A.O. Scott

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.