Anthony Lane

What is involved here, in other words, is a tradition of truthtelling, with a long and honorable reach. The new film, like the old painting, is a stubborn, unvain, yet beautiful description of a man whose illusions are failing along with his mortal health, but who is somehow revived and saved by the act of describing. The glory flows from the pain.

Such is the strenuous effort of Phoenix’s performance that it becomes exhausting to behold.

Downton Abbey concludes with both Lady Edith and Daisy uttering the sacred words “I’m happy.” Upstairs and downstairs, in perfect concord: believe that, and you’ll believe anything.

How can a parable that set out to take the side of little people, versus gargantuan greed, end up using them as disposable comic fodder?

What Landes has done is to revise, and to render yet starker, the premise of “Lord of the Flies.”

Ad Astra is Gray’s most formidable paradox to date, liable to leave you awed, confused, and sad. It is a work of calculated grandeur, and, if you get the chance to catch it in IMAX, and thus to revel in the breadth of its beauty, do so. But there’s something small at the movie’s core.

At once breakneck and tolerant, Give Me Liberty manages to be both rousingly Russian and touchingly all-American. The Cold War is officially over.

This mixture of poverty and fantasy will not be for everyone. Compare the angry reaction to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” when it came out, in 1950; not content with revealing the plight of destitute children, in Mexico City, Buñuel had the temerity to swerve into nightmare.

Good Boys is worth catching for those rare and wrenching points at which emotional honesty breaks through.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette has to be seen, and demands to be believed, because of Cate Blanchett. Like “Blue Jasmine” (2013), which earned her a second Oscar, this new film lies at her command.

For novices, the film will serve as a lively, if annoying, introduction to the Hammarskjöld mystery, yet there’s a sadness here. The more we are encouraged to puzzle over the darkness of his death, the less heed will be paid to his illuminating life.

The longer that After the Wedding goes on, the more it concentrates on the woes of white folk, to the exclusion of all else, and you gradually realize that the Third World, far from being a source of cultural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to minor domestic events on the East Coast.

The movie simmers with a longing for revenge, frequently boiling over, and the foe is not just Hawkins but the colonialist order for which he stands: barbarism, thinly disguised as civilization. Many scenes feel punishingly hard to watch.

Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it,than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, is a declaration of that love.

Honeyland swarms with difficult, ancient truths about parents, children, greed, respect, and the need for husbandry.

I happen to find the live-action Disney reboots easy to admire but hard to warm to — supremely unlovable, indeed, and stripped of the consoling charm that we look for in their animated sources.

The movie is compact, coolly heartwarming, and gratifyingly uncute. Be warned, though, it also leaves you starving.

From the opening shot of Ophelia adrift in a river, in mimicry of Millais’s famous painting, the film seems to splash around in search of a suitable style. The drama is no longer a tragedy but a fairy tale — almost, at times, a farce.

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

As Rose-Lynn, stomping along in white cowboy boots, she is ballsy and fiery, at once wised up and dangerously immature.

As Cooley’s film quickens and deepens, we get a fabulous running joke about the “inner voice,” a staple of American self-will since the days of Emerson.

The killings pile up, yet Jarmusch, the master of mellowdrama, would rather die than be accused of overkill. His heart isn’t really in the blood and guts. The line between the laid-back and the listless, in The Dead Don’t Die, may be too fine even for him, and most of the running gags don’t run at all, merely loping around in a circle.

Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species.

Egerton is busy and fizzy in the leading role, but there’s a curious blankness in his impersonation, and a shortage of charm. Hard to tell whether viewers will flock to him as they did to Rami Malek, who gave such electric life to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yet Rocketman is the better film. Not by much, but just enough.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.

The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.

This is Hogg’s most disconcerting work to date. Like her previous movies, such as “Unrelated” (2007), it proceeds in lengthy takes, and the camera, more often than not, prefers to keep its distance, the better to observe her characters — the human animals — at play.

Wilde is unerringly focussed on her heroines, and on their fundamental right to get things wrong.