Joe Morgenstern

Their homegrown spirit is so appealing, and their history so affecting, that you want to overlook the shortcomings of a dutiful, derivative script, with its several inspirational strands and dearth of essential details.

The buddies in Faces Places are perfectly matched, notwithstanding an age difference of 55 years, so the things that happen during their wanderings around rural France aren’t funny in a conventional sense. They are lovely, surprising and deeply moving.

If Human Flow has a chance of breaking through the noise and clutter of the media surround, it’s not because the demands Mr. Ai’s documentary makes on our attention are modest; just the opposite. This movie, a testament to the power of seeing, provides a long and uncommonly vivid look at a human crisis that’s changing the face of our planet.

Professor Marston & the Wonder Women stands head, shoulders, boots, tiara and lasso above many independent films of the moment. See it and you’ll come away with a new appreciation for the polywonder of creativity.

Marshall — a terrific performance by Chadwick Boseman — comes off at the outset as full of himself to overflowing. In other words, here’s an irreverent movie with a quirky ring of truth.

As in previous films, Mr. Baker mixes amateur and professional actors to exceptional effect.

Daring in its own right, this broodingly sumptuous saga explores the primacy of feelings, the nature of memories and the essence of being human, framed as the difference between being manufactured or born.

The storytelling doesn’t measure up to the spectacular scenery; at several points the narrative veers sharply off-course into Tarantino-tinged violence, some of it patently silly. But the generally somber tone is interesting, the performances are involving.

What’s so memorable about Ms. Lipitz’s documentary, though, is its privileged view of not-privileged students trying to dance well, learn well and think well on the way to living well in the world beyond their nurturing school.

Eleven years after An Inconvenient Truth Mr. Gore remains a prodigy of hope, with energy that seems endlessly renewable.

The story is impenetrable, with more betrayals than you can give a damn about, and the frigid tone borders on self-parody, with frequent excursions to the wrong side of the border. As strong and formidable and commandingly tall as Ms. Theron is, she can’t rise above the gloom.

Dramatically relentless and emotionally shattering, it brings news from a turbulent past that casts a baleful light on America’s troubled present.

If the plot turns out to be a convenience, the pleasure lies in what the co-stars bring to it.

Seldom has such a glittering wagon been hitched to such dull stars.

In Dunkirk, an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic.

Whether the truth sets anyone free is unknowable at this point, but the city that was being slaughtered silently has been heard, and its suffering has been seen.

This improbably magnificent film and Michael Giacchino’s majestic score are a perfect match.

There are mysteries here, not the least of them being how such a modest little movie can evoke such profound feelings.

Genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age.

Beguiling, meditative and elegantly photographed documentary.

Sensationally entertaining.

Ms. Dorfman, bless her open heart, has been captivated by the surfaces of the people she shoots, of how they seem. “I am totally not interested in capturing their souls.”

The strength of her film transcends the soldier’s power to seduce. We’re beguiled, as an audience, by seeing this male animal as he is seen, and for better and worse experienced, by a diverse and dynamic group of females. And by seeing, in the end, how The Beguiled gives new and memorable meaning to the notion of a finishing school.

It’s hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

The story has the hollow ring of artifice, even though Ms. Hawkins shrinks quite remarkably into the physical aspects of the role and opens up its spiritual dimensions.

Lost in Paris is nonsensical by design, a comedy of the absurd that’s always entertaining and occasionally pure.

The first film wasn’t bad, though it had its lapses. “Cars 2,” an aberration, was readily forgotten. This one feels like the series, at the end of the road, is running on fumes of nostalgia for its earliest self.

Taut, smart, intense and genuinely scary, Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night fulfills the promise, and then some, of the filmmaker’s 2015 debut feature, “Krisha.”