A.O. Scott

Faces Places reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work.

Mr. Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.

“Mark Felt” is a sharp portrait set against a blurry background, a history lesson that won’t help you on the test. It is possible to savor the crags and shadows of Mr. Neeson’s performance without quite grasping why Mr. Landesman thinks the story is worthy of such somber, serious and sustained attention.

Part of the pleasure of this film, directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”), lies in the rediscovery of what wonderful actors they can be, and how good they are together.

As the story limps and drags, the viewer also becomes accustomed to the images, and astonishment at the film’s innovative, painstaking technique begins to fade. But its charm never quite wears off, for reasons summed up in the title.

The Lego figures are rendered with playful rigor; their limited movements and expressions generate some amusing sight gags. But the physical world they inhabit is more of a generic digital-cartoon space than a snapped-together environment. And the themes they explore are tired, cynical, sub-Disney bromides about family reconciliation and self-discovery.

Brad’s Status at its best is genuinely thought-provoking.

The movie, directed by Michael Cuesta from a script by a team of blue-chip writers (Stephen Schiff and Michael Finch are credited, along with Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz), shows more skill than personality.

Mr. Aronofsky is a virtuoso of mood and timing, a devoted student of form and technique straining to be a credible visionary. But as wild and provocative as his images can be, there is something missing — an element of strangeness, of difficulty, of the kind of inspiration that overrides mere cleverness.

Shot in rich, wide-screen color, with minimal camera movements (except when a small camera is attached to a falcon’s restless head) and almost no dialogue, it is detached almost to the point of abstraction.

The Unknown Girl is as tense as a police procedural, and as mysterious as a religious parable.

The filmmakers honor both the pastoral and the infernal dimensions of Mr. King’s distinctive literary vision.

The filmmakers feign boldness in tackling national politics, but revert to coyness and caricature when it comes to local matters, gesturing toward a multiculturalism that isn’t even skin deep and sweeping gentrification under the rug.

Like its protagonist, sensitively and shrewdly played by Lakeith Stanfield, the film is soft-spoken and thoughtful, with sweet, lyrical touches that alleviate some of the grimness without blunting the cruelty and injustice of what happened.

Ms. Macdonald is quite simply a revelation, capturing the reflexive self-confidence and defensive diffidence of the millennial generation with sneaky sincerity and offhand wit.

Logan Lucky is a terrific movie. That’s a matter of skill, and maybe also of luck. But mostly it’s a matter of generosity.

It occupies its genre niche — the exuberantly violent Euro-action movie-star paycheck action comedy — without excessive cynicism or annoying pretension.

Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.

Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.

It’s both too tidy and too messy, and at the same time neither quite wild nor quite sensible enough.

The film’s struggle against simplification — against the sentimentality, wishful thinking and outright denial that defines most Hollywood considerations of America’s racial past — is palpable, almost heroic, even if it is not always successful.

For all the profanity and naughty behavior, it has the timid, ingratiating vibe of a television sitcom, sticking to safe and familiar emotional territory.

Mr. Escalante is an exceptionally deft and subtle realist, and you sometimes feel, in “Heli” and even more so in The Untamed that he is drawn to extremity partly out of boredom with his own skill.

To say that “Valerian” is a science-fiction epic doesn’t quite do it justice. Imagine crushing a DVD of “The Phantom Menace” into a fine powder, tossing in some Adderall and Ecstasy and a pinch of cayenne pepper and snorting the resulting mixture while wearing a virtual reality helmet in a Las Vegas karaoke bar. Actually, that sounds like too much fun, but you get the idea.

The images in Endless Poetry are arresting and sometimes disturbing, but there is an earnest commitment to ecstasy and authenticity that renders moot any question of offensiveness or exploitation.

There is a scene toward the end of War for the Planet of the Apes that is as vivid and haunting as anything I’ve seen in a Hollywood blockbuster in ages, a moment of rousing and dreadful cinematic clarity that I don’t expect to shake off any time soon.

A Ghost Story is suspenseful, dourly funny and at times piercingly emotional.

It is a dark, startlingly bloody journey into the bitter, empty, broken heart of the American middle class, a blend of farce and satire built on a foundation of social despair.

Reagan’s legacy remains a live and contentious issue. His name is still routinely invoked, on the left and the right, with reverence and rage. The Reagan Show helps attach a face to the name, but it doesn’t accomplish much more than that.

The picture, which never stops moving, is dense with information and feeling. Barbs of satire pop up and are washed away on streams of strong emotion. It’s all marvelously preposterous and yet, at the same time, something important is at stake.

[Ms. Coppola’s] Beguiled is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale.

It is a fluent and knowing pastiche of genres and styles with a brazen and vigorous wit of its own.

It Comes at Night is pretty terrifying to sit through, but it may be even scarier after it’s over, when you sift through what you’ve seen and try to piece together what it may have meant.

This is neither a simple satire of privilege nor a mock-provocative comedy of diversity and its discontents. It’s about a clash of values, about unresolvable contradictions. Or to put it another way, about good and evil.

The “Mummy” reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess.

The Exception is a diverting and occasionally exciting film, though it is rarely disturbing or thought-provoking in ways the material might require.

Its earnest insouciance recalls the “Superman” movies of the ’70s and ’80s more than the mock-Wagnerian spectacles of our own day, and like those predigital Man of Steel adventures, it gestures knowingly but reverently back to the jaunty, truth-and-justice spirit of an even older Hollywood tradition.

After a sluggish and chaotic start, War Machine finds its groove and becomes its own thing: a mordant, cleareyed critique of American war-making that is all the more devastating for being affectionately drawn.

Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment.

Like its source material, Baywatch is sleazy and wholesome, silly and earnest, dumb as a box of sand and slyly self-aware. It’s soft-serve ice cream. Crinkle-cut fries. A hot car and a skin rash. Tacky and phony and nasty and also kind of fun.

The film makes uncompromising demands on your attention and your empathy. But it is also illuminating and, in its downbeat, deliberate way, exhilarating.

The film, scrupulously faithful to its source, is decidedly literary, but not in an especially satisfying way.

The fact that you know more or less exactly what’s coming doesn’t diminish the creepiness, or lessen the jolt when the thing you’re dreading arrives.

Though this movie ostensibly celebrates the spirit of adventure and openness to experience, it takes no risks and blazes no trails. It’s ultimately as complacent, self-absorbed and clueless as its heroine, and not always in an especially amusing way.

Its images and scenes are suffused by an intensity that seems almost to be a quality of the light and air as they play across Ms. Chemla’s watchful, sometimes inscrutable features.

To some degree in spite of Ms. Poitras’s journalistic intentions — though very much as a consequence of her rigorous honesty — the picture that emerges is complicated, unsettling and intriguingly ambivalent.

It’s less that Mr. Cedar blends realism with absurdity than that he refuses to acknowledge any distinction between them.

Mr. Davies, whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.

Colossal has such an easygoing, offhand vibe, and takes such pleasure in its characters’ foibles, that it camouflages its deep subject, which is rage.

Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.

Karl Marx City, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s unsettling new documentary, is a smart, highly personal addition to the growing syllabus of distressingly relevant cautionary political tales.

This is not a lurid true-crime tale of jealousy and drug addiction, but a delicate human drama about love, ambition and the glories of music.

The dark, comic poignancy of the book is drowned in garish, self-conscious whimsy, and the work of a talented ensemble is squandered on awkward heartstring snatching.

Canners is a testament to its director’s indefatigable humanism, and to the human beings who feed it. The movie follows the money, a nickel at a time, and discovers something far more valuable.

Personal Shopper is sleek and spooky, seductive and suspenseful. It flirts with silliness, as ghost stories do. And also with heartbreak.

Its classicism feels unforced and fresh. Its romance neither winks nor panders. It looks good, moves gracefully and leaves a clean and invigorating aftertaste. I almost didn’t recognize the flavor: I think the name for it is joy.

Before I Fall is tactful rather than maudlin, tasteful rather than lurid, soothing rather than creepy. None of that is good news.

The Girl With All the Gifts doesn’t really venture into new territory, but it does a decent job of reminding us why zombies are so scary, and so interesting.

Mr. Barras’s film, with its bigheaded, asymmetrical modeling-clay figures and off-kilter picture-book backdrops, explores a harsh situation with gentle whimsy.

While I can’t exactly say that the movie cheered me up, it did give me something I needed. Not catharsis or uplift but a bracing dose of profane, sloppy, reasonably well-directed hostility. We take what we can get.

You might feel like you’re in the company of a manic cinephile friend breathlessly recounting his favorite movie scenes in no particular order. You admire his devotion, his taste and his scholarship, but in the end the experience is probably more satisfying for him than it is for you. Still, the company isn’t bad.

Mr. Zandvliet is less interested in the stark battle between good and evil than in the shifting ground of power and responsibility, and the way that every person carries the potential for decency and depravity.

Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.

We are not exactly in the present and not precisely in the past, but in a dreamy cinematic space where distinctions of genre and tone are pleasantly (and sometimes shockingly) blurred.

With exquisite patience and attention to detail, Asghar Farhadi, the writer and director, builds a solid and suspenseful plot out of ordinary incidents, and packs it with rich and resonant ideas.

[McConaughey's] wild, abrasive and improbably delicate performance is what makes Gold watchable, even if the rest of the movie doesn’t supply sufficient reason to keep watching.

Something about the strangeness of the people and the harsh indifference of the nature that surrounds them feels real, even if realism in the conventional sense may be the last thing on the filmmaker’s mind.

The Red Turtle practices a minor, gentle magic. It wants you to smile and say, “Ahh,” rather than gasp and say, “Wow.” But somehow the understatement can feel a bit overdone, as if the film were hovering over you, awaiting an expression of admiration.

Split is lurid and ludicrous, and sometimes more than a little icky in its prurient, maudlin interest in the abuse of children. It’s also absorbing and sometimes slyly funny.

Sleepless, directed by Baran bo Odar, sets a low bar for itself, and then trips over it.

Even though, in retrospect, The Ardennes feels a little obvious and secondhand, it unfolds with enough speed and wit to hold your attention.

Toni Erdmann, proceeding in a perfectly straightforward manner, from one awkward, heartfelt, hilarious scene to the next, wraps itself around some of the thorniest complexities of contemporary reality.

From one scene to the next, you may know more or less what is coming, but it is never less than delightful to watch these actors at work.

Julieta is scrupulous, compassionate and surprising, even if it does not always quite communicate the full gravity and sweep of the feelings it engages.

Mr. Larraín invites us to believe that history is on the side of the poets and the humanists, and that art will make fools of politicians and policemen. But he is also aware, as Pablo Neruda was, that history sometimes has other plans.

Even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — Fences is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play.

Plots and subplots are handled with clumsy expediency, and themes that might connect this movie with the larger Lucasfilm mythos aren’t allowed to develop. You’re left wanting both more and less.

Mr. Marcello tells a simple, touching tale that seems to contain a whole cosmos of meaning.

La La Land succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity.

This captivating movie, like the blues itself, is at once a recognition of those somber truths and a gesture of protest against them.

Ms. Hansen-Love surveys the territory with clear eyes, but also with an unmistakable shading of pity and with ideas, in particular about Nathalie’s sexuality and the political compromises of her generation, that seem more like assumptions than insights.

As a purely emotional experience it succeeds without feeling too manipulative or maudlin. I mean, it is manipulative and maudlin, but in a way that seems fair and transparent. Still, it isn’t quite satisfying.

There are some touching and amusing zigzags on the way to the film’s sweet and affirmative conclusion.

It’s not so much a work of art as a triumph of craft, and therefore a reminder of the deep pleasures of old-fashioned technique and long experience.

Ms. Biller’s movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What’s underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself.

Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back.

The Illinois Parables is not, strictly speaking, an educational film, but it conveys a unique and precious kind of knowledge.

It’s a psychological thriller, a strangely dry-eyed melodrama, a kinky sex farce and, perhaps most provocatively, a savage comedy of bourgeois manners. Mostly, though — inarguably, I would say — it is a platform for the astonishing, almost terrifying talent of Isabelle Huppert.

The satire may be a little too gentle, but there is something disarmingly tender about the way Mr. Lee dramatizes young Billy’s predicament. You may be surprised at how sweet this movie is and also, in retrospect, startled by how bleak its vision turns out to be.

Viewers jaded by daily doses of digital dazzlement might not fully register the reality of the wonders they are witnessing. But that doesn’t, in the end, make The Eagle Huntress any less wonderful.

Desmond Doss was calm, humble and courageous, qualities Mr. Gibson honors but does not share. It is possible to be moved and inspired by Desmond’s exploits while still feeling that his convictions have been exploited, perhaps even betrayed.

Fire at Sea occupies your consciousness like a nightmare, and yet somehow you don’t want it to end.

Moonlight is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.

The subtlety of the film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them.

Aquarius is a marvelous and surprising act of portraiture, a long, unhurried encounter with a single, complicated person. And that is enough to make it a captivating film, an experience well worth seeking out. But there is also, as I’ve suggested, more going on than the everyday experiences of a modern matriarch.

Mr. Malick presents these events as if he had drawn them not from his mind but from some repository of celestial memory. Which may be to say that Voyage of Time ultimately proves his point about the way the universe and human consciousness mirror each other. But it’s a point that might have been more powerful if he had left it unspoken.

The movie, uneven as it is, has terrific momentum and passages of concentrated visual beauty. The acting is strong even when the script wanders into thickets of rhetoric and mystification. And despite its efforts to simplify and italicize the story, it’s admirably difficult, raising thorny questions about ends and means, justice and mercy, and the legacy of racism that lies at the root of our national identity.

American Honey, long and messy as it is, is by turns observant and exuberant, and sweet in a way that is both unexpected and organic.