John Anderson

The Found Footage Phenomenon, while long-winded, offers a knowledgeable take on what makes the difference.

Hold Your Fire is a bona-fide thriller, its elements in delicate balance.

There’s so much going on that one loses track of how inane so much of it is, but “A New Era” is also a pleasure, guilty or otherwise: Mr. Fellowes doesn’t go very deeply into any character, his frictionless repartee gliding by.

It’s a deranged story, one that offers all kinds of opportunities for examining changes in the state of artificial insemination, medical ethics, the ways in which the human body has been opened up like an evidence locker, and the catchup that legislation has to play with technology.

An uneven but likable horror film with one of the better plot twists in recent memory.

It’s largely a two-character drama with two capable actors, though neither Mr. Teague nor Ms. Richardson (who is usually quite good) are given much with which to win our sympathy.

The attitude of Mr. Navalny and his colleagues is fearless, in a country governed by fear. Thrillers are rarely so inspiring.

There’s no glory in the pugilism of The Survivor, save for the last, exquisite shot of Haft in his Marciano fight, which is alarmingly beautiful, a catharsis for Haft and a moment of aesthetic delirium for the viewer.

Funny, wry, emotionally potent, and like most films by Hirokazu Kore -eda (“Shoplifters,” “Nobody Knows,” “After Life”) operates on multiple levels—usually some kind of domestic tragicomedy under which lies profound existential disquiet.

A romance, bromance and good-natured send-up of teenage obsession.

Ms. Leo is in the kind of role that befits her particular gifts—a character overwhelmed by her own emotions, who sucks the air out of whatever room she finds herself in. But Measure of Revenge moves with too much trepidation—or too much style, one might say—for a convincing urban thriller.

What’s lovely about The Adam Project is its treatment of grief, the love between mothers and sons and, to a slightly lesser extent, fathers and sons.

As noted in the thoroughly entertaining Oscar Peterson : Black + White, the jazz giant never seemed to struggle, not musically: He arrived on the scene “fully formed,” someone notes, a technical wonder, a master of swing who reigned over the jazz keyboard for 60 years.

There are a few charming moments between Ms. Lopez and Mr. Wilson that prove beyond doubt that their characters are too intelligent to be in this movie. And yet, here we are.

There are a few characters and storylines that aren’t quite resolved, but the essentials—notably, what launched Mickey into a life of crime—are wrapped up in a way that should mollify a viewership left hanging when the show was so abruptly assassinated.

Generic booze is, in its way, a shortcut, something pretending to be something else—something achieved through time, effort and expense. As such, it’s not a bad analogy for this movie.

[A] moving and poetic documentary portrait.

Ms. McDonald resorts to some rather standard practices—fleeting graphics, subtitles and numbers—but the strength of the movie is its interviewees, including journalists Joe Castaldo, Alexandra Posadzki (“There was no plan. Why was there no plan?”) and Amy Castor, as well as Taylor Monahan of the crypto service MyCrypto.

The actor and his director may be addressing the oldest subject in drama. But they manage to give it a new twist nonetheless.

Those robots have read our emotional programming, Arthur says, and know exactly how and why we’ll do what we do. Which is more than one can say for viewers of Mother/Android, who will find the robot rebellion more plausible than the human behavior.

Middleton and Spinney are all about the medium’s first megawatt celebrity, who is a slippery enough subject all by himself, one treated here with affection, intelligence and an unadoring tone that’s intriguing all by itself.

It’s also a film made by her grieving husband. On paper, it shouldn’t work at all. It works measurably better on screen.

There’s a lot going on and somehow not enough, because the emotional destination is so obvious, the tone so wearying and the performances, mostly, so stilted. The fight scenes, it must be said, are electrifying, especially the climactic battle.

It might have taken one actress to make a movie so reliant on others. It certainly took a director with a supreme confidence, not just in the talents of her performers but in the power of gesture.

Among the charms of Finch is its willingness not to overexplain, trusting our patience while involving us visually.

To call The Harder They Fall transgressive would be giving it too much credit: Its various outrages are obnoxious because they have so little to do with anything like a story—which, for all the subplots and posing to come, is about payback for that first scene.

It’s a humanistic endeavor, essentially, out of which emerge memorable people doing heroic work in inglorious places.

The real-life Arizona case was likely a lot less funny than Queenpins, which was adapted by the film’s directors and uses the comedic gifts of its lead actresses (reunited from both “Veronica Mars” and “The Good Place”) to remain both outrageous and entertaining without ever abandoning an undercurrent of sadness.