Anthony Lane

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.

The topic is so grave, and the corralling of ancient Greek comedy so audacious, that you long for Chi-Raq to succeed. Sad to report, it’s an awkward affair, stringing out its tearful scenes of mourning, and going wildly astray with its lurches into farce.

The remarkable thing is that Son of Saul is a début: Nemes has never directed a full-length film before. As for Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, born in Budapest and now living in the Bronx. If neither of them made another movie, this one would suffice.

If you want a Ron Howard movie about a man obsessed with a creature from the deep, In the Heart of the Sea, sadly, is not the place to start. Try “Splash.”

So expert are the performers that you wind up rooting for Burry, Baum, and the others despite yourself, knowing full well that they are fuelled by cynicism -- by an ardent faith that the system will and must fail.

The problem is not that Kurzel cuts the words, which is his absolute right, but that he destroys the conditions from which they might conceivably have sprung.

The movie is gorgeous, as you would expect from Sorrentino, but beauty this great can lead to suffocation. The plot goes round and round and nowhere, and the highlight is a couple of blistering monologues — one from Weisz, delivered while she is cloaked in mud, and another from Jane Fonda, as an aging screen goddess, encased in her own crust of powder and Botox.

Mustang is the début feature of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and it’s quite something: a coming-of-age fable mapped onto a prison break, at once dream-hazed and sharp-edged with suspense.

The movie is rife with confusions of every type, and Hooper handles them with clarity, grace, and a surprising urgency, far more at ease in this intimate drama than he was with the super-sized galumphings of “Les Misérables.”

The movie was written and directed by Brian Helgeland, whose screenplay for “L.A. Confidential” (1997) won an Oscar — deservedly so, for the skein of plot required a steady hand. Legend, by contrast, pummels us into believing that it has a plot, where none exists.

The film is a casting coup, with Blanchett’s inherent languor —plus that low drawl of hers, a breath away from boredom — played off against the perter intelligence of Mara, whose manner, as always, is caught between the alien and the avian.