Joe Morgenstern

Audacity can’t carry a drama that’s unequal to its subject in almost every respect. ( Brian Cox does what he can, sometimes admirably, to breathe life into the title role.)

Caught up in the coils of Princess Diana’s hot lasso, I am bound to tell the truth: Wonder Woman is wonderful, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment. She is also learned, charmingly funny and, for a goddess, touchingly human.

The movie is a minor crime, a meandering misdemeanor that’s neither soft-core nor hardcore but no core, with no consistent style and minimal content.

This movie is truly unhinged — not crazed, which might be interesting, but devoid of the usual hinges that connect one sequence with another.

This Danish-language film about a Copenhagen commune in the mid-1970s pulses with screwy energy and antic confusion.

This new “Alien” prequel is mostly a gore fest, which may be great news for gluttons of the genre.

The soul of Ms. Burshtein’s film lives in its lovely off-center encounters, since the men Michal meets turn out to be consistently interesting.

This latest retelling of the ancient Arthurian myth is a stinker for the ages.

Timing being everything in life, Risk could hardly be more of the moment.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 probably couldn’t, and definitely doesn’t, recapture the sweet and singular silliness of the original, though the new edition from Marvel Studios and Disney has its rewards.

An unusually engaging portrait of a legendary chef who can be insufferable, as his most ardent admirers acknowledge, but who is also a brighter-than-life charmer, raging perfectionist, world-class hedonist, self-styled dandy and all-too-human survivor of the highest-end restaurant wars.

Unfortunately, the climax comes with more than a half hour to go, and the film, losing its focus on Jane Jacobs, turns its attention to the urban-renewal plague that devastated cities across America.

In its agreeably eccentric spirit, Tommy’s Honour evokes the Scottish comedies of Bill Forsyth; here it’s oddballs among the handmade, undimpled golf balls.

The payoff is sneakily profound — sneakily because this small-scale drama grabs you when you least expect it, often with the help of the dog.

A quietly transfixing drama.

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

Who am I to call it soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent — even for the franchise — and, not incidentally, brain-numbingly long at 136 minutes?

One of the smartest, funniest and most surprising movies I’ve seen in years.

Kasper Collin’s splendid documentary feature starts with an event that shook the jazz world.

In a production based on a nonfiction book by Diane Ackerman, a brilliantly specific story has been reduced to conventional drama and synthetic heroics.

For a film that moves at a deliberate pace, Frantz grows remarkably involving; Mr. Ozon is a formidable storyteller, as he has previously demonstrated in such films as “Under the Sand” and “Swimming Pool.”

A pitch-black, blood-soaked comedy and phenomenal first feature by Alice Lowe, who also stars as Ruth, the pregnant heroine.

For all its flashy trappings, weighty ruminations and zero-gravity floatings aboard the International Space Station, Life turns out to be another variant of “Alien,” though without the grungy horror and grim fun. In space no one can hear you snore.

[Kore-eda's] latest film, though, has a special warmth and grace. It unfolds slowly, sneaks up on big questions about intertwined mysteries of family and personal destiny, and pretty much answers them, though the biggest question for Ryota is whether he’ll be changed by what he learns.

In the new film beauty is sought, and seldom found, in glitzy surfaces. Enchantment is chased, and never captured, in extravagant set pieces that owe less to fairy-tale tradition than to Cirque du Soleil grandiosity.

The ghost story gets to be silly, and wants to have it both ways, as ghost stories often do, on the question of whether various signs from beyond the grave are real or imagined.... Yet Ms. Stewart’s portrayal has the ring of truth and the urgency of terror.

This French-language horror film is shockingly well made for a debut feature: Julia Ducournau, who wrote and directed it, really knows her stuff and is clearly bound for mainstream success, if that’s where her appetites take her.

I’ve gone on about the creatures because there’s so little to say about the humans, who, in their turn, have little to say about the creatures, because the writers haven’t written enough lively dialogue.