Kyle Smith

What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.

The film’s airless, cramped quality demands consistently high-level dialogue—words that sting and burn. Instead, the two big speeches, especially the second one, land somewhat like filibusters.

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

Cobbling together ideas from other, better movies, Rust isn’t original enough to be a must-see, but it didn’t deserve to be canceled because of an accident, either. Mr. Baldwin has been largely absent from the screen in recent years, and this effort is a reminder that, to use a word often applied to Harland Rust himself, he remains formidable.

In short, every element here has the dusty funk of an item pulled off the back shelves at the Goodwill store for blockbuster story beats. Your enjoyment of the film will thus largely depend on the overall vibe: whether you enjoy hanging out with the new gang as they strategize and quarrel and banter, with occasional interjections of everyone punching, kicking and hurling each other meaninglessly around the set.

The overall effect is appropriately trippy, and revealing.

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

What started out as something that promised to be akin to a droll, twisted Coen Brothers comedy instead wanders off into reverie. And when the movie ends, critical questions are simply left unresolved. Mr. Cronenberg may not care about closure, but a movie can benefit greatly from it.

Mr. Malek is incapable of providing the audience with an emotional hook.

I can’t imagine a movie doing a better job bottling such an experience. Drinking it down requires a taste for the maximum dosage, though.

A Working Man is watchable enough, with the occasional interjection of humor, but it’s a formulaic punch-’em-up that simply jams in as many fights as it can with little effort expended on plausibility.

Directed by James Griffiths, “Wallis Island” is warm, endearing and very funny, a quintessential indie smile-maker about nice, humble people adorably stumbling their way toward a little happiness.

While the film is partially redeemed by a couple of surprisingly touching late scenes involving Ridley and her dad, for the most part it’s merely a weak satire in which we’re meant to cheer as the moneyed class gets a sanguinary comeuppance, with crushed skulls and spilled intestines presented as hilarious.

The contrast between the two Killians—mighty on the outside, meek within—makes Magazine Dreams a wrenching character study, by turns lovely and chaotic.

Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.

“Snow White” is the fairest of them all, in the sense that fair can mean mediocre.

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.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Messrs. Soderbergh and Koepp have followed one of (Elmore) Leonard’s Laws—“Leave out the parts that people skip”—to construct an electric, fast-paced thriller that amounts to one climactic scene piled atop another.

The film is at its best in the way it keeps building the stakes of the character clash, thanks in large part to the virtuosity of the two lead actors.

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

Last Breath, which runs a compact 91 minutes, doesn’t feel like a finished film: The dialogue is strictly functional, and there is so little time for establishing character that none of the three principals really makes an impression.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

Ex-Husbands is more a poignant reflection than a fleshed-out story. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions to the various predicaments it considers. But Mr. Pritzker has a sagacious understanding of our various stumbles and humiliations, how we prove unable to make a marriage work or even communicate effectively with our children or parents.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.