Joe Morgenstern

What you see is exactly what you think you’re seeing from the moment of your first guess. What you feel is another story—one of calm, almost inexplicable enchantment.

One of the pleasures—even privileges—of watching a film like this is seeing what superb actors are able to do with material that doesn’t aspire to greatness. The story is charming, the performances are exceptional.

Loving it is not the issue, of course—the level of amputating, eviscerating, decapitating violence transcends good nasty fun. The challenge is taking it in, watching it without averting your eyes—I can’t say mine stayed fixed on the screen—and seeing it for what it is, a tumultuous, graphically gorgeous entertainment for our time as well as an ineffably somber meditation on our species’ seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of savagery.

The film isn’t just about their search for love and the vagaries of modern dating, but the craziness of life as it’s lived by passionate, gifted people with insufficient channels for their passion and shabby containers for their gifts.

Productions can go wrong. Certain elements can fail to ignite or cohere. Bad stuff happens all the time, especially in industrial enterprises of this magnitude, but usually there’s some good stuff to dilute the debacle. Not here, though.

It’s a return to dramatic accounts of blastoffs, followed by soul-filling footage from beyond our sheltering atmosphere and implacable gravity; a portrait, by reflected light from fiery boosters, of one of Earth’s most curious (in every respect) overachievers; and a testament to failing upward—far, far upward.

In this action adventure, the apotheosis of his career thus far, cheerful idiocy occasionally rises to the level of delectable lunacy. For the most part, though, it’s entertainment as punishing paradox, a high-speed slog.

This film is what it is, a particularly generic genre piece that the bean counters at a once-great studio must have had reason to believe would turn a profit, mostly in the foreign market. Very possibly it will.

It’s a piece of urban history seen through the lens of magic realism, a fragile but beguiling fantasy, tethered now and then to gritty reality, about a do-gooder doing the best he can against daunting odds.

The film, written by the director and Thomas Reider, is often brutal in content and spare in style, a celebration of unquenchable tenacity and the sustaining power of love.

The climax as a whole is cheerfully chaotic, if not over the top, but who cares about perfection when a movie is as good as this one?

The film, playing in theaters, is very long, relentlessly intense, murmured more often than spoken, and photographed, by Greig Fraser, with a glowering gorgeousness that must be seen to be felt. It’s also enthralling and tailored to our time, an extended rumination on finding one’s moral compass in a world of all-encompassing evil.

In a tale that touches on such a diversity of subjects—loneliness, mortality, adoption, family ties, the realm of the senses, artificial intelligence—it’s the ineffable things that count.

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.

Mr. Haroun is a sophisticated filmmaker who alternates bold, almost impressionistic strokes with quietly meditative passages, and his cinematographer, Mathieu Giombini, works in astonishing colors that can be bold and exquisitely subtle almost simultaneously.

An enthralling, even visionary drama that regards its subject with empathy and horror, locates him on the actual piece of land he once owned in Montana and portrays him through a stunning performance by Sharlto Copley, who finds emotional mercury in Kaczynski’s boiling cauldron of rage.

If less is more, Uncharted must be a masterpiece. It’s bloodless, heartless, joyless, sexless and, with one exception, charmless. The exception is Tom Holland, but what’s he doing in a slapdash action adventure adapted from a videogame? Making money, of course—gamers will flock.

Ms. Hurwitz’s film, which was written by Michael Levine, is modest in scale yet far-ranging.

Blacklight isn’t much of a title. At the very least, though, it provides a useful hint that the movie isn’t much either. One could even argue that it’s not a movie at all, only a rusted-out recycling bin of ill-fitting themes, notions, poses, conventions, affectations, tropes, tropelets and inert snippets of dialogue from other movies.

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

Josephine Decker’s screen version of the Jandy Nelson young-adult novel, which was adapted by the author, embraces excess as an expression of the heroine’s mercurial spirit. Sometimes the results are excessively excessive, blithely blissed-out or simply clichéd. Mostly, though, they’re funny, affecting and endearing. And daring.

This vibrant, buoyant drama, intimate in scope instead of vast, takes us to Oslo—not exactly another planet, but an adventure all the same—where it builds a world of mercurial passions while its enchanting heroine, Julie ( Renate Reinsve ), belatedly and erratically comes of age over the course of several years.

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.

For those with a hunger for surprising, affecting films, I say seek this one out by all means. Mr. Kuosmanen’s direction of actors is impeccable; he and his stars deserve one another fully.

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.

The film is a fable, to be sure, and one that unfolds at a leisurely pace, not a tough-minded psychological drama. But it’s sharp-witted as well as soulful, reasonably suspenseful.

Instead of “The Shape of Water” this is a stream of drivel.

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

There’s too much plot for the film to manage, but its heart, and sumptuous art, are so firmly in the right place that its appeal comes through sweet and clear.

This astute, subversively funny film fills a broad canvas. Mainly, though, it’s about long division, the all-too-human state of being permanently and unwittingly split down the middle.

Jockey has its limits as full-fledged drama; it’s more of a meditation on mortality, as well as a love letter from a filmmaker son to his own father. At the same time, though, it’s a testament to the power of being recognized, truly seen and remembered.

A plausible premise, right? Yes, absolutely, but it’s squandered in a slapdash, scattershot sendup that turns almost everyone into nincompoops, trivializes everything it touches, oozes with self-delight, and becomes part of the babble and yammer it portrays.

All of the performances are superb. Ms. Smit is a special revelation. This is only her second feature, though you’d never know it from the alacrity and intensity of her scenes with Ms. Cruz.

The Matrix Resurrections is a recycling dump of murky effects, indifferent action and a crazily cluttered, relentlessly repetitive narrative.

Ms. Gyllenhaal might have chosen conventionally entertaining material for her first time behind the camera, but she and Ms. Colman turn “The Lost Daughter” into something memorable. It’s a study of repression expressed with heartbreaking poignancy, a lost mother’s search for herself.

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.

Mr. Holland carries the day with unaffected charm, the good stuff is really good and improbably joyous, and the writers have found a plausible way of pushing the reset button for a new round of high-flying web-slinging. The possibilities are nothing less than multifarious.

Mr. Rex gives a 100% phenomenal performance, starting with a bright veneer of charm that conceals only barely, then not at all, an unmoored soul.

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

Mr. Spielberg’s film is a revelation. He has seized the moment by rethinking and reworking the source material. The results aren’t perfect. The production suffers from a heart condition of sorts, a flaw in the love story that’s flagrant but not life-threatening. Altogether, though, this pulsing, exultant musical connects a classic of American entertainment to a contemporary audience as never before.

We are all snapshooters these days, highly placed spectators to tragedy that seems to be beyond our comprehension, let alone control. Flee takes us down to sea level.

The Hand of God creates a reality that is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and remarkable for its buoyancy and grace. It’s a film from the hand of a master.

This is a significant addition to the Verhoeven canon, meaning it’s elegantly crafted, formidably well performed and as fascinating as it is lurid.

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.

What it is can be summed up in a word that’s often used loosely but fits the case here—a masterpiece, a mysteriously enthralling creation that keeps you guessing about where it’s going, then reveals its essence with astonishing clarity.

[Mr. Anderson's] screenplay soars above and beyond literal references by creating the oddest power couple you’ve ever seen. Whatever the psychodynamics between Gary and Alana may be, their bond has its own brilliant logic.

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.

If you’re up for going with the fascinating flow of a mercurial tale, this distinctive feature by Mike Mills may be just the ticket.

It’s serious at bottom. It means to teach and inspire, as well as entertain, and takes on more subjects of consequence than you can shake a racket at—among them race, parenting, marital dynamics, the weight of personal history and the mad commercialization of sports. Yet it’s marvelous fun from start to finish.

It shows us the woman in full, a fearless, joyous eccentric committed to carrying the oriflamme of French cuisine to the Jell-O-scarfing masses.

There’s only one trouble with his semi-autobiographical account. It’s so polished—so spirited, funny and skillfully calibrated—that it could be taken for a while as a crowd-pleaser and not a lot more. Sign me up for the crowd, though. This is surely the most pleasing film I’ve seen so far this year, but also the most affecting.

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.

The physical locations are spectacular, a surprise because most examples of the genre are shot in the augmented reality of high-tech soundstages. The spirit of Ms. Zhao’s film—and it is Ms. Zhao’s film—ranges from buoyant to playful during the downtime between generic battles to the almost death.

With its exuberant images (cats, oodles of cats), quaint Victorian settings, damask palette, odd camera angles and old-fashioned screen proportions, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain might have been too clever by more than half, except for its startling tenderness and depth of feeling, and the brilliance of its starring performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy.

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.

Ms. Hogg has outdone herself with an even stronger film about grief, self-discovery, the daunting uncertainties of the creative process and, before and after everything else, the mysterious power of the movie medium.

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.

This ingenious and beautiful film by Mia Hansen-Løve isn’t for chewing so much as savoring. The more you think back on its mysteries, the more pleasure it bestows.

In scene after scene we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait, especially because of Ms. Rapace’s presence.

The stuff of heroism is always mysterious. In this case it’s also marvelously strange.

The greatest reward of Old Henry is Mr. Nelson’s performance.

An astonishing and horrific thriller that has been constructed, like few films I’ve ever seen, to make you turn away from its frequent eruptions of savagery but then look back, just as often, to savor its mysterious beauty.

The new installment is exciting for its energy and scale, despite its flaws and derivative themes, and makes a lovely valediction for its star.

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.”

The film is poetic in its turn, as well as deliciously funny, and pretty much perfect except for a slightly didactic coda. But that’s a minor flaw in a major achievement. To err, even slightly, is you know what.

The film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scaled production in all of its live-theater iterations has become a ponderous movie that turns earnest into maudlin, lyrical into lugubrious.

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 a slow-release dose of sincere feelings.

What begins as a chamber piece, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin from a screenplay by Dennis Kelly, becomes a full-fledged movie with a pair of marvelous performances at its claustrophobic center.

The filmmakers find a way to expand their slashifications into provocative reflections on the white world’s fear of ostensibly menacing Black men, and, secondarily but importantly, art’s power to shape our understanding of the world around us.

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.”

Matt Damon, in the central role, confers a somber grace on a man who always thought he had none.

The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them.

What gives the film its distinction is the grace and intimacy with which it depicts the cousins’ girlhoods, and the quality of the performances—superb throughout, remarkably well-matched at every stage of each character’s life, and, in the case of a homeless wanderer who was once a lovely, ardent child, nothing less than extraordinary.

[Ms. Huppert] is fascinating again, but in a wonderfully nimble way that could be considered campy if her style weren’t so assured and her performance weren’t so witty and precise.

The result is a documentary that keeps drawing you in, even when you think it’s keeping you at a certain distance, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who, through good times and dreadful ones, has remained devoted to his art.

For many reasons, none of them good, Old is in a class by itself. M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller-slasher-sci-fi-creep-out is peerlessly clumsy, silly and alarmed.

It’s a fertile idea, beautifully executed.

A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.

It tests your tolerance for ambiguity as well as your visual acuity. Yet the spell it casts justifies the intense anxiety it creates by depicting a black-and-white society in which men have worth and women don’t.

The flashbacking narrative addresses, with surprising subtlety, buoyant wit and fearless theatricality, several matters that superhero sagas aren’t supposed to trouble themselves about.

However you look at it—as concert footage enriched by cultural history or cultural history raised up by glorious music—Summer of Soul is a thrilling documentary and a remarkable feature debut.

It’s another Soderbergh film whose allure is sure to endure.

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

The production, which grew out of the filmmaker’s friendship with the two men, Iván and Gerardo, is so heartfelt, and the material so intrinsically powerful, that I Carry You With Me slowly catches up with itself, and lights a fire fueled by food and love. That’s a winning combination in this story, just as it is in real life.

This delightful and useful documentary by Mariem Pérez Riera catches its subject at a piquant point in her career

As pleasing as the film is, some of it feels arbitrary, underdeveloped, possibly rushed.

It’s a gentle, often funny meditation on advancing age and the fragile joys of youth.

The energy feels authentic, and endlessly renewable. The cultural matrix is specific, yet the passions are universal. This grand and welcoming entertainment is exactly what’s needed to bring movie audiences back into the fold.

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.

Undine isn’t a conventional romance, or a readily accessible one, but open yourself to this special film and you’re liable to be hooked.

Every joke is leaned on, as if it were some Shavian gem; every pregnant pause eventually aborts.

This follow-up offers the solid satisfactions of suspense and intensity without the delight of discovery.

The new film, playing in theaters, devotes itself more obviously to making us feel good, but it succeeds.