Joe Morgenstern

No one makes movies like Mr. Jia does. He’s a dramatist with the eye of a documentarian and the instincts of a historian, even a geographer. But he’s also a romantic poet, and his heroine, a strong woman with a pure heart, is driven by love as far as it can take her.

Ms. De Clermont-Tonnerre’s direction is a revelation — not just a good first try, but a first-rate achievement by any measure. She clearly watched such relevant classics as “The Black Stallion” and “The Misfits,” yet found a laconic style that is all her own.

The result is provocative, even startling, and more edifying than you might expect.

The film doesn’t give Ms. Larson enough good stuff to fulfill her role’s potential. Her Captain Marvel is an appealing character who becomes an impressive one, wrapped in a shimmering aura of blue and white energy. What’s missing, though, is what helped make “Wonder Woman” an exemplary figure of female empowerment two years ago: unforced warmth, along with strength, and flashes of delight.

This evocation of the mission half a century ago is as good as it’s likely to get — meaning not just good but magnificent.

A marvelously loopy and deeply serious film from Iceland.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

A surfeit of spectacular images from top-of-the-line computer animation. And the love story branches out beyond a boy and his dragon into gladdening fulfillment on both sides of the species divide. That will certainly be sufficient for kids and families who’ve been waiting for the final chapter of the big-screen trilogy. Over much of the territory it covers, though, the film feels like it’s flying on empty.

The film can be harrowing in its repetitive violence, but never less than fascinating as a piece of ethnology, with magic-realist dimensions, that amounts to an origin story of the Latin American drug trade.

I loved watching this sci-fi spectacle’s moving parts. I just couldn’t get past its brain.

The stupidity lacks smarts in the script department, and the joke, such as it is, wears thin, then turns sour.

A hugely ambitious sequel, joyous and genuinely complex, that’s charged with dramatic and musical energy to the very last frame.

Never Look Away makes an eloquent case for art as an expression of hope, a way of searching for meaning in chaos.

Daughter of Mine is a triptych of vivid characters and superb performances (including that of young Sara Casu), a study in contrasting and competing passions.

Arctic is a lesson in lessness, coolly observed and warmly felt.

As entertainment, however, the film is calculation impure and simple. It’s a box-ticking exercise in female jeopardy, survival and empowerment, oppressively efficient in its relentless way but unrelieved by emotional resonance.

Of the 7,000 Jews who resisted, about 1,700 survived. The stories of these four don’t constitute high drama; there’s none of the dramatic clarity of “Schindler’s List.” But they testify to that part of the human spirit concerned with ironic humor, improbable daring and unlikely generosity.

Details like these are delightful. So is the notion of Stonehenge as a transport hub to another temporal plane, and the spectacle of Alex and his dauntless cohorts in tin armor they’ve bought in a souvenir shop. What’s destructive, and eventually benumbing, is the kitchen-sink clutter of fantasy, reality, wish-fulfillment and glib enchantment. To say that the film lacks simplicity would be an oversimplification.

Mr. Shyamalan’s movies have often been turgid in a distinctive way, with overtones of lofty sadness, and dramatized deliberately or violently, but seldom spontaneously. This one follows the pattern, for not so good and worse. It’s a lofty letdown.

The film as a whole never takes flight, though not for lack of trying.

The real head-scratcher is how such an endearingly modest, gentle film can say so much with such eloquence about a professional partnership that amounts to a love affair; about the mysterious business of being funny; and about the toll taken by the passage of time. (Messrs. Reilly and Coogan are both wonderful; so are Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as, respectively, Ollie’s wife, Lucille, and Stan’s wife, Ida.)

The good news about the production is that Ms. Kidman gives a formidable performance in what’s essentially a classic noir thriller reconceived, with a woman at its center, and Ms. Kusama’s direction is superb. (Julie Kirkwood did the stylish cinematography.) The bad news concerns tone, or emotional weather. The film is intentionally dark, but it’s also almost ceaselessly grim.

Is the film worthy of her? Not really. It’s informative, in a didactic way, but basically an exercise in hagiography, a skin-deep celebration of someone who has never settled for superficiality in her life’s work.

Exhilarating but ultimately off-putting.

Like “Roma,” another glory of the current season, the film was shot in black-and-white; the shooter was Lukasz Zal, who was co-cinematographer, with Ryszard Lenczewski, on “Ida.” As in both of those films, the result here is mysteriously ravishing, so much so that you either forget it isn’t in color or take the rich blacks and radiant whites to be colors in their own right. Also, black is the color of the screen between the chapters of a story that takes bold narrative leaps off-screen; the impact of these ellipses is stunning.

The results are mind-numbingly immense, joylessly violent and utterly lifeless.

I found this sequel deeply slumping, not to mention unnecessary, unmagical and often unfunny. The misuse of talent is what slumped me the most.

The Mule is based on a true story, and a good one, but it’s weakened by a mediocre script.