Kyle Smith

The intricately choreographed fight scenes are amusing enough, not that they have a lot of impact given the overbearingly silly musical score and the lurching, chaotic plot.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

As a document of Liza’s triumphs, talent and temperament, though, “Liza” is, like its subject, disarmingly sweet and completely lovable.

The plot is so cleverly constructed that its undertones sneak up on you. Their subtlety makes them that much more effective.

In stripping down the legend—no talk of ancient curses or silver bullets here—Mr. Whannell may have modernized it, but he has also made it so joyless that it might as well have been produced by Glumhouse. This “Wolf Man” chases its own tail.

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

Ms. Aitken seeks to draw a connection between Terry’s life story and her dedication to helping these impossibly vulnerable and sweet birds, but a documentary that avoids important questions is a failure.

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

Dylan was the idol of an era; many weedy intellectuals have sought to explain why. Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.

Ms. Reijn’s film is brilliantly evocative, exploring the shameful, shadowy parts of a complicated woman’s psyche, the ones she would never discuss and doesn’t fully understand herself.

Firmly rejecting the prevailing style in horror movies today, Mr. Eggers has created a somber, cold-sweat doomscape that is in no way a thrill ride.

The big cats of Mufasa: The Lion King take a long walk from an arid and desolate climate to one teeming with life. The movie itself represents a journey in something like the opposite direction, from the bountiful gardens of creativity to the chilly environs of the corporate brand-extension department.

A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film.

Mr. Kamiyama has sent into battle nothing but armies of clichés.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

September 5 is tough, rough, messy and gritty, in the tradition of American cinema from the decade in which it takes place.

The setup is fun to explore. But after establishing it, the movie essentially gets stuck delivering variations on the idea of Mother splitting into two selves, the domestic and the feral.

Unfortunately, the script by Zach Baylin doesn’t do an adequate job of making either side of these cat-and-mouse games thrilling.

Through a single family, Mr. Rasoulof has created a vivid portrait of the dilemmas of today’s Iran, where the power of iman, or faith, suggests one kind of observation but the power of the iPhone suggests another.

Mr. Scott seems content to restage story beats and action scenes from the first film. Most cold-case sequels aren’t very good, and maybe there’s a reason for that.

The plot is so rich and eventful, and the script so witty, that the movie doesn’t drag once the extended flashback starts. Moreover, every moment is eye candy. The screen bursts with whimsical costumes (by Paul Tazewell) and sets (Nathan Crowley is the production designer), and all of the important roles are impeccably cast.

The movie takes on the shape of a video game, with the heroes swaggering confidently from one blowout action sequence to the next with hardly any thought given to making us care about the characters or establishing the film’s heart.

All of [Bogart's] facets are on view in a must-see documentary for fans of Golden Age Hollywood.

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

Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.

It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.

Mr. McQueen seems consciously to be shedding his past style—the icy minimalism of “Hunger” and “Shame” and the scarifying gauntlet of his Oscar-winning “Twelve Years a Slave”—in a bid to make a big, warm-hearted, conventional holiday-season tear-jerker. Yet the film . . . will strike many viewers as a bait-and-switch exercise.

The inch-deep approach to history and social issues, the high-concept device, and the trite characters all seem better suited to a different type of movie—such as one of those gee-whiz featurettes shown at the EPCOT theme park.