Ms. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.

By keeping its focus admirably tight, the sober and sobering Israeli documentary The Law in These Parts presents a devastating case against the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Gerhard Richter may not fling paint at the canvas, Jackson Pollock-style, but as Corinna Belz shows in her documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, he can be his own kind of action painter.

Well made, and for once the talking-heads format is satisfying.

This history is too recent to seem dry, and the film gets an added emotional punch from interviews with former tenants, whose memories mix fondness with anger and loss.

May not be fully satisfying as a documentary. But it has what any good movie needs: a star — the ever-game soprano Natalie Dessay.

These are vivid, flawed, even introspective characters. And they're classic American strivers. With rodeo, but not just that, they hope to go beyond where they have been.

These interviews form the backbone of !W.A.R., and like the film, they're passionate, contentious, funny, sincere, politically attuned.

The writer-director Anusha Rizvi, making her feature debut, shoots her story efficiently and with visual panache, but after a compelling setup her script runs out of juice.

Patang ("The Kite"), Prashant Bhargava's first feature, has a lovely, unforced quality. That's because Mr. Bhargava lets his story, set during the annual kite festival in Ahmedabad, India, tell itself, unfolding slowly as he follows filmmaking's most basic and most sinned-against dictum: Show, don't tell.

Edmon Roch has a great story to tell in Garbo the Spy, and he recounts it with the flair of a Hollywood spy movie: "Garbo" is dramatic, entertaining, even funny in parts.

By turns frustrating and moving, Ali Samadi Ahadi's documentary The Green Wave, about the Green Revolution in Iran, gets a jolt from footage shot by the people for the people on the people's cellphones.

It also shows, perceptively and often sweetly, a broader slice of young, urban, educated life in India as the three deal with careers, love and happiness.

Ms. Rohrwacher combines a documentary impulse (effective in family scenes) with a more allegorical one. Her film gets clunky when allegory has the upper hand, and that means Corpo Celeste often stumbles, along with its 12-year-old heroine, Marta (Yle Vianello).

The filmmakers retain a touching faith that most Americans won't tolerate injustice when they know about it. This film is meant to teach them.

It's very much a Hindi film, but updated and delivered with conviction and style.

At times you wish Mr. Marx had sharper storytelling skills (or a better editor). Some important details seem clear only in retrospect, and some remain murky. Still, Mr. Marx shines a light on a place and a way of life that are rapidly changing.

If only Red Flag were funnier and tighter and had a sharper idea about what it means to blur the lines between self-interrogation and self-absorption. As it is, the movie throws off too few sparks.

The filmmakers have no patience for details, either basic or telling. Their elliptical method starts to seem lazy, and Jean's plight, a journey from bad to bad, starts to seem a stacked deck. Through it all Mr. Genty holds your attention with his sober dignity. Too bad the filmmakers frequently let that slip into pathos.

Intermittently absorbing, if deliberately stripped of drama.

There's a lovely, unhurried quality to Mr. Hosoda's storytelling, which nicely matches the clean, classically composed images of his outer story.

At one point the lions make a meal of a lovely young zebra they've just killed. That spelled the end for the little boy sitting next to me. "I'm too scared," he said, and he dragged his mom out of the theater. Sorry, kid, it's a jungle out there, even in Disneynature.

Big Miracle gets off to a shaky start, but once revved up, it becomes an involving work-against-the-clock-and-the-odds action movie.

The movie plods along self-consciously, and when the big twist occurs (you'll most likely see it coming), it complicates the plot, but not Butch, who remains a paragon. That's the problem with Blackthorn: it goes all mushy when contemplating its grizzled, out-of-time hero.

Korkoro (the word means freedom in Romani) has an unexpectedly leisurely quality as it shows the texture of Gypsy life - the music-making, the intense bonds with horses and the natural world - and its awkward fit with modernity.

If the storytelling disappoints (shocking!), the film mostly doesn't. It relies on action and effects and Bollywood's trump card, star power, to carry the day. This is Mr. Khan's movie, and once he sheds Shekhar's droopy locks, he shines as the deadpan, action-hero robot with digital snot and smooth moves on the dance floor.

Undone by its very premise: that the two stories it tells can coexist in the same film.

The fine-boned, delicate-looking Ms. Casadesus, now 97, is a pleasure to watch. And the not-delicate-looking Mr. Depardieu does his usual excellent job. But their scenes together, if sweet enough, aren't particularly convincing or moving.

Inoffensive and low-key, Gayby is too diffuse to have much pop when it comes to the topics at hand: love and friendship, and how unconventional modern permutations might help rewrite the script of romance.

The interviews are mostly good and instructive, but the well-chosen historical footage is better.

Has a complicated story to tell, about black surfers and, more broadly, about African-American history and the history of surfing. Great topics all, but that's a lot of ground to cover and, unsurprisingly, the film often feels a bit scattershot.

Aging is probably the real theme here, but it's approached sidelong and has no punch. Still, only the nostalgia has any real conviction.

As storytelling, "The Global Catch" often falls short. It has too much to cover to be comprehensive and can seem a bit random. As a consciousness raiser, the film fares much better.

Mr. Wexler has found interesting people and useful, funny and sometimes crackpot-seeming information.

It’s dragged down by non-scene after non-scene, and filmmaking choices that don’t earn their keep.

The film needs an injection of Bollywood’s unembarrassed, anything-goes, bigger-than-life spirit, which embraces willy-nilly — as does Mr. Rushdie’s novel — the vulgar, the fanciful and the frankly unbelievable.

The film mixes period footage with visually unappealing contemporary interviews. If you're expecting voluble, outsize personalities with colorful war stories, you'll be disappointed.

Ms. Rao gives the city an immediacy it doesn't usually have in films. But she has more feel for mood than for storytelling.

The reunion of Ms. Caplan and Mr. Starr, cast mates on Starz network's "Party Down," seemed intriguing. That series, though, with all the fizz and social comedy that this movie lacks, was a better showcase for them.

If the movie feels old-school (with new-school production values), consider its pedigree. It's no wonder: Shaolin is a reimagining of the 1982 "Shaolin Temple," in which Jet Li made his debut.

Fast and mostly fun, the movie also seems compulsively too much, throwing everything it can think of at you, lest it fail to entertain.

The talented Mr. Ross makes Dre's panic and adrenaline-fueled behavior all too believable. You watch as he sees his horizons dim. What could be sadder?

Occasionally funny, though its dirty riffs - most provided by Kevin Hart as the Happily Divorced Guy - are as formulaic as its earnest parts.

Worse, you never root for Ms. Calderon's Luz, who goes from sullen to more sullen to a bit less sullen. She has discipline - to lift, she has to keep her weight down and train constantly - but not much compassion and no joy.

Bel Borba Aqui gives us plenty to look at, but not much to think about.

The movie goes mushy when it should be critical, and leaves you with questions that it's not prepared to answer.

Through it all Mr. Allman, who played the skeevy Tommy on "True Blood," is a pleasant presence but blank. And Don's crisis of faith, which should be the movie's core and engine, is never really convincing. It's spelled out but dramatically inert, lost among the yuks of the Reed kookiness.

Mr. Mortensen keeps you watching, even when the movie’s storytelling underwhelms. But Everybody Has a Plan is less about story than about texture and atmosphere. They stay with you, as does the haunted visage of Agustín, drifting on the delta waters.

Though Weil remains fascinating, Ms. Haslett's film, even when it uses more traditional documentary techniques, mostly isn't.

A wearisome mix of miserableness and dark humor.

A mix of gently outraged populism and low-powered romantic comedy, Vishal Bhardwaj's Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola might have been better with a chunk lopped off its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Deliberately small-scale, Five Time Champion has tough-minded moments but too often veers toward the sweet and even the treacly. It's pleasant enough, but too careful to be very involving.

While the movie has its heart in the right place, the first-time writer-director Rehana Mirza doesn't yet have the skills to shape the narrative into something moving or revealing.

Chalet Girl may not be particularly creative or genre busting or even a great example of a romantic comedy. But its premise might make you smile.

Leonie Gilmour was almost certainly unusual and unusually self-reliant. Too bad that the film that bears her name ultimately reduces her to the mother of her child.

The slick filmmaking - the movie has a glossy, Hollywood-ready feel that sometimes tips into the cutesy - works against its themes.

Ambitious but uneven, Kai Po Che (based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life”) mixes, not quite successfully, traditional Bollywood storytelling with something less conventional.

Full of indie mannerisms - compulsive swearing, jokey violence, quirk-laden characters - Flypaper can't quite manage to find a style or a comic groove of its own.

What should be rousing stuff - a republic is born! the chains of feudalism thrown off! - remains a kind of lavishly illustrated history lesson. Even the irrepressible Mr. Chan (this is his 100th film) seems subdued.

Lost in all this is Halston, who comes through only in dribs and drabs. If you're curious about him, skip this film. Read about him - you'll learn far more on his Wikipedia page - and look at his clothes. And if you're a filmmaker, go out and make a decent movie about him: he deserves it.

Mr. Sarmah's film is well intentioned, but it comes off as a kind of Cliffs Notes to enlightenment.

It's hard to completely dislike a movie in which Mr. James makes like Fay Wray, hitching a ride on the back of his gorilla pal, Bernie (voiced by Nick Nolte), as Bernie clambers up a bridge.

Ms. Portes's script strains credulity, and it's not helped by Mr. Martini, who can't find the right tone.

Mr. Quandour's utopian vision may seem improbable - that fairy tale quality again - but his odd, guileless, folkloric movie doesn't feel cloying so much as something from a different world.