Justin Chang

The valedictory sentiments at the heart of this mysterious experiment are conveyed with characteristically wry wit and great generosity of spirit.

The result is a ride that feels smooth and bumpy in all the right places. You are pulled along by the seductive glide of Soderbergh’s filmmaking, by the jazzy riffs of David Holmes’ score and the suavity of the camerawork, only to be jolted into high alertness by the nasty, bloody surprises in Solomon’s script.

The movie is a straightforward, even familiar, tale of survival and recovery, but its grave respect for the unique extremity of its protagonist’s ordeal cancels out any impulse toward exploitation. It doesn’t make the mistake of assuming that your tears are its natural entitlement, which is precisely why you might find yourself shedding a few before it’s over.

For all the mysteries it chooses to leave off screen and on dry land, Chevalier speaks for itself: Scene by scene, it builds a vision of group dynamics as calm, violent and finally unyielding as the sea.

I’m wary in general of making any definitive pronouncements about Locked Down, whose charms and irritations (and it has its share of both) are largely a matter of timing and perspective.

What we see on-screen is both rewardingly jagged and uncommonly thoughtful, an engrossing family drama that doubles as a sharp rethink of how a family operates within the overlapping, often overbearing spheres of race, class, sports and celebrity.

To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.

The horrific 1937-38 massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during the early days of the Japanese occupation gets a polished presentation in Nanking.

The tension is rooted in psychology rather than gimmickry, and evinces a command of craft that feels old-fashioned in the most refreshing possible sense.

This complex story from the early days of psychoanalysis engrosses and even amuses as it unfolds through a series of conversations, treatment sessions and exchanged letters.

The emotion and the horror might have taken still deeper root if the world of the movie felt less hectic and more coherently realized, if the supernatural touches and occasional jump scares welled up organically from within rather than feeling smeared on with a digital trowel.

Like many art films of a certain aesthetically adventurous, formally rigorous, narratively oblique persuasion, Music will probably be ignored by most and dismissed by many as excessively challenging at best and woefully obtuse at worst. But that overlooks the piercing, entirely accessible emotion that Schanelec layers into her story, often in ways that would seem counterintuitive in less assured hands.

The sense of sisterly solidarity that powers The Woman King is the movie’s raison d’être; it’s also part of Prince-Bythewood’s authorial signature.

A twisty, thorny new documentary that grips, jolts and exasperates in roughly equal measure.

The conceit itself is by turns intriguing and laborious, and depending on your willingness to unpack it, it will be either the revelation that sends this movie soaring into the stratosphere or the heavy stone that drags its featherweight pleasures down to earth.

While Wild will surely be praised in the coming months for having a strong, well-written, flesh-and-blood female at its center, it’s to the film’s credit that it wears this badge of honor with a lightness that in no way undermines its sincerity.

Even as Into the Inferno invites us to marvel at our insignificance in the face of Mother Nature’s seething primordial firepit, Herzog, being Herzog, refuses to lose sight of the human element.

Mostly, Audiard leans assuredly on his actors, gently pushing each one toward a simple, ordinary, never-irrelevant question — what does your character want? — and coaxing forth an utterly unique answer.

For a film that is very much about the need to continually question our heroes and hold them to a higher standard, Happy Valley offers an unapologetic tribute to one man’s painful honesty and a tacit rebuke to those who couldn’t muster anywhere near the same courage.

Its emotional reserves are deeper and more capacious, its sense of mystery more profound, than in just about any American movie of any scale I’ve seen in recent memory.

Eschewing character arcs and talking heads in favor of a more poetic approach, this lyrical exercise in avant-garde entomology is the work of an intuitive filmmaker with an often hypnotic sense of composition.

This cloddishly contrived suspenser is too busy to bore, but too farfetched to thrill, combining routine heist-thriller machinations with dialogue that often thuds like a body hitting asphalt.

Barnard’s grounded yet kinetic filmmaking — her collaborators include director of photography Ole Bratt Birkeland and editor Maya Maffioli — catches you up in its own infectious, wittily syncopated rhythms.