Joe Morgenstern

A comedy afflicted with terminal unfunniness, Here Today, which is playing in theaters, may well be gone tomorrow.

Some films make do with stories that present an interesting surface and little more. In “The Boy From Medellín” undercurrents run constantly. Depression and anxiety provide two of them, but the most dramatic one—the source of the film’s genuine suspense—flows from politics.

The filmmaking is strong and confident throughout, while Mr. Brummer’s performance is a constant revelation.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

Concrete Cowboy is far from perfect, but it’s vividly alive. If the choice must be between that and careful craftsmanship, life carries the day.

It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.

The good news here is Mr. Odenkirk’s performance, not to mention his endurance in strenuous action sequences that must have taken a real-life toll on his physique; he certainly doesn’t look computer-generated.

There’s an old Broadway joke about a musical being so bad that you walk out humming the scenery. Six Minutes to Midnight is a spy thriller, not a musical, and it isn’t bad at all; the factual history it was based on is fascinating. Still, the scenery was what stayed with me most vividly.

The film gives no reason for optimism in the urban warfare it portrays, but its heart, head and sharp eye are in exactly the right place.

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.

It’s ingenious and intriguing, right up to the silly finale, which should be forgiven if not ignored.

Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.

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.

It’s rare that a film mixes joy and melancholy with such ease, and to such lovely effect.

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.

What might have been predictable or sentimental in other hands becomes startling in the film’s approach, as well as beguiling, unsparing, terribly moving and occasionally very funny.

I defer to no one in my admiration for Ms. Pike and her fellow cast members, but it’s no fun watching them soldier on through this heavy-handed and mean-spirited charade. I Care a Lot is a good title for the film that might have been. In the film that is, you can’t find anyone to care about.

The film, directed by Shaka King from a script he wrote with Will Berson, is a special sort of twofer—a powerful, and candidly sympathetic, political biography with contemporary relevance, and a morality tale set forth as an exciting action adventure.

The most efficient review of Minari would be something along the lines of “It’s wonderful. See it. You’ll love it.” But you need to know more than that about Lee Isaac Chung’s partly autobiographical drama.

This debut film by Filippo Meneghetti, streaming on major digital platforms, is elevated by the beauty of its performances, and by its masterly technique, which would suggest a filmmaker at the height of his career, not someone directing his first feature.

The result is better than smart, it’s stirring.

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

I’m glad it got made—not a sure thing at all in a relentlessly commercial market—and made with such intelligence and respect for the factual details of the discovery by people who obviously loved what they were doing; glad it’s available to a wide audience on Netflix; and glad to have gained from it a heightened, and lengthened, sense of human history that the filmmakers convey in a style that’s the antithesis of grandiose.

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.

Every moment strengthens the essence of the drama—the bond of love between two people who came out of their mother’s womb within seconds of one another.

Movies are seldom flawless and don’t have to be. This one speaks more eloquently to how a spell can be woven rather than broken.

Mr. Vasyanovych’s approach is literally and figuratively visionary.

The intimacy of Ms. Johnson’s performance is extraordinary. She is the least assertive of movie stars, yet the courage, despair and fury she finds in Nicole will lift you up and spin you around.

It’s surely the most spellbinding documentary ever made about the mediation process.

While Mr. Bahrani’s film shares certain themes with Danny Boyle’s international hit, it’s a great entertainment in its own right, a zestful epic blessed with rapier wit, casually dazzling dialogue, gorgeous cinematography (by Paolo Carnera ) and, at the center of it all, a sensational star turn by an actor, singer and songwriter named Adarsh Gourav.

Herself has a largeness of spirit that finds room for its passionate, funny and fiercely desperate heroine and everyone who rallies around her.

The concept is inspired, and inspiring—kids with a misorchestration of neurons, if that’s what it is, escaping from solitary confinement. More than that, the film is beautiful—the cinematography, by Ruben Woodin Dechamps, combines objective views of the subjects and their parents or teachers with startling visual analogues of the ways people with autism perceive the world they inhabit. And “The Reason I Jump” is deeply informative.

Instead of creating the kind of texture and narrative flow that allows characters to reveal themselves gradually and fully, the film devotes increasing attention and lots of clumsy plotting to the question of litigation—can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?

One of the great strengths of Farewell Amor is its intimacy, the sense it conveys of three people close together yet emotionally distant in Walter’s small, narrow Brooklyn apartment.

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

What makes the film very much worth seeing—in addition to Mr. Hanks dispensing his special quality of integrity from what seems to be an inexhaustible source—is Kidd’s steadfast effort to cross the divide of mistrust between him and the girl, and her opening up after unimaginable years of shutdown.

I think Soul will become a classic, but we must be patient too, because this stretch of the film is mostly illustrated notions, heavier on explanation than action. It’s very pretty—Klee-like figures and lots of pastel translucency—but not, perhaps inevitably, all that lively.

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.

If there’s any fault to be found with Ammonite, it’s in the film’s deliberateness.

This is a movie about the joys of friendship, among many other things, and the possibility of change—for the better, not only for the worse, and not only through blood-alcohol adjustment.

The stars are obviously having great fun in their roles, and we’re up for sharing it: Who doesn’t want to see a cast like this succeed? Yet the characters and situations are oversold from the opening scenes, and it’s not a problem of technique—these virtuosos can do anything that’s asked of them—but of directorial choice in a movie that still has one foot on a theater stage.

An improbably beautiful work of barnyard art.

Mr. Soderbergh, who directed one of my favorite films, “Out of Sight” (from Scott Frank’s brilliant screen adaptation of a terrific Elmore Leonard novel, I should add), has made a number of features, with varying success, that were partly or wholly improvised. This one, though, feels flat and slack, with scenes that drift off oddly, or aren’t there at all.

Mr. Clooney and his colleagues have crafted an elegant screen version of a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton with a resonant performance at its center—his own.

The narrative is telegraphic rather than dramatic, with story points ticked off like bullet points, and the actors (excluding Ms. Mulligan, once again) act mainly for the camera, as if they aren’t sure their leaden emphasis is weighty enough. The intended tone is darkly comic, but the supporting cast isn’t sufficiently skillful to sustain it.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the year’s best movie thus far, and a fitting tribute to Chadwick Boseman. His loss is still stunning, but oh, what a legacy to leave behind.

Mank really is about betrayal — not just what the hero does to others but how, over the years and decades, he has betrayed the precious talent at his core. Yet it’s equally about him saving his soul. The worst fix he’s ever been in yields the best thing he’s ever written.

It’s a beautiful film, a piece of absurdism that goes straight to the heart.

The book’s climax has been changed, somewhat awkwardly, but the movie doesn’t go soft in the end. I prefer to think it goes tender.

An unusually affecting film by Alice Winocour.

The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.

Mr. Wiseman’s film shows us, without telling us, that American cities continue to be laboratories for rebirth and innovation. The spirit of this one is embodied in its mayor, Marty Walsh.

And The Donut King is about the doughnuts themselves — how they’ve evolved over the decades from a sturdy staple into a fantasy, if not quite a delicacy, of prismatic colors and preposterous toppings.

What was weirdly but deliciously scary has grown ponderously out of scale, even for witches at their malign worst.

Instead of growing from a sweet young thing into a strong woman who is Maxim’s equal, this bride stays scared and vulnerable until close to the end, when the script turns her implausibly into a sort of Nancy Drew doing detective work for the husband she adores. Who could have guessed that the film with a modern perspective on gender politics was the one made 80 years ago?

Ms. Eaton’s film can be trying for its messiness, challenging in its allusiveness, or precious in several spasms of ritual jubilation, but it’s never less than fascinating, and often beautiful, a communiqué in code from the far side of silence.

Mr. Sorkin’s film is sometimes eloquent, and sustained for the most part by his flair for hyperverbal entertainment. Yet it also diminishes its aura of authenticity with dubious inventions, and muddles its impact by taking on more history than it can handle.

A sociologist might call Time a longitudinal study, a document whose value is enhanced by the decades it spans. I’d call it a joyous tribute to love and resilience, and a case study in eclectic technique.

The most shocking scenes speak for themselves, the ones in which Americans deride, upbraid and physically attack one another over the wearing of masks. That’s when Totally Under Control functions not as a polemic but a mirror, and the picture isn’t pretty.

As a piece of entertainment, Ms. Johnson’s documentary is exuberant, to say the least, and instructive in the bargain.

The father-daughter relationship is often witty, a seduction that never ends, and sometimes exquisitely poignant, but both roles are burdened by a script that falls into disquisition on the larger subject of men and women.

The more I think back on Kajillionaire, which goes to digital platforms in mid-October, the more I remember lovely things in it — moments of mystery and grace that go against the absurdist grain.

She’s (Brown) the bright, sustaining spirit of a film that surrounds her with a fine cast and lovely trappings in a pleasantly twisty detective story that’s elevated by the exuberance of Enola’s detecting.

Mr. Campos and his superb cast confer such authority on the whole thing that there’s no choice but to follow the film’s three time-hopping, befuddlingly intertwined stories — for 138 minutes, no less.

Stirring, profound, poignantly funny and almost literally transporting.

The most urgent question posed by The Social Dilemma is whether democracy can survive the social networks’ blurring of fact and fiction. “Imagine a world where no one believes what’s true,” Mr. Harris says. It’s possible, of course, that the film itself is a conspiracy cooked up by chronic malcontents, but it has the ringtone of truth.

It’s an efficient retelling of a tale about a young Chinese woman discovering her power — affecting at times, occasionally quite lovely, but earnest, often clumsy and notably short on joy.

A special film, and occasionally an exasperating one, but not, in the end, an inaccessible one. It’s a work of emotional impressionism with moments of rueful grace and startling images that evoke yearning.

Truth be told, though, the film, which Mr. Iannucci directed from a screenplay he wrote with Simon Blackwell, is blissed out on its own cleverness and ultimately exhausting.

Lingua Franca is, first and foremost, a story about yearning, vulnerability and sexual awakening in which the complications of identity are revealed slowly, with a dramatist’s awareness that our perceptions will change, or undergo a succession of changes, before we come back to seeing the decreasingly calm Olivia for who she is, a passionate spirit on an uncertain journey.

The film also offers a portrait in unfathomable courage. It’s a horror story shackled to a hero’s journey in which a man with a surpassingly fertile mind feels himself — his deepest, essential self — coming inexorably, inexplicably undone.

Desert One, a superb documentary by Barbara Kopple, snatches high drama from the jaws of devastating failure.

Whether or not Darbyshire’s admission is the bombshell Mr. Amirani says it is, his account is a chilling commentary on a dark chapter in Middle East history.

A hugely entertaining and scarily edifying documentary.

All the same, strong performances, strikingly spare production design and somber cinematography convey a sense of something important going on. That’s no small achievement in what proves to be a creature feature with flair.

Ms. Arterton gets to play a few scenes worthy of her art before the film turns into a milking machine designed to wring feelings from a link between past and present that, once again, amounts to a construct.

Mr. Howard wants us to know that greater challenges lie ahead — not a welcome reminder while we’re in the grips of the coronavirus. Yet his documentary also dramatizes the resilience and resourcefulness we can bring to bear in meeting them. Calamity, the film says, isn’t destiny.

She is intensely, almost palpably, radiant. I call this star power, coupled with the intelligence and verve Ms. Pike always brings to her roles. She’s brilliant in this one, a plausible vision of a singular visionary in the history of science. If the film around her is unstable to the point of screwiness, it is not for lack of ambition.

It’s research of a profoundly affecting kind — a study of love and devotion, and the toll taken by machine-gun bullets on a body, a gallant spirit and a family.

There’s never been anything quite like it — an exquisitely crafted work of cinematic art putting radiant black-and-white photography (by Vladimír Smutný) in the service of indescribably shocking images that reflect the darkest of human impulses, as well as the unquenchable will to survive.

In the end Relic really is about decay, both physical and spiritual, and filial devotion. But devotion to what is the question. The answer makes this movie distinctive, and well worth seeing.

Parts of the drama play out on its star’s face, and they’re the best parts, because there’s no one better at portraying a good man’s self-doubts and a frightened man’s courage.

What makes The Old Guard special is that, for all its canny action tropes, the film really does deal with the prevalence of evil in the world, and the limits of doing good. It’s a lot to squeeze into a smaller screen.

This isn’t a great film, but it’s a work of great subtlety with artfully smudged boundaries — “Rashomon” in modern dress and watercolors.

A treat that becomes a chilling enthrallment, one of those closely observed dramas you love — for its intimacy, calm authority and mystery — even before you begin to get what it’s really about.

The film, streaming on demand, brings old news that can’t hold a flickering candle to the events of our flabbergasting moment, and a clever twist doesn’t redeem long passages of gratingly broad and awkward humor.

What the film does sustain, and quite remarkably, considering its serious theme, is a delicately comic tone. That’s due in large measure to the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

The level of artistry here is out of all proportion to the smallish scale of this Australian coming-of-age drama, which was directed by Shannon Murphy from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais. Everything seems freshly discovered. Lives connect spontaneously, explosively. Love bursts forth inappropriately, yet unquenchably. Moments come along, not just a few but many, that stop your heart, leave you grinning with delight or watching breathlessly.

The content can be raw, sometimes startling, but before and after everything else the film is hilarious, and constitutes a cockeyed pantheon of comic performances. On top of that it is beautiful. The more you laugh, the more deeply you’re moved by its portrait of a lost manchild trying to find himself in a present that’s missing a precious piece of his past.

A drama crossed with a polemic that’s enriched by a black-history lesson, the film is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing.

For all its verbal combat, and marital strife that’s echoed and amplified by a younger academic couple in the manner of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the story works best when the dialogue tides subside. In those fleeting moments Ms. Moss is able to convey, eloquently and almost wordlessly, a tormented soul.

Should you choose to watch Judy & Punch, the best way to do it is with the sound turned low or off. The downside is missing part of Ms. Wasikowska’s performance; she plays Judy with impressive ferocity. The advantage lies in losing the repetitive bombast of Punch’s drunken posturings while enjoying the genuine prettiness of Stefan Duscio’s cinematography and Josephine Ford’s production design.

The oddity of the crime lay in the value of the art — relatively low, except to the artist, a young Czech woman who was neither famous nor rich. The beauty of the film lies in the bond she forges with one of the thieves after they’re found by police and sentenced to 75 days in prison. Questions of identity haunt both the victim and the perp — not their names or addresses, but who they are in the farthest reaches of their psyches, and who they may become.

Sure, the formula has worn thin; this installment is, in fact, the end of the road. But what was great at the outset — supersmart banter coupled with sensational celebrity impressions — is still pretty darned good, and the meander takes an unexpected turn.

Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.

A harrowing but enthralling documentary.

Verve! Lilt! They are precious qualities in movies. As soon as you encounter them you know that liftoff is likely. Saint Frances, newly available on demand, has them in an abundance.

Mr. Dujardin won a best actor Oscar in 2012 for his buoyantly funny performance in “The Artist” as George Valentin, a silent-film star on the way down. Here he’s Georges with an “s” but without the buoyancy or the fun, a man descending into murderous delusion. Quentin Dupieux’s glum absurdist fable gives absurdism a bad name. It’s a facile notion inflated to feature proportions — just barely, since the running time is only 77 minutes.