Joe Morgenstern

Most powerfully about what violence does to the soul: Joe is almost dead to the world, and to himself. Not quite, though. This harshly beautiful film is equally about his regeneration during the course of a journey that amounts to a parable of humanity trying to climb out of the pit of endless slaughter and retribution.

Unconcerned with context or tonal nuance, it frames itself as an action thriller with a signature moment that could have been lifted from an old western.

Yet the nonsense content, being pure, is liberating, and allows us to savor all the machinery as machinery: the train, the plot, the pitch-imperfect dialogue, the huffing-puffing fights, the ridiculous stunts and, yes, the climactic train wreck. Here’s how filmmakers can fill screens when they don’t have a film to make.

Paddington 2 is “The Godfather Part II” of Peruvian bear movies, a sequel that surpasses the superb original.

It’s weighed down by symbolic significance, yet powerful and instructive all the same, with a few flickerings of black comedy.

In Between is full of life, a triptych of sexual and cultural combat that takes us to places that I, for one, knew nothing about.

Superb as Ms. Kruger is, there’s nothing she can do to keep the taut, heartfelt narrative from going off the rails.

It’s always rewarding to see her (Bening) in action, even though her latest movie, Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, doesn’t measure up to her performance.

It’s a movie in which too-muchness ends up being not-enoughness, since the script lacks a vital center. But the premise remains appealing. If you have to travel by air, being 5 inches tall makes a seat in economy a throne.

No one knew Mr. Sorkin was a good director, but he is, and his filmmaking chops come topped with intelligence and curiosity. That makes it all the more remarkable, and I don’t mean good remarkable, when the film takes a last-reel turn into slushy psycho-sappiness, enlisting someone we thought we’d seen the last of to explain what the story was really about.

Expansively, melodramatically entertaining.

It’s a great story told well, for the most part, and exceptionally well through Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham

The rhythms are unhurried, the drama pinpoint-intense, the style intimate, the wit Hitchcock-perverse.

This sequel turns out to be a comedy of manners, of all things, and an agreeable one, a movie that will get you laughing and suck you in.

A narrative that mixes, not always successfully, stirring moments and sensational action with angst and grim conflictedness on a galactic scale.

Quest is intimate, warm yet unsentimental and agreeably rambling, at least for a while. It’s an extended visit, squeezed into 104 minutes, with intensely likable people who are doing their best to hold things together, and, if possible, get a bit ahead.

This is a feel-real film, a sharp-witted, tough-minded biopic about Tonya Harding, the 1991 U.S. figure skating champion and two-time Olympian who skated rinks around most of her rivals but never became America’s sweetheart.

Ms. Hawkins reminds us how intense silent films could be. She gives the best performance of the year with the most heart-piercing silence you’ve ever seen.

It’s a tale of totality, not during an eclipse but during a brief conjunction that changes at least one life surprisingly, and one of the greatest pleasures of the movie year.

He’s (Oldman) superb in this one, a study in eccentric but magnetic leadership, and in masterly acting.

The film is exuberant and heartfelt, and the hero’s journey takes him through spectacular territory; the picturesque land of the living pales by comparison to what Miguel discovers in the Land of the Dead.

Mr. Gilroy’s new film doesn’t try for lean. When its lawyer hero isn’t citing legal precedent, he uses spectacularly florid language that reflects his unusual mental state. But there’s a disconnect between what we see and hear and what we’re meant to feel.

The battles to save the world are generic/titanic; the villain is a bloodless bore with a boom-box roar; and the screen, like the ragged story, is chockablock with such underdeveloped overachievers as Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and the Flash.

The movie is, by turns — and sometimes simultaneously — darkly comic, blazingly profane, flat-out hilarious and shockingly violent, not to mention flippant, tender, poetic and profound.

The current cast is cursed with the director’s lust for gravitas. Searching for emotional truth in Agatha Christie, Mr. Branagh succeeds only in killing her playfulness.

Ms. Gerwig’s movie is very much a thanking situation. Once you’ve seen it — even while you’re watching it, with a grin stuck on your face — you want to give thanks for how wonderful it is, how wise and funny and full of grace.

The effort shows in all three performances. Spontaneity is in short supply. The comedy seems willed, the solemnity mechanical, the dialogue rhythms awkward and self-conscious.

Gradually, though, it wins you over with endearing performances and a clarity of purpose. If that sounds faintly patronizing, it isn’t meant to.