mower.

Surprising as it may be, given an unpromising trailer, the 3D update of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth turns out to be perfectly charming as well as predictably eye-popping.

Entertaining but highly conventional documentary.

This is silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence.

Both performances are appealing, but Mr. Ashe’s screenplay is not well served by the laggard pace and low energy of his direction.

For those more concerned with what “The Avengers” movies do best — outsize spectacle and wry comedy — Age of Ultron has to be declared a victory.

This one’s pretty entertaining, although increasingly noisy and ultimately ridiculous.

A kind of blues song in its own right, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory is an affectionate attempt to showcase three major figures in the development of Chicago blues, musicians who spent their entire lives eclipsed by the oversized stars they played with.

The Boy Behind the Door is an underwritten movie and an underpopulated one, though missing people are less of a handicap to the narrative than missing information.

Mr. Reynolds can do goofily perplexed as well as anyone and is quite charming as Guy, who doesn’t know what’s going on, except that as “Blue Shirt Guy” he’s rocked the worldview of online gamers everywhere.

Grungily stylish and often funny, at least for a while, though all of the caveats and contradictions that apply to Tarantino films apply here: One man's--or boy's--stylization is another's profane, unrelenting and tedious brutality.

Camp X-Ray isn’t anti-American, despite much of Ali’s rhetoric. It is about the evils of ignorance, wherever it rears its ugly head.

Mr. Bulger does a fine enough job defending his own legacy, being, at age 87, a still-charismatic figure and one who refuses to condemn his brother, or even concede that the family knew everything about its black sheep’s nefarious career.

It’s a film that demands to be watched several times to figure it out, but although I occasionally enjoyed its mordant humor, it’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to sit through once.

Mr. Thayi doesn’t tell a straightforward version of the Hwang story, because he’s after more—the story of cloning itself, which will be enlightening for those of us on the fringes of science.

Cobbling together ideas from other, better movies, Rust isn’t original enough to be a must-see, but it didn’t deserve to be canceled because of an accident, either. Mr. Baldwin has been largely absent from the screen in recent years, and this effort is a reminder that, to use a word often applied to Harland Rust himself, he remains formidable.

Silly is endangered these days, and normal has come under withering fire from stupendous, yet tedious, visual effects. Busting ghosts used to be a lot more fun.

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

The butler, Cecil Gaines, is a fictional creation, an African-American Forrest Gump who bears special witness to the civil-rights movement while serving on the White House staff under seven presidents. The contrivance is stretched to its breaking point over a running time of 132 minutes; some of the episodes cross a different line from almost plausible to downright silly. That's not the whole story, though.

This is less a film in the lustrous Pixar tradition than a Disney fairy tale told with Pixar's virtuosity. As such, it's enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.