Kyle Smith

The most annoying tactic in the script is its repeated, strenuous attempts to convince us that we’re in the rarefied air of serious literary discussion.

With its feel for both beauty and ugliness, the film transports us to this unfamiliar milieu with a richness rarely attempted in the cinema anymore.

The screenwriter starts to seem like a sweaty basement-of-the-coffee-house magician who keeps sawing ladies in half long past the point of diminishing returns.

Even those who find Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis convincing are likely to concede that it is more at home in the library than at the multiplex. Many others will find Origin confusing and dry.

After an intriguing start and a strong middle, however, the film can’t quite deliver a satisfying ending.

Mr. Stanfield is a gifted performer. Thanks to an amateurish script, however, Clarence is a lifeless Brian.

The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.

A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

Tiresome digressions mixed in with philosophical banalities add up to a pointless, inert drama.

It’s a passable bloody-knuckles action piece for those who enjoy relaxing with a couple of hours of crazed carnage.

The direct, intimate way in which the movie is filmed and acted, however, makes it an affecting study of two people’s attempts to forge some kind of relationship despite huge psychic damage on both sides.

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

Of all the versions I’ve seen, the latest one is the best, a holiday spectacle bursting with spirited sisterhood. Its characters may be broadly drawn, but their sorrows and triumphs come across with more feeling than ever.

Leonard Bernstein was a towering musical figure and a complicated man. Netflix’s “Maestro” has a great deal to say about the latter characterization and surprisingly little about the former.

The Iron Claw is either a cheesy professional-wrestling hold or the unbreakable grip of a hostile fate. Or perhaps it’s how a father clutches his children. Whatever it is, it’s a resonant image for a potent tearjerker.

American Fiction is being heralded as a brilliant satire, which is almost correct. I’d say it’s sharp and funny, but its targets are low-hanging, and the film’s writer-director, Cord Jefferson, is hardly the first to take a poke at them.

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

It’s lacerating, a master class in how to show without showing.

The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.

Both literary and cinematic, “Poor Things” gives the audience everything we can ask for in a film—beauty and wonder; hefty ideas and clever storytelling; twists, shocks and laughter.

This movie seems proud, even smug, about recycling scraps from other fairy tales.

Sensitive as the film is, it might be most effective to those who haven’t sat through scores of iterations of what has come to be known as the Sundance Film.

Mr. Woo’s frenzied love of operatically heightened violence may have influenced some talented younger directors, but without an interesting screenplay to work from his movies sink into mindlessness. “Silent Night” is nothing to shout about.

This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen.

Any five audience members might have five different takeaways, which tells you there is a lot going on here. I was left with this thought: How well do we really know anyone, even ourselves?

Dream Scenario is such an imaginatively offbeat movie that it’s a shame it isn’t better.

Priscilla is gorgeous and at times intoxicating, but like Ms. Coppola’s previous efforts, it could do with less woolgathering and more character development.

It’s a pleasure to report that the 100-minute conversation is as wonderful as the actors who deliver it—by turns witty, wistful and revealing, steeped in an appreciation for the hard learning that comes with age.