Rachel Saltz

This kind of fantasy-spectacle is Mr. Varman’s forte, not storytelling. When the singing and dancing and action stop, which is less often than you might think, so does “Kalank.”

Super Deluxe, though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act.

The moral seems as tacked on as the villain. But it’s a sweet thought and not entirely out of keeping with a movie that for all its crassness, comic and commercial, is basically good-spirited.

The makers of the Bollywood movie Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga have a touching, if slightly demented, belief in the transformative power of art. How to combat ugly stereotypes and entrenched beliefs? Put on a show!

Mr. Bhansali is painting with a broad brush.

A dramatic life does not necessarily a dramatic film make.

If “Badrinath” ends up being less about female empowerment than about schooling gents on a cardinal rule, its pop comes from Ms. Bhatt.

Avoiding flabby subplots, Mr. Dholakia keeps Raees taut and suspenseful, even at two and a half hours, though it probably has a song too many

The movie, written and directed by Neeraj Pandey, is not hagiographic or overly obvious. Instead, it’s something of a quiet muddle, with too many squandered or dramatically blurry scenes.

Mr. Roshan, an appealing dancer, works hard to twinkle his way into our affections and make Sarman something more than a cardboard hero. He can’t, but the effort is appreciated.

Because the filmmakers have given their characters labels (rebel, guru, villain) instead of personalities, the movie’s bid for epic resonance feels particularly hollow.

Based, sometimes loosely, sometimes carelessly, sometimes pointlessly, on “Great Expectations,” the Hindi movie Fitoor is at all times more Bollywood than Dickens.

Ms. Kongara seems to know the clichés of fighter movies and is mostly unembarrassed to embrace them. That keeps the film humming along, as does Mr. Madhavan, who grows in stature along with Adi.

There’s plenty of story here, but Bajirao Mastani has more visual pop than narrative traction.

The director, Sooraj R. Barjatya, courts and embraces cliché at every turn, which is both the movie’s charm and its limitation.

India’s Daughter is a portrait of a place and time. And for all of its horrors, the movie has a positive message, too: Out of tragedy — and this case is just one of many — can come galvanizing change.

Mr. Khan is this movie’s best weapon. Playing a familiar character type, the world-weary detective, he gives a performance, full of small, sly details, that doesn’t seem familiar at all.

With its light silent comedy, Mr. Wenders’s film presents movie history as a meeting of the inventive and the inevitable — a playful lark.

Through it all, Mr. Taylor’s creative mysteries remain intact; a master of the casual and the vernacular (a good way to learn about movement, he says, is to watch football halftime shows), he nonetheless approaches the mystical.

The hapless secret agent heroes of Kabir Khan’s revenge thriller Phantom, could have used some pointers before being sent into the field.

Although Brothers is a remake of Gavin O’Connor’s 2011 “Warrior,” its plotting, timeouts for montages and a song or two — Kareena Kapoor appears as a spangly item girl, the sole female in a sea of leering chorus boys — are echt Hindi movie. Even more so is its emotional appeal.

For much of its first half, Bombay Velvet hums with the kind of energy found in movies by the 1970s American directors....Mr. Kashyap is perhaps too faithful to his Bollywood imperatives, though. In the grand tradition, his film is overlong (149 minutes) and overplotted.

This movie, as the title suggests, is set up to be Piku’s story: How will she make a life? But the filmmakers let Mr. Bachchan overwhelm the story. Ms. Padukone, an always likable performer, remains in his shadow, just as Piku remains in Bhashkor’s, liberated but without real agency.

The twisty story has a kink or two too many, a problem of whodunit plotting rather than of Bollywood excess. And the war comes across here as a kind of heightened backdrop rather than real crisis. But these aren’t fatal deficiencies in a film more attuned to movie-made ideas of history and style than to history itself.

If the movie gets a bit gooey at times that’s probably an occupational hazard when considering the sublime. And Ms. Honigmann’s restraint — there’s something classical in her style, too — keeps the film from floating away. When it threatens to, something piercing or traumatic brings it back to earth, where any account of art belongs.

Mr. Puri works hard, but the strain shows and so do the movie’s seams. And Mr. Khurrana, who rides the line between ingratiating and annoying, has trouble carrying the movie.

I is exuberant and unselfconscious but too cartoonish to engage your emotions. The onslaught of images and music will engage your senses, though, even as you’re left giggling at the too-muchness of it all.

Mr. Hirani remains an excellent storyteller, weaving his disparate story strands into a convincing, satisfying whole — a rare Bollywood feat.