“Hotel Mumbai” is based on real events that took place in November 2008, when ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani Islamic terrorist organization, carried out an insanely-bold series of attacks on Mumbai, starting from the rail station and making their way to the Taj hotel where a number of guests were staying, including American ones.

A thriller directed by 

On Friday Gren Wells's "The Road Within," a low-key dramedy about affliction adapted from the 2010 German film "Vincent Goes to Sea," opened in New York and Los Angeles. It stars the young, promising Irish actor Robert Sheehan as a teenager stricken with Tourette's, whose cold-hearted father (Robert Patrick of "Terminator 2": Judgment Day") installs him in a mental clinic after his mother dies.

The opening of Neill Blomkamp’s “Chappie” sweeps across multiple stories in multiple places in early stage apocalypse-Johannesburg, South Africa. A helicopter fleet of robocops dives from the sky and blasts through a collection of menacing gangsters. It’s a lovely, frantic movement of action, editing and scoring. And then everything goes wrong after that. It’s common for critics to wish that movie characters would grow brains.

At one point in the much-praised crowd-pleaser Slumdog Millionaire, the [...]