A.O. Scott

In Ms. Nair’s hands, Phiona’s story has a richness and unpredictability that separates it from other, superficially similar movies. It also has the buoyant, cleareyed feel for the particulars of culture and place that is among this director’s great gifts.

The acting and filmmaking are too crude to make you care about what happens to any of them, even though you know pretty much exactly what that will be.

Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

Cameraperson isn’t a work of journalism or advocacy. It’s a scrapbook, a found poem assembled out of scraps and snippets of truth. And it is, above all, an act of showing rather than telling.

"Author” is most interesting — and least self-aware — as a study in the gullibility and narcissism of the celebrity class.

The internet is an elusive quarry. It’s a marvel and a menace, a banal fact of life and a force for incalculable change. But it’s also less the subject of this captivating, uneven film than an excuse for its director to add to his collection of memorable faces and voices.

There is plenty of drama in a teenager’s everyday life — no need to sensationalize — and Morris From America feels true to both the pleasures and the frustrations of its title character.

There are many lovely and memorable moments in this film, which is in every way the opposite of a vanity project. If anything, Ms. Portman seems constrained by her own modesty, by a justified but nonetheless limiting reverence for her source material.

Like its hero, Disorder has plenty of technique but not enough purpose.

There are creatures fished out of formaldehyde, volumes flecked with rot, birds that have been hollowed out and stuffed, household tools battered beyond recognition. The effect of seeing all this is certainly haunting, but too beautiful to be morbid.

You will come for the kind of humor promised in the title and the well-earned R rating, but stay for the nuanced meditations on theology and faith.

On the most fundamental level, Neither Heaven Nor Earth is an impressive stunt, a horror movie masquerading as a film about the horrors of war. But its gravity and intelligence...make it something more.

It’s a subtle movie, alert to the almost imperceptible currents of feeling that pass between its title characters.

Suicide Squad is a so-so, off-peak superhero movie. It chases after the nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool” and the anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” but trips over its own feet.

A certain amount of work is required to stitch together a sense of the plot, but as is often the case in Zulawski’s films, the story is less the point than an excuse, a loose temporal conceit holding together flights of visual invention, verbal extravagance and male and female nudity.

Equity pulls off a difficult balancing act with an elegance that should not be underestimated. It turns its unflappable gaze on a maddeningly complex reality and transforms it into a swift, clear and exciting story.

The tedium, I would argue, is not incidental but essential, because this is not really a spy thriller or even a foot-chase and fist-fight-driven action movie, but rather a somber meditation on the crisis of the Gen-X professional in the throes of middle age.

This is a film about the struggle for sexual freedom and women’s rights, and also about the power of region, class and custom in the lives of its characters.

The nerd in me wants a bit more rigor, a bit more plausibility underneath the exuberant fakery. Maybe in the next episode.

It is, overall, an amusing little picture, with some inspired moments and some sour notes, a handful of interesting performances and the hint, now and then, of an idea.

You leave with a vivid sense of the man’s living presence and a reasonably thorough account of his life, work and associations. Given the sheer volume and variety of the work in question, this is an impressive achievement.

Seeming to wander through small incidents and mundane busyness, it acquires momentum and dramatic weight through a brilliant kind of narrative stealth. You are shaken, by the end, at how much you care about these women and how sorry you are to leave their company.

The Secret Life of Pets is adequate animated entertainment, amusing while it lasts but not especially memorable except as a catalog of compromises and missed opportunities.

The Purge: Election Year takes itself just seriously enough to provide the expected measure of fun — a blend of aggression, release and relief. A lot of people die, but no one really gets hurt.

There are delights on display, but not many surprises...The BFG is a different kind of movie, and Mr. Rylance’s face and body have been enhanced and distorted by digital sorcery, but his unique blend of gravity and mischief imbues his fanciful character with a dimension of soul that the rest of the movie lacks.

Mr. Ross consulted some of the leading experts in the era...and has done a good job of balancing the factual record with the demands of dramatic storytelling. The result is a riveting visual history lesson, whose occasional didacticism is integral to its power.

Mr. Solondz’s eye for the petty hypocrisies and delusions of American life has lost some of its sharpness, and he flails at flabby targets — avant-garde art, campus “political correctness” — in ways that sometimes carry an ugly whiff of racial and sexual bigotry.

Contemplating both tales in succession can induce a far from unpleasant sense of vertigo, a feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss of wide-open philosophical questions and deep psychological mysteries.

It is possible to appreciate Mr. Zulawski’s perverse ingenuity, and to miss his eye and voice, without quite succumbing to the strenuous charms and overcooked provocations of Cosmos.

What “Dory” lacks in dazzling originality it more than makes up for in warmth, charm and good humor.

There is no denying the film’s uncanny power or its visual discipline. It’s a luminous puzzle with a few pieces missing.

It’s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clichés, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been.

Like any good work of criticism, De Palma will be catnip for passionate fans while also serving as a primer and a goad for the skeptical and the curious. Mr. De Palma is remarkable company — witty, insightful and neither unduly modest nor overbearingly vain.

This floppy British romance, directed by Thea Sharrock and adapted by Jojo Moyes from her best-selling novel, sits at the point where tedium, ridiculousness and heartfelt sentiment converge, separated by an all-but-imperceptible distance.

“Popstar” takes aim at everything that is artificial and plastic in contemporary pop in a spirit of love rather than spite. It’s a celebration of the curious authenticity — the innocence, the sweetness, the guiltless pleasure — of music whose badness is sometimes hard to separate from its genius.

[Ms. Tsangari's] inquiry stops short of the hearts of these men, and she seems content to dramatize some of the sad, ridiculous and tender ways that boys will be boys.

Part courtroom drama, part rumination on what separates human beings from other animals, the film is above all a sympathetic portrait of an advocate.

Ms. Miller’s choices are hard to argue with. She steers gracefully through a zigzagging plot, slowing down for quiet, contemplative stretches and pausing for jokes that are irrelevant but irresistible. She finds a tricky balance of farce, satire and emotional sincerity, a way of treating people as ridiculous without denying them empathy.

This is a dumb movie pretending to be smart, even as it wants you to believe the opposite. Still, dumb can be fun.

The retro-futurist production design is gorgeously awful, the cast is awfully gorgeous, and the dystopian setting is explored with an appropriately Ballardian blend of suavity and aggression. But onscreen, High-Rise is curiously inert. The themes don’t resonate, and the story lags and lumbers.

At times, most often when Mr. Bennett is onscreen, Love & Friendship is howlingly funny, and as a whole it feels less like a romance than like a caper, an unabashedly contrived and effortlessly inventive heist movie with a pretty good payoff.

Money Monster begins with a jolt of satire, proceeds through a maze of beat-the-clock exposition and lands on a surprisingly gentle, sentimental note.

Cruelty and humor are nestled like spoons in a drawer. Mr. Lanthimos’s method is to elicit an appreciative chuckle followed by a gasp of shock, and to deliver violence and whimsy in the same even tone. “The Lobster” is often startlingly funny in the way it proposes its surreal conceits, and then upsettingly grim in the way it follows through on them.

[Mr. Audiard] makes popcorn movies disguised as art films, and vice versa. Dheepan is a bit like a Liam Neeson revenge-dad action thriller directed by the Dardenne brothers. I mean that in the best possible way.

This very crowded, reasonably enjoyable installment in the Avengers cycle...reveals, even more than its predecessors, an essential truth about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not so much a grand science-fiction saga, or even a series of action-adventure movies, as a very expensive, perpetually renewed workplace sitcom.

The performances are vivid and moving, but there is ultimately less to this well-made, impeccably acted film than meets the eye. Its meticulousness is to some degree a flaw, an evasion of nearly every variety of human messiness.

It’s like a comprehensive exhibition catalog or a thorough critical essay — an indispensable aid to understanding and appreciating a fascinating artist.

Ms. Mort’s writing lacks psychological texture, and her direction generates little intensity, or even continuity.

Its badness is not extreme, but exemplary: It’s everything wrong with Hollywood today stuffed into a little less than two hours.

The charms of Sing Street should not be underestimated. Partly because its manner is unassuming and its story none too original...it’s easy to overlook Mr. Carney’s ingenuity and sensitivity.

Once the violence starts, Green Room settles into horror movie logic, becoming steadily more gruesome and less terrifying as the body count grows. You know some people are going to die, and figuring out who and in what order feels more like a brainteaser than like a matter of deep moral or emotional concern.

The most fascinating — and the most moving — thing about this sprawling, sincere and boisterous movie is its tone.

You could call Mr. Skolimowski, who is 77, an old dog, and while the multistranded, chronologically intricate narrative conceit of 11 Minutes isn’t exactly a new trick, it’s one he pulls off with devilish panache and startling impact.

It is possible to admire the craft and sensitivity of Louder Than Bombs without quite believing it. The characters are so carefully drawn that they can feel smaller than life, and the dramatic space they inhabit has a curiously abstract feeling.

Ms. Ushpiz is determined to rescue her subject from the banality of biography. The details of Arendt’s childhood, education, romantic life and professional activity are not ignored, but they nearly always illuminate her ideas.

A charming, earnest, sometimes ungainly mixture of history, criticism and high-minded gossip, Notfilm testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema.

It’s a work of art that troubles the conscience, in part because it suggests, both by default and by design, that no art is innocent, and that its preservation, like its destruction, depends on the operation of power.

Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome.

It is about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head.

The cleverest and most troubling aspect of the film is its empathy.

The charm and audacity of this film lie in the way it blends the commonplace and the bizarre.

City of Gold transcends its modest methods, largely because it connects Mr. Gold’s appealing personality with a passionate argument about the civic culture of Los Angeles and the place of food within it.

In Knight of Cups, as in “To the Wonder,” the deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.

There is power in this vision, but it can also feel forced, almost mechanical.

Despite its affection for the quirks of its characters and their milieu, the film is most memorable for its gravity, for the almost tragic nobility it finds in sad and silly circumstances.

Rabin, the Last Day is not interesting in spite of its flaws as a film. It’s interesting because of them, because of Mr. Gitai’s refusal or inability to clarify or even coherently narrate the history he addresses.

Shot in richly toned, wide-screen black and white, Aferim! looks like an elegant exercise in period playacting. But it casts a fierce, revisionist eye on the past, finding the cruelty and prejudice that lie beneath the pageantry.

The film’s enigmas are atmospheric, and somewhat superficial. It solicits the audience’s morbid curiosity rather than gripping our emotions or haunting our dreams. It’s a creepy and beguiling oddity, willfully weird but, at the same time, not quite weird enough.

Mr. Garrel is always worth attending to when he takes up the rhythms and paradoxes of love, and even though this is a minor entry in his canon of melancholy romances, it is brief, brisk and intermittently affecting.

This franchise is lucky to have Kevin Hart in that role, and his manic comic energy is enough to make the sequel something other than a complete waste of time. But the genre is also stubbornly innovation-proof, and there’s not much new to see here.

The final shot, accompanied by an improbable but perfect musical cue, is an astonishing cinematic gesture, an appalling, hilarious statement about modern values, the state of the world, human nature and everything else. This is a movie that lives up to its name.