Anthony Lane

Thank heaven for Dwayne Johnson, whose foot-wide smile will not be switched off, and who saves the life of the movie. Whether it deserves to be saved is another matter.

This film is at once sumptuous with thrills and surplus to requirements. Let sleeping aliens lie.

Schreiber moves with bearish stolidity, even when boxing, and nothing is more poignantly delayed than Chuck’s realization that most of his wounds were self-inflicted.

Gunn decides to treat the quest for meaning seriously — a lethal move that not only leads to the noisy palaver of the climax but also undermines Chris Pratt, who likes to hold these movies at arm’s length, as it were, and to probe them for pomposity.

To be fair, A Quiet Passion is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it’s when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity.

The first third of Aftermath is stripped to emotional basics (one man seized up with grief, another with guilt), and it delivers quite a jolt. Sadly, as the characters converge, the rest of the movie loses force; it slackens and then rushes, and the time frames feel out of joint.

Gray is hampered, to an extent, by treading in the tracks of Werner Herzog, who went to South America with Klaus Kinski, his leading man (or, as Herzog calls him, “my best fiend”), and returned with the extraordinary “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982).

Graduation, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is a mirthless farce. All that can go wrong does go wrong, and the process is both compelling and close to unwatchable.

It is this rage for authenticity, more than the leading lady, that transforms Ghost in the Shell into an American product. Here’s an irony: if anything preserves the unnerving quiddity and strangeness of the Japanese movie, it is Johansson.

Beauty and the Beast is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue.

T2 cannot hope to break the mold, as “Trainspotting” did, but Boyle and his cast rifle eagerly through the shards: a motley of plot scraps, crazed camera angles, flashbacks, trips, sight gags, and musical yelps.

As Adrien, Pierre Niney is extraordinary to behold: pale, tapered, and flickering, like a candle made flesh.

The over-all effect is as taut with tangible evidence as a detective story.

The thing that breaks the back of this movie, and makes the second half so much less prodigious than the first, is a simple matter of geography. Once the combatants are split up and scattered around the island (Packard here, Chapman there, Conrad and Marlow stuck in their own heart of darkness), the story loses focus and even starts to drag.

The curious thing is that, as with many big-budget horror flicks, this small French-Belgian movie feels too pleased with its own outrage; the grosser it grows, the less interesting it becomes. When the carnage was over, I went out and had a steak.

When Logan and Laura unleash their furious scythes nothing feels settled or satisfied. The world grinds on, fruitlessly weary and wild.

On the whole, Asante’s movie, though crammed with the white man’s treachery, has a dulled and inoffensive sheen, and cannot match the visual rigor that Ava DuVernay brought to “Selma.”

Again and again, its stark and suspenseful compositions strike the eye — figures in dark clothing, prone on a pale beach, with lines of wire, black warning flags, and the chill gray waves beyond.

Under its compelling influence, we are lured into feeling that these various lives, marked by vacuity and frustration, are in some way destined to end at the point of a gun — that the murderer and his victims coexist on a continuum of despair. Try telling that to the people of Aurora.

The film that results is at once panicky and abstruse, and we are left with little more than the delirious shine of McConaughey’s eyes and the preacherly rapture in his voice.

In short, we are watching an old-fashioned exploitation flick — part of a depleted and degrading genre that not even M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of Split, can redeem.

What follows, in the final half hour of the movie, is an astounding chamber piece, worthy of Strindberg, with the husband, the wife, and her aggressor stuck in a dance of doubt and death. With every shot, our sympathies flicker and tilt.

Dave’s dread of his brother hooks The Ardennes onto a long chain of fraternal crime dramas, from “The Public Enemy” (1931) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) to “We Own the Night” (2007). Pront can hardly be blamed if his actors lack the sinew of Cagney or Brando.

Layer by layer, this dumbfounding movie devises its magical recipe, and dares us to resist it: ketchup, mustard, two slices of pickle, and hold the irony. Delicious.

Where “Paterson” is tranquil to the point of inertia, Neruda, with its jumpy shifts of scene, its doses of casual surrealism, and its mashing of high politics against low farce, struck me as more of a poem. It reminds us that movies, by their very nature, owe far more to poetry than they ever will to the novel. The story is only the start.

This movie has almost no bite but plenty of moseying charm, and what it does get right is the idea of poets as perpetual magpies.

Almodóvar - whose penchant for narrative complexity grows ever deeper - latches on to the idea of personal history as a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

The movie belongs wholeheartedly to Bening, and to the age, come and gone, that she enshrines.

Catch the film on the largest screen you can find, with a sound system to match, even if that means journeying all day. Have a drink beforehand. And, whatever you do, don’t wait for a DVD or a download.

Allied is written by Steven Knight and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who seems uncertain whether to treat the tale as a wrenching saga of split loyalties or as a glamorous jaunt. Having gathered all the ingredients for derring-do, he forgets to turn up the heat, and the derring never does.

I happen to find the result intrusive, presumptuous, and often absurd, but, for anyone who thinks that all formality is a front, and that the only point of a façade is that it should crack, Jackie delivers a gratifying thrill.

As is proved by documentary footage at the end, Garth Davis’s film is based on a true story; though wrenching, there is barely enough of it to fill the dramatic space, and the second half is a slow and muted affair after the Dickensian punch of the first.

In all, the movie is a cunning and peppy surprise, dulled only by the news that no less than four sequels await. Will the spell not wear off before then?

Even if you love the film, as I do, all the lurching, stop-and-go exchanges of these unquiet souls may leave you with a craving for “The Philadelphia Story,” or something equally streamlined.

That stance of hers will outrage many viewers, as Verhoeven intends it to, but the question of whether Elle is pernicious nonsense or an excruciating black comedy is brushed aside in Huppert’s demonstration of sangfroid. This, she shows us, is how to stand up for yourself in style. She’s the best.

I felt sorry for Gyllenhaal, berated in both his personae for being weak, and for Adams, strapped and laced into a role that scarcely lets her breathe.

It may be weaker in the resolution than in the setup, but that is an inbuilt hazard of science fiction, and what lingers, days after you leave the cinema, is neither the wizardry nor the climax but the zephyr of emotional intensity that blows through the film.

The quiet joke of the film is that you could scarcely meet two less revolutionary souls.

The result, though corny at times, treads close to madness and majesty alike, and nobody but Gibson could have made it.

How far the story of Christine Chubbuck ripples outward, registering the cultural stresses of its time (and ours), I’m not sure. As an eyewitness report of a lonely soul on the rack, however, the movie is hard to beat.

Park has conjured up not only his smartest but also his most stirring film to date. And the least icky.

Precisely thirty-six times more interesting than “The Girl on the Train.” Where the conceit of that movie feels timid, cooked up, and culturally thin, Anvari’s is nourished by a near-traumatic sense of history, and, in terms of feminist pluck, Rashidi’s presence, in the leading role, is both gutsier and more plausible than the combined efforts of all the main performers in Taylor’s film.

Does it matter that the plot is so full of holes that you could use it to drain spaghetti?

In short, Peter Berg has done it again. You come out shaken with excitement, but with a touch of shame, too, at being so easily thrilled.

Arnold’s very strength — the mashup of grime and epiphany — is in danger of becoming a shtick. Then, there’s the length: an elasticated plot doesn’t really suit a director who is at her best in specific locations, where people get stuck like flies.

Neel’s cast is terrific, from Schnetzer and Flaherty, with their soft and soulful — and thus punchable — faces, to Jake Picking, who plays the leader of the frat pack, and whose Popeye arms and buggy unblinking eyes make him both a monster and, if you stand aside from the melee, a bad joke.

Traces of real history are hard to spot in Fuqua’s Western, but there isn’t much evidence of a real Western, either. You sense that an entire genre, far from being revitalized, is being plundered for handy tips.

Maguire has the nerve to give her heroine a big speech on the “integrity” of proper journalism — this after Bridget Jones’s Baby has made fun of foreigners’ names, and arranged for her to put the wrong Asian guest in front of the cameras. (Do all Asians look alike to her? Is that the joke?) So reliably does she embarrass herself at every public event that the film, trudging by on automatic, becomes an embarrassment, too.

As “Eight Days a Week” springs from color to black-and-white, and as frenzied action is intercut with stills, we get a delicious sense of doubleness. The Beatles now belong to an honored past, stuck there like an obelisk, and yet here they are, alive—busting out all over, time and time again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The movie only stirs in the final twenty minutes.

Whether the film cuts it as a fully functioning weepie is another matter. I was in pieces after “Blue Valentine,” and had to be swept up from the floor of the cinema by the guy who retrieves the spilled popcorn, but the The Light Between Oceans left me disappointingly intact.

Huggins is brash and brisk, of course, with Moretti cleaving to an old-fashioned myth of the American interloper. But Turturro is slightly too broad for the occasion, relishing the outbursts of the spoiled star.

Lo and Behold is, by virtue of its scope, one of Herzog’s more scattershot endeavors.

I gradually grew more interested in Curtis, who has his own solitude to cope with. This represents the first non-comic leading role for Robinson (moviegoers will know him from “Pineapple Express” and “Hot Tub Time Machine,” among other films), and he commands it with a gruff and amiable ease.

The result is at once a work of efficient charm and, to those of us who treasured Frears in his more acerbic phase, a mild disappointment.

To say that the movie loses the plot would not be strictly accurate, for that would imply that there was a plot to lose, and that Ayer, in a forgetful moment, left it in the glove compartment of his car on the way to the studio.

The best reason to watch Little Men is Michael Barbieri, who musters a blend of soulfulness and aggression that would be remarkable at any age.

Greengrass is as dexterous as ever, yet the result, though abounding in thrills, seems oddly stifled by self-consciousness and, dare one say, superfluous. Come on, guys. There are so many wrongs in the world. If Bourne could tear himself away from the mirror for a moment, could he not be persuaded to go and right them?

Schamus is a great producer of independent cinema, having overseen — and sometimes co-written — the work of Ang Lee, but this is the first movie he has directed, and the rhythm of the storytelling feels careful and courteous to a fault.

It’s not just a blast but, at moments, a thing of beauty, alive to the comic awesomeness of being lost in space.

To transform a TV series into a film is to surround yourself with pitfalls, and “Absolutely Fabulous,” sad to report, nosedives into every one of them.

Another hitch, for Feig, is that, whereas the cheesiness of the effects in the earlier “Ghostbusters” was part of its rackety charm, no current audience will settle for anything less than a welter of wizardry. And so he piles it on, until whole sections of the movie collapse beneath the visual crush.

The practiced calmness of Kore-eda’s approach is such that you barely notice the speed at which he tugs the plot along and flips from one setting to the next.

Owen has made immense progress, to which Life, Animated is a stirring tribute, yet it leaves a trail of questions unanswered or unasked.

If this film has a secret, it dwells in the cinematography — by Vittorio Storaro, no less, who shot “The Conformist,” “Last Tango in Paris,” and “Apocalypse Now.” He worked with Allen on a segment of “New York Stories” (1989), but Café Society marks their first full-length collaboration, and the result is ravishing to behold.

Indeed, the whole film is oddly poised between the pensive and the peevish, with a topdressing of high jinks.

No surprise, then, that Goldblum seems a little lonely and marooned in the latest venture, which suffers from a nagging case of Smithlessness.

By the end of the movie, Refn has toyed with cannibalism, lesbian necrophilia, the egestion of an eyeball, and other minor sports, all of them filmed in lavish taste. It’s enough to make you reflect longingly on the Agatha Christie drama that he made for British TV in 2007. Say what you like about Miss Marple, at least she merely questioned her suspects. She didn’t eat them for tea.

The joke is that Wiener-Dog is about as non-epic as can be, but there’s also a sleight of hand, with the dazzle of the images distracting us from the fact that the movie has run out of plot. Meanwhile, the depths of doghood remain unplumbed.

For the most part, though, Love & Friendship is a frolic: crisp and closeted rather than expansive, with curt exchanges in drawing rooms, carriages, and gardens.

Why see this film? Partly because of the leading men, but mainly because of a girl. An Australian actress named Angourie Rice plays March’s daughter, Holly, who is thirteen.

As the feigning wears off, and Captain America: Civil War crawls to a close, you sense that the possibilities of nature have been not just exceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue seems like a special effect: “You’re being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,” Black Widow remarks to Iron Man. Translation: “Say something.”

The Lobster is more than a satire on the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender emotions.

The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on Kanigel’s book, and directed by Matthew Brown, feels sluggish and stuck, and it hits an insoluble crux.

A Bigger Splash is fiercely unrelaxing, and impossible to ignore. You emerge from it restive and itchy, as though a movie screen could give you sunburn, and the story defies resolution.

Where the eyes of a Disney princess grow wide as her pumpkin becomes a coach, the folk in Tale of Tales accept that miracles happen, being not an irruption into life but part of its natural flow.

Of the two attempts, I still prefer the one from my childhood.

But Byrne, who has lacked good movie roles of late, is marvellously grave.

There is much to savor here, especially the unforced performance of Judah Lewis — one more recruit to the terrific roster of younger actors who are streaming into the movies. Yet the film lacks the courage of its affliction.

The whole saga, complete with shootings and a car chase, is cooked up for the film. Meanwhile, when it comes to those with whom Davis worked so fruitfully to forge what he calls “social music,” we get nothing of Dizzy Gillespie or John Coltrane, say, and only the odd glimpse of Gil Evans (Jeffrey Grover).

Linklater barely puts a foot wrong, and he shows that a movie about happiness can be cogent and robust, rather than sappy or wispy; and yet, for all its gambolling mischief, Everybody Wants Some!! leaves us with plenty to rue.

When I first saw the movie, at a festival, it wavered on the brink of the precious. That changed on a second viewing. Most of Francofonia now seems tender, stirring, and imperilled.

The winner, on points, is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who crashes the party and leaves them both dumbfounded, not least because she has the wit, and the wherewithal, to confront evil while wearing a conical bustier.

Oddly, the effect of that imbalance is not just to heighten the charm of the film but to render it more credible: the course of true memory never did run smooth.

Yet Nichols’s movie, though smudged by its dénouement, is not wrecked, and already I am desperate — with a Roy-like yearning — to return to it, and to revel anew in its group portrait of those who are haunted by the will to believe.

Zootopia, like its heroine, is zesty, bright, and breakneck, with chase scenes and well-tuned gags where you half expect songs to be.

There are treasures in Knight of Cups. It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball.

This is a scary movie and a serious one, because it lures us into the minds, and the earthly domains, of those who are themselves scared, night and day, that they have forfeited the mercies of God. It takes an original movie to remind us of original sin.

The movie is memorable and draining, but “Full Metal Jacket” it is not.

The ambition is laudable, but Tim Miller’s movie, far from seeming reckless and loose-limbed, comes across as pathologically calculated, measuring out its nastiness to the last drop.

The first film scored a few palpable hits, but the new one barely makes the effort.

The whole thing appears to have been designed by some crazed Oedipal wing of the N.R.A. And what are the aliens known as? The Others. I rest my case.

Put the evidence together, and it’s no surprise that this poor little movie fires blanks. It never wanted to be a Western at all.

So acclimatized are we to action flicks, and to onscreen conflicts teeming with soldiers, that it’s refreshing to find a film that concentrates on hanging back and reversing out of harm’s way.

Seldom, it is fair to say, does Kaufman just want to have fun, but as he lifts the spell of his gloom a surprising beauty breaks through.

By temperament, Abrams is more of a Spielbergian than he is a Lucasite. His visual wit may not be, as it is for Spielberg, a near-magical reflex, but nor is Abrams suckered into bombast by technological zeal, as Lucas has been, and the new movie, as an act of pure storytelling, streams by with fluency and zip. To sum up: “Star Wars” was broke, and it did need fixing. And here is the answer.

The hitch with tales of endurance, onscreen, is their unfortunate habit of becoming endurance tests for the viewer, and, after a while, The Revenant turns into a slog. Make no mistake, it’s a very beautiful slog. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography summons a wealth of wonders.

By the end of The Hateful Eight, its status as a tale of mystery and its deference to classic Westerns have all but disappeared, worn down by the grind of its sadistic vision. That is the Tarantino deal: by blowing out folks’ brains, he wants to blow our minds.