A.O. Scott

Rather than illuminating the politics of the present by examining the struggles of the past, Bissell lurches from folksy comedy to clattering melodrama, producing the opposite of enlightenment. To quote an old protest song: When will we ever learn?

What The Beach Bum celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.

Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.

This isn’t an especially good movie — it’s too long, too drenched in Thomas Newman’s cloyingly eclectic score, too full of speechifying and self-regard — but it is a coherent one, with the courage of its vengeful, murderous, politically terrifying convictions.

Enthralling.

Unsparing as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, there is something graceful in his sympathetic attention to lives defined almost entirely by disappointment and diminished hope. Unlike the titular elephant, the film never stops moving, and by the end, instead of feeling beaten down, the viewer is likely to feel moved as well.

It’s pretty good fun, and could almost be described without sarcasm as a scrappy little picture, like most of Boden and Fleck’s other work.

What Perry lacks in filmmaking rigor — like its predecessors, “Family Funeral” is a bit of a mess, formally and technically — he makes up for in generosity. The movie is the usual plateful of low humor and high melodrama, in no particular hurry to make its way through a busy plot.

Even though the techniques are immersive — plunging you into a disorienting reality that mirrors the drug-fueled frenzy you are witnessing — the effect is also curiously distancing.

The point, and the fun, is the wild mischief of Huppert’s performance, which grows lighter and more joyful as Greta’s behavior slides from menacing to murderous.

The movie is fun to look at without quite being exciting to watch. This is mostly because the story never fully lives up to the ideas, and the ideas themselves are fuzzy and scattered.

Instead of stepping back to explain the beliefs and practices of its main characters, it plunges you into the reality of their lives, trusting that both their humanity and their distinctiveness will be apparent, that they are no more inherently mysterious — or inherently noble — than anyone else.

I can’t deny that the glum, resentful, not-giving-a-damn masculine vibe of Cold Pursuit has its appeal, as does Moland’s blunt knack for efficient screen violence.

The intellectual virtuosity on display is somehow both ostentatious and casual. The performances — Holland’s in particular, full of sadness, guile and audacity — feel the same way.

Farhadi’s choreography of the shift from rowdy celebration to frantic desperation is the most effective part of the movie, and he keeps the suspense going on several fronts.

This version, in the dreariest Hollywood-remake tradition, turns a grim, morally ambiguous story into a fable of empowerment. That might be kind of fun if it didn’t feel so tired and timid.

The unapologetic, sometimes heavy-handed literariness of The Wild Pear Tree is leavened by hints of grim comedy and sharp, if subtle, social criticism.

Never Look Away bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost-heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.

I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will.

This isn’t a perfect movie — sometimes the machinery of plot-focused screenwriting hums a little too insistently, especially toward the end, disrupting the quieter, richer music of everyday life — but its clearsighted sensitivity makes it a satisfying one.

You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.

On the Basis of Sex does a brisk, coherent job of articulating what Ginsburg accomplished and why it mattered, dramatizing both her personal stake in feminist legal activism and the intellectual discipline with which she approached it.

What makes the movie interesting — and disturbing on a few different levels — is how its sentimental, inspirational elements do battle with darker impulses.

Vice offers more than Yuletide rage-bait for liberal moviegoers, who already have plenty to be mad about. Revulsion and admiration lie as close together as the red and white stripes on the American flag, and if this is in some respects a real-life monster movie, it’s one that takes a lively and at times surprisingly sympathetic interest in its chosen demon.

Capernaum, a sprawling tale wrenched from real life, goes beyond the conventions of documentary or realism into a mode of representation that doesn’t quite have a name. It’s a fairy tale and an opera, a potboiler and a news bulletin, a howl of protest and an anthem of resistance.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse contains a vital element that has been missing from too many recent superhero movies: fun.

It looks beautiful and moves swiftly but never quite takes full imaginative flight.

Ben Is Back is really Holly’s story, and notwithstanding the all-around excellence of the cast, it’s very much Roberts’s movie. This isn’t a matter of ego or showboating. On the contrary, what is so moving and effective about Roberts’s work here is her shrewd subversion of her long-established persona.