Kyle Smith

Here’s a brilliant idea for a rock documentary: Catch up with a band in the creaky fog of middle age, long after the hits. A certain toll has been exacted, a certain humility achieved, and yet the story is not yet over.

After Love may be a bit thin on story, but it nevertheless shines with feeling.

The second half, in particular, exemplifies science fiction at its best: thoughtful, exciting, provocative and pointed. It’s fantasy wrapped around ideological substance, making “Kingdom” the best of the franchise films to make it to theaters so far this year.

Without straining to make an obvious point, Mr. Tomnay uses black comedy and shocking splatters of gore to tweak the class of jaded plutocrats who are as asset-rich as they are morals-poor.

Dreamin’ Wild is an elegant appreciation of the many textures of aging, balancing the feel of rhapsodic memories and shuddery regrets.

If a thriller can make you hold your breath for fear of being eaten by aliens while you’re sitting in the multiplex, it’s working pretty well, and “A Quiet Place: Day One” appropriately kept me in a frozen state, afraid to so much as crinkle a page in my notebook.

Chile ’76 subtly illustrates how difficult it becomes to separate the personal and the political in an authoritarian state. As it goes on, it develops from a character portrait into an unusually realistic thriller, with danger asserting itself everywhere.

It’s difficult to watch but beguilingly genuine in its exploration of the tortured dynamics of three adult siblings whose mother died five years earlier and who haven’t been together in three years.

Strays is wildly inappropriate. It’s also wildly funny.

Though the oddness of the situation yields the same kinds of lightly funny observational moments that gave Lost in Translation some of its charm, Rental Family is, like Sofia Coppola’s movie, above all else a sweet drama about the difficulty of connections. Which makes it an unusually mature and considered experience at the movies.

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

For those who complain that movies are too pat and formulaic, “Marty Supreme” is mostly a bracing tonic—pungent, wild and weird.

Directed and written by Kelly Fremon Craig, it’s a charmer: sensitive, funny and grounded. It’s also a kind of rebuttal to many woeful cinematic trends, foremost among which is dishonesty, or lack of verisimilitude.

You’d be unwise to look to the movies for economic insight—this one amounts to an extended fatuous argument that an individual who behaved like a corporate restructuring would be a psychopath. But among contemporary socio-economic parables, Mr. Park’s latest is an amusingly cutting one.

Once the two rovers landed, three weeks apart, problems that had never been confronted before in the history of humanity started to become routine occurrences. So did solving them, and the documentary is a warm and well-earned tribute to the brilliant scientists and engineers who did so.

The Christophers is zingy fun. Whichever world Mr. Soderbergh decides to visit, he invariably makes the trip worthwhile.

The film is a scintillating drama that explores a weighty historical dispute with Gothic flair.

It’s stylish and chilling, with a lively feminist undercurrent.

In balancing the two sides’ competing motives, Mr. Sorogoyen has fashioned not only a taut drama but a parable that is widely applicable across many cultures at this moment.

It’s as effective as one of the fabled machines it celebrates.

The latest and best “TMNT” movie contains a little more substance than may at first be apparent, and this sci-fi reptile comedy admirably advances a message that we can and should all get along, majority and minorities alike.

If you emerge from this movie with a strong urge to rewatch the entire saga, you won’t be alone. Neither will those who emerge with tears of gratitude in their eyes.

Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.

Ms. Mirren and the film do us all a service in declining to paint Meir as a legendary figure but instead observing that although she was a strong leader who can rightly be credited with saving her country from annihilation, crisis forced her to make grueling decisions whose psychic burdens she bore heavily.

As directed with a wonderful combination of whimsy, deadpan humor and childlike exhilaration by Ms. Regan, the film is impish and full of bounce.

The bad news about the Ennio Morricone documentary Ennio is its length: 2 1/2 hours. Far too short!

The film is quiet, deliberate and low-key, and some may find it underwhelming, but writer-director Gabriel Martins has a novelist’s feel for his characters, taking us under everybody’s skin with deep sympathy for their differing outlooks.

It’s easily the most effective work of horror I’ve seen this year.