A.O. Scott

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.