Kyle Smith

Mr. Peele has loads of ideas and builds up considerable suspense and dread, but he fails to tie everything together with a resounding final act.

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

Whatever the charms of the book, they are entirely absent from the dull and listless film.

Though marred by an unfortunate title (“Fire of Love” sounds like a disco number from about 1979) and by the wobbly vocals of its narrator, Miranda July, who speaks in a fragile croak, the film is one of the year’s few awe-inspiring documentaries—a visually ravishing record, a bustling adventure, and an engrossing character study that begs to be remade, with actors, as a big-budget Hollywood narrative feature.

Thor: Love and Thunder is, like most of the Marvel films since Iron Man died, only intermittently amusing, a bit wobbly in its storytelling, thin in its emotional impact and more geared toward spectacle than coherence.

It’s all painfully exact and true. Myself a product of exactly this kind of blue-collar New England community, I winced as I laughed at this gang of badly dressed, foul-mouthed reprobates. My people!

There’s no sense to almost every element in the movie, and its sensibility is this: that dull dialogue is bound to sound witty if delivered in an English accent. It doesn’t. At least the costumes are pretty.

The film is a sort of jigsaw puzzle that demands either paying minute attention or viewing it twice. Seemingly unimportant and easily forgotten details from the opening minutes turn out to cohere and create a conclusive emotional impact of the kind that everyone in the movie is missing.

The editing is like a kaleidoscope fed through a food processor, the camera has less ability to sit still than a 4-year-old stuffed with birthday cake, and both lead actors veer into camp.

All three of these attractively awful figures are to egotism approximately what the sun is to light, which makes for a delightful triangular battle for supremacy not unlike the one in All About Eve. Clever plotting—an early, seemingly throwaway scene in which Félix does some goofy martial-arts training turns out to be critical—and inventive character details enhance the wicked fun.

It’s nice to know that Team Pixar can still recognize the importance of fun. Though Lightyear isn’t as funny as the original “Toy Story,” nor as emotionally potent as “Toy Story 2,” and hence probably won’t be rewatched nearly as many times as those two classics, it’s a plucky and rousing little sci-fi saga.

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.

Mr. Davies’s wit is admirable, but his structure is nonexistent. He devises no problem to be solved, no goal to be met, no riddle to be answered. Occasionally we hear bits of Sassoon’s beautiful war poetry in voiceover, but it is irrelevant to most of the action.

All of the roaring and thundering in “Dominion” carries roughly the dramatic impact of a robust sneeze, because Mr. Trevorrow has forgotten that what we human beings care about, despite our addiction to spectacle, are human beings.

Lost Illusions is sumptuous yet piercing, an expertly plotted social-relations saga of the kind that once typified prestige Hollywood cinema, and it dives into moral quandaries rather than dispensing easy bromides.

For all its promise to be a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, The Belko Experiment is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.

Yes, we remember one of the best movies of the 1990s, but the sequel is like the moment at the party when someone raises the shades and you realize that it’s blinding broad daylight, well past time to go home.

Vogt-Roberts never develops the characters enough to make us care whether anyone lives or dies and never whips up even a flirtation between Hiddleston and Larson.

Congratulations are in order to Table 19: This comedy about the random losers stuck together at a wedding reception actually, uncannily, creates an experience as dull, awkward and excruciating as the thing it mocks.

It’s a captivating throwback that promises to lead the genre away from sci-fi flash and trickery. I’d rank it beside “X-Men: Days of Future Past” among the best X-Men entries.

It’s Peele’s first film, but it has none of the rough edges or self-indulgence you’d expect from a rookie.

It may be a second-rate “Lord of the Rings,” but at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Mia Goth is as fine a name as can be imagined for the actress playing a creepy, hollow waif in A Cure for Wellness, and her name is practically a tag line for this fantastically eerie movie: “Me a Gothic!”

Nutty as The Lego Batman Movie is in conception, it’s nifty in execution.

A touching love story that gets sidelined by a tiresome intra-family African political dispute, A United Kingdom has a big heart that beats far too slowly.

The first “John Wick” was taut and nasty, a potent slug of B-movie. This one is so enamored of its own extravagance that, on more than one occasion, I was reminded of “Zoolander 2.”

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In The Comedian he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.