Justin Chang

Another Round itself often moves and swings like a piece of music: Staccato in its rhythms and symphonic in structure, it’s awash in Scarlatti and Schubert, bar tunes and patriotic songs, and climaxes with a jubilant blast of Danish pop/R&B. It sings, and it sparkles.

An unremarkable if far from unpleasant sequel.

The conventionality of Happiest Season might be the most radical thing about it. The movie boasts the usual surface delights and yuletide setpieces: It has competitive ice skating and a white-elephant-gift party, shticky running gags and acres of throw-pillow-heavy production design. It also has two lead performances of remarkable grown-up complexity and moment-to-moment coherence.

The horrors of Collective are sickeningly specific; the implications, as suggested by its comprehensive indictment of a title, are universal.

Boseman, evincing the same integrity he clung to his entire career, refuses to soft-pedal the destination. He imparts to this seething, shattered man the gift of a broken soul, riven by anger and trauma, and makes him all the more human for it. His final moments of screen time are among his darkest, and also his finest.

By zooming in and out of his protagonist’s consciousness, Marder casts aside any pretense of omniscience; he empathizes, but he also knows when to detach. Ruben’s journey is a privilege to witness, but it’s one he’ll ultimately have to walk alone.

Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.

Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.

Winocour shows us smart, sometimes insensitive and fundamentally decent people navigating an extraordinary situation and the sacrifices that are made in service of a grand collective undertaking.

A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.

With City Hall, his 45th feature, he [Wiseman] has composed another epic from a series of intricate, carefully arranged miniatures, a four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of a movie that will leave you admiring its agility and concision.

With a few exceptions . . . Borat’s satirical jabs don’t land with quite the same cringe-making force this time; the setups are too convoluted, the anonymous targets too genial, the payoffs too meager.

For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty . . . The Witches is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients.

Hopefulness and rawness, much like society and the self, are ultimately inextricable in “Martin Eden,” a work of art that abounds in its own beautiful contradictions. It might reject individualism, but it’s also a glorious singularity.

The filmmakers seem curiously at sea over the purpose of their assignment, possessing neither the patience to plunge headlong into the story’s familiar depths nor the radicalism to reinvent it entirely.

Even its most surreal flights of fancy are tethered to a ploddingly diagrammed story whose indisputable lessons — cherish the ones you love, and also make room for more of them — are driven home with dispiriting obviousness.

Time can make you weep for a hundred reasons, from joy, pain or recognition, but its wounds and its glories are finally inextricable from one of the paradoxes of moviemaking itself. Cinema can magically compress decades into hours and transform lives into narratives, but what it erects here is ultimately a monument to something irretrievable. Cherish every moment of this movie, because each one stands in for all the others that have been lost.

Charm City Kings clearly knows what it’s doing; unfortunately, what it’s doing is often just as obvious to us.

It is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date. How could it not?

This is a funny film about death, which is to say it’s a wrenching film about life.

The sly achievement of The Forty-Year-Old Version is to turn a critical eye on the very idea of success (by whose standards?), and to ponder exactly what level of compromise is acceptable to secure it.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, smoothly entertaining as it is, may also elude clear consensus. Democracy is a messy business, but an element of real, lived-in messiness seems beyond this movie’s purview.

Bit by bit, line by line, she [July] nudges you onto her characters’ wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions.

You see in Felix the deadpan anarchic streak that has made Murray a force in American comedy for decades. At the same time, the actor seems to be winking at his own reputation for off-screen mischief — the tricks, stunts and pop-up bartending gigs that have made him a kind of one-man flash mob.

What makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin.

It’s a delight to see the director cut loose, along with his gifted behind-the-scenes collaborators (including production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Jacqueline Durran) and his captivating stars.

You can reject the conclusions of Campos’ movie, particularly its unrelenting pileup of dead bodies, and still take pleasure in its atmospheric surface — in the persuasiveness of its small-town environs (shot on 35-millimeter film by the gifted cinematographer Lol Crawley) and the vigor of its performances. He may not persuade you all the time, but the devil is very much in those details.