A.O. Scott

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.