Justin Chang

The royal family’s travails have long been likened to that of a soap opera, but Spencer, even as it conjures the emotional extravagance of a first-rate melodrama, refuses to be hemmed in. It’s a historical fantasia, a claustrophobic thriller and a dark comedy of manners, all poised on a knife’s edge between tabloid trash and high art.

While its succession of emotionally loaded moments never crystallize into a vivid whole, the strong performances and highly effective use of music should put audiences in a forgiving mood.

[Hall] picks up on their contrasting energies, the way Negga eagerly draws the camera’s gaze while Thompson quietly deflects it. But what’s most striking about Hall’s direction is her visual acuity, her gift for composing images that are gorgeous, disorienting and strangely intuitive.

You walk out in the depressing realization that you’ve just seen one of the more interesting movies Marvel will ever make, and hopefully the least interesting one Chloé Zhao will ever make.

Surely the truth (or something close to it) of who these men and women were must have been more fascinating, and more worth mythologizing, than what transpires in this strained mashup.

A poignant, sometimes piercing triptych of tales, each one predicated on chance encounters and romantic possibilities (the original Japanese title translates as “Coincidence and Imagination”), it finds Hamaguchi in playful, beguiling and quietly affecting form.

A willingness to subvert expectations is one reason this ungainly, ingenious and altogether fascinating collaboration works as well as it does.

The Rescue is a gripping, unsurprisingly moving early account, one that emphasizes the pluck and ingenuity of its heroes and the resilience and beauty of its survivors. To say that it feels necessarily incomplete is to acknowledge the extraordinary and extraordinarily multifaceted story it has to tell.

What fascinates the director, and clearly also fascinates his four outstanding lead actors, is the possibility of grace in a seemingly impossible, inconsolable situation. With considerable intelligence and disarming moral seriousness, they confront the question of whether forgiveness and understanding can be honestly extended or received, and whether healing can ever be more than an abstract concept.

Titane is nothing if not a triumph of engineering, to the point where the slickness and sophistication of its technique sometimes threaten to overwhelm the rigor of its ideas. Still, it’s hard not to admire the sheer verve with which Ducournau ultimately welds those ideas together.

Unfortunately, [Showalter] is often stymied by a pedestrian script by Abe Sylvia ( TV series “Dead to Me” and “Nurse Jackie”) that lurches from one defining life moment to the next and leans heavily on Chastain’s performance to establish a sense of emotional and psychological continuity.

The simplicity of the story Eastwood is telling would seem to suit his unvarnished, unfussy style, though frankly, a bit more fuss — a few more takes to smooth out a wobbly performance, an extra light bulb or two in the interior shots — wouldn’t have gone awry. But “Cry Macho,” with its attractive but not indulgent landscapes (shot in New Mexico) backed by a spare, twangy Mark Mancina score, takes pains to reject anything that might smack of falsity or pretense.

Scene by scene, it pulls us into a world that coheres not just through plotting and dialogue, but through the sharp rhythms of Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.’s editing, the hard shimmer of Alexander Dynan’s images and the humdrum precision of Ashley Fenton’s production design.

To call this Dune a remarkably lucid work is to praise it with very faint damnation. Perhaps reluctant to alienate the novices in the audience, Villeneuve has ironed out many of the novel’s convolutions, to the likely benefit of comprehension but at the expense of some rich, imaginative excess.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is most enjoyable when it shakes off the tedious franchise imperatives and forges its own path.

Page by page, frame by frame, it seeks to cultivate your wonder and awaken your outrage, to spin a work of unbridled fantasy into a depressingly relevant critique of human callousness and greed in any era.

The director, David Bruckner, doesn’t just mindlessly apply the electrodes; even when he jars you to attention, he always seems to be drawing you into something deeper and more atmospheric. He delivers a scare you can sink into.

It’s a tale of profound isolation and thrilling connection, alert and alive and gorgeously sensual even as every moment carries a bittersweet reminder of time’s inexorable passage.

Respect is fine, fitfully rousing, even respectable. And sometimes, it’s something more.

At the simplest level, the stories of trauma and loss told in In the Same Breath exist as a necessary corrective.

What does it mean to be a knight, or even just to be human? It isn’t an easy question, and The Green Knight, in taking it seriously, isn’t always an easy film. But by the time Gawain reaches his journey’s end, in as moving and majestically sustained a passage of pure cinema as I’ve seen this year, the moral arc of his journey has snapped into undeniable focus.

Psychotic, battle-weary and devoid of compassion as they may be, these merry professional killers aren’t entirely dead inside. By the same token, Gunn’s insouciant swagger isn’t entirely devoid of warmth or sentimentality, and the bonds of kinship that emerge between comrades — warm little cracks in the movie’s nihilistic facade — can’t help but sneak their way into your own affections.

Jungle Cruise, despite its more-than-capable leads and its much-vaunted attention to detail and verisimilitude, never feels transporting in the way that even mediocre blockbusters were once able to muster. It’s less an expedition than a simulation, a dispatch from a wild yet oddly pristine world where seeing is never close to believing.

[The] story never fully comes into focus. You catch glimpses of it in between the busy, mechanical lurchings of the plot, in the swirling movement of a camera pan and the ardent commitment of the actors.

Old grabs you right away, starts losing you at the half-hour mark, pulls you back in with some agreeably bonkers set-pieces, drags you through a tedious closing stretch and finally leaves you in an oddly charitable mood: Say, that wasn’t so bad, except when it was terrible.

Artfulness and restraint can be admirable qualities in a filmmaker, but rage and despair, when channeled with this much force and purpose, can be undeniably effective substitutes.

Even Hansen-Løve’s characteristically light, unassuming touch feels like a playful rejoinder to the weight of the Bergman mystique, a refusal to let him dictate the terms of the argument.

Nobody here actually calls Julie the worst person in the world (that insult is reserved for another character entirely), but you can imagine her thinking it about herself as she considers the mistakes she’s made and the people she’s hurt. But over the course of this charming, wistful, ineffably tender movie, you also see her learn to embrace the possibility of good in herself and in every precious, unhurried moment. It’s time well spent.