Joe Morgenstern

The casting is perfect in concept, and occasionally fulfills its promise, but in a notably imperfect film that’s afflicted by a benumbing score and dreary songs.

Like Poirot’s mustache, the movie as a whole is a waxworks.

The film is less like a full-fledged story than a series of notifications you might get on your phone, most of them couched in language that could have been generated by a buggy AI program.

It’s a tribute to the sizzle of the central relationship that you want all that silly plot stuff to go away so Maggi and Carsten can kiss some more. They’re the main course, and the most zestful one, in an alluring but overcooked feast.

Through no fault of Mr. Roth’s, his character isn’t interesting enough to sustain our involvement in the story. Neil’s detachment doesn’t intrigue us, it only detaches us in our turn.

What this film does best is offer, sometimes playfully and sometimes not, new perspectives on the central problem of our shared history.

Nightmare Alley is, in its entirety, a beautifully visualized period piece that holds our attention and evokes plenty of horror, to be sure, but never brings us under the tent of wholehearted involvement. This time the beauty is screen deep.

Why so gloomy? Well, this is a serious movie, for better and, more often, worse.

I found the film so insistently campy yet painfully mirthless—its style lies somewhere between opera buffa and telenovela—that my mental state of acute anguish may have skewed my perceptions of whatever the story has to offer.

Insisting on the significance of its themes, the film dispenses one emotion at a time while it creates a pervasive atmosphere of dread. Yet there’s no air in the atmosphere, not much life in the brooding landscapes.

Pablo Larraín’s film, written by Steven Knight, calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy.” It might also be called a fever dream, a surreal nightmare, a reductio ad tedium or just an inherently limiting concept that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of itself.

So what does the film, playing in theaters, want to make millions of moviegoers feel? Delight in graphic design? Sure, but the filmmaker’s familiar motifs, playful and inventive as they may be, operate in an emotional void.

There is simply not enough dramatic development to fill the film as a whole.

Rather than belabor the what that was chosen—the silly lather the story works up—I’ll reflect in my turn on how fine “Last Night In Soho” turns out to be when its co-stars are fully engaged in their eerily mysterious dance of identity.

The Last Duel is often ponderous, and no wonder, given its ambitious but erratic script.

To its perverse credit, “Venom 2,” as it’s being called, manipulates its audience with all the tentacles it can deploy, most of them cheerfully ridiculous, although a climactic battle between Venom and Carnage is the dreariest face-off since the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel duked it out in Zack Snyder’s 2016 “Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice.”

Jessica Chastain is the only reason, though a good one, to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a shrill biopic of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father. But the characters don’t add up. The complexities and nuances that might have brought them fully to life never made it to the screen.

Almost every sequence contains references to other films. Spotting them is a pleasant distraction from figuring out the plot, an absurdly rococo structure that rivals the most flagrant befuddlements of “Inception” or, for that matter, the latter stretches of “Westworld.”

F9 makes a mockery of itself before anyone else can—it’s a gleefully shoddy goof on a pseudo-epic scale.

Fatigue has caught up with the Warrens, and the question about the franchise is not where it can go from here, but how much longer it can be sustained by humdrum deviltry.

It is not a good sign when a film keeps evoking superior examples of its genre. And a worse sign still when the genre itself seems more remote from current concerns than it deserves to be. Such is the case with The Courier.

If there’s anything more you need to know before deciding whether to watch this, I should tell you that it’s nothing like “Eighth Grade,” “Booksmart,” “Clueless” or “Election,” all astute studies of the high-school scene. The calculations of this screenplay, adapted by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer from a young-adult novel by Jennifer Mathieu, are naked enough to qualify as nude scenes.

The film fails most importantly, almost inexplicably, at telling its story of governmental abuse and personal suffering in a coherent fashion. And the disorganization of Ms. Parks’s script is enhanced by a succession of montages that must have been put together to camouflage narrative gaps.

This remake isn’t terrible, just tentative and too long by at least 40 minutes.

I owned a deep sense of discomfort (which the movie means us to feel) that gave way to increasing boredom until the search led to an appliance repair store in a seamy area of the San Fernando Valley, and to one of its employees, Albert Sparma, the suspect played by Mr. Leto.

Both performances are appealing, but Mr. Ashe’s screenplay is not well served by the laggard pace and low energy of his direction.

The sensibility of the earlier production has been transformed, despite Ms. Gadot’s continuing authority. Wit has been replaced by feverish caricature, feeling by sentimentality, and Wonder Woman is left with almost nothing to do for long stretches of a very long and disjointed story.