Kyle Smith

Stirring as it frequently is, The Way Back is a good movie that should have been a classic.

A sharp comedy as well as a punk-pulp spree. Don't go if you can't handle Brit slang. ("Grass" = informer.)

Dryly comic, arch, sleek, and suffused with mood-setting tracks by the likes of X and Depeche Mode, Electric Slide has some of the mordant absurdity of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. Like its dim hero, it’s going nowhere, but traveling in style.

Never before have I been so emotionally involved with an apple core, or seen salvation in a flip-flop. Taika Waititi, you had me at nunchuks.

Though it does have a handful of dirty jokes meant to earn the audience-pleasing PG-13 rating and features Marge swearing, it falls short of classic status.

Still, if 13 Hours lacks the gravitas of “American Sniper,” it’s powerful stuff. Bay’s goal is to put you right in these men’s boots, to feel the heat, the fear, the fatigue, the weight of the weapons and the web of camaraderie.

It is said that everyone either loved or hated radical defense lawyer William Kunstler. A documentary by his daughters asks, "Why choose 'or' instead of 'both'?"

Its plot is simple and direct, albeit enlivened by well-timed surprises. The film isn’t especially funny—droll is more accurate—but its approach to Antoinette’s character adroitly balances sympathy with mockery.

Though the documentary is clearly meant as a fan letter, not an even-handed report, it does overlook some important matters.

Uneven though it is . . . No Hard Feelings devises some smart new twists for the teen sex comedy while expertly counterbalancing Mr. Feldman’s doe-eyed innocence with Ms. Lawrence’s vamping.

As a love story, Fantasy Life isn’t particularly original, but the low-key way Mr. Shear realizes some familiar situations is warm and human, with comic aspects and sad ones kept in an appealing balance.

Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.

If “Spinal Tap II” doesn’t quite earn an 11 on a scale of one to 10, I’d say it rates a strong 7.

Mr. Chu knows exactly how to bring this story emphatically home, and as we’ve heard before, there’s no place like it.

At times, it’s scary how derivative it is. Still, as crepuscular weirdness seeps across the story and leads to a delirious ending, it’s largely effective.

Belgian writer-director Michiel Blanchart’s debut feature is snappy and tart.

Many have observed that the first “Avatar,” despite its outsize box-office, didn’t leave much of a cultural footprint. The second is more of the same. It may be a visual buffet, but the pickings are merely eye candy.

It is the year’s sweetest cinematic surprise so far, containing much of the childlike tenderness and dry whimsy of a Wes Anderson film, minus that director’s sometimes-suffocating obsession with surfaces.

The almost nonstop fighting and Mr. Quaid’s low-key charm are enough to make the movie a serviceable action offering. Moreover, the script, though focused on wacky spasms of violence, has a strong human element at its core.

It’s a bloody comedy that’s also a buddy comedy.

The overall effect is appropriately trippy, and revealing.

Though the movie is consistently fun and has some clever ideas to go with its marvelous look, its story is thin and episodic, without much in the way of momentum.

The power of the film lies in how it crafts excitement out of a granular understanding of Russian state brutishness and the degree of determination it will require to evade it. It will take a spy’s level of resourcefulness to emerge from the labyrinth, and Kompromat has the punch of a first-rate spy thriller.

M3gan is wittily written and smoothly plotted by Akela Cooper, from a story by her and James Wan, as well as tautly directed by Gerard Johnstone, who hearkens all the way back to Mary Shelley’s warning. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we’ve created a monster, but there’s no way to kill off tech.

It settles for being amusing when it could have been interesting as well.

The clash Mr. Roberts devises between the lunchbucket blues of operating a crane at a shipyard and the dazzle of big-time sports raises pertinent questions about the relationship between vocation and avocation, about where we truly locate meaning in our lives, especially as time grows less disposable.

Blunt, brassy and chatty, she makes for a refreshingly open host of her own life story.

Touch is a worthy consideration of the things that matter most when the clock is running out, but it could have been more focused.