Noah can be silly or sublime, but it's never less than fascinating. I was on board from start to finish.

In all candor, and with all the amity I can muster, Divergent is as dauntingly dumb as it is dauntingly long.

These miniatures magnify their subjects, and ennoble them. The picture is anguishing to see, but it isn't missing anymore.

The movie commits the sin of boredom, partly because Ms. Martin is exceedingly inexpressive.

For precursors of Guy's perversity, one would have to go back to W.C. Fields, who made antic art out of his characters' abhorrence of children.

The main — and for my money only — attraction in Le Week-End, which was directed by Roger Michell, is the marvelous Scottish actress Lindsay Duncan. She is witty, fiercely intelligent and intensely sexy in the role of Meg, a woman stuck in a failing marriage.

This tale of forbidden friendship between a bear and a mouse is so winning that audiences will cherish it as the classic it's sure to become.

Do not attempt to see this film, derived loosely from the videogame of the same name, unless you're prepared for wobbly writing, lead-footed direction and acting that must have been boosted by nitrous-oxide injectors, plus a starring performance that could have used a boost and didn't get one.

Real life is not the movie's concern. Mr. Anderson's lovely confection — that's a pastry metaphor — keeps us smiling, and sometimes laughing out loud. Yet acid lurks in the cake's lowest layers.

The director, Arie Posin, and his co-writer, Matthew McDuffie, have tried to do with their film — fill a bare-bones version of the Hitchcock film with an illusion of life. They do succeed sporadically.

Chiemi Karasawa's unblinking documentary feature watches Elaine Stritch struggle with the toughest role of her life—being old, and in constantly uncertain health.

Wonderfully fresh and affecting fable from India.

Much of the fun is awfully silly. The story strains logic, as well as credulity. It's been cobbled together, often crudely, from pieces of classic predecessors. (Here snippets of Hitchcock, there stretches of "Speed," with wings on the bus.) Yet the silliness parades itself in a spirit of cheerful self-awareness, while Liam Neeson fills the thrill quotient impressively as an air marshal.

Growth is the film's subtext, and finally its subject. Never has a line of dialogue been more freighted with symbolism, or more grounded in literal reality, than when Barbu says, ever so quietly, "Mother, please unlock me."

Whatever possessed the people who made this film to believe its ponderous style would appeal to contemporary audiences? One answer may lie in a variant of the mostly true proposition that no one sets out to make a bad film. No one chooses ponderousness as a goal; it comes unbidden, with deadly earnestness.

Daisy was written without irony, wit or any grounding in reality. She's a barefooted flower child in a flatfooted fiasco.

The result is fitfully interesting, and Mr. Kinnaman, best known for "The Killing" on television, compels our empathy with a kind of macho melancholia. Still, the whole thing comes down to an action adventure that's graphics-rich, logic-poor, coherence-challenged and pleasure-impaired.

Mr. Goldsman, a first-time director though a veteran screenwriter, has been done in by the source material. Either he climbed aboard a horse that was too much for him, or the universe gave him a bum steer.

The new film may not qualify for masterpiece status, but it's an enthralling portrait of a man — an exceptionally brilliant and articulate man — who personified the courage, complexity and moral ambiguity of his tortured time.

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

The Lego Film has a specialness all its own. There's never been a hodgepodge quite like it.

This adroit and understated coming-of-age film reminded me of the New Wave of Czech films in the 1960s, but with a distinctive poignancy that translates to wisdom.

The most intriguing question it raises is whether our feelings about Vermeer may be changed by the likelihood of him having used optics of one sort or another. The answer is yes, unavoidably, but not necessarily for the worse.

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.

Like Father, Like Son has still more on its mind — a vision of a Japan in which work will be balanced with leisure and love.

With someone else in the central role, Gloria might have been cloyingly sentimental or downright maudlin. With Ms. García on hand, it's a mostly convincing celebration of unquenchable energy.

Ride Along, set in Atlanta, gives shoddiness a bad name.

This is a film with a positive message that's delivered eloquently, and who's to say that joyous purpose doesn't have its place?