Manohla Dargis

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.

The movie is weirdly entertaining, but the world it presents, despite its flourishes of comedy, is cold, hard and unforgiving.

In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.

Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, Azor is a low-key shocker.

The solitary man returns in The Card Counter, a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death about another lonely soul, William Tell, who, with pen to paper, grapples with his present and his unspeakable past.

Because much of the rest of the story is so underdeveloped — notably Claire’s intimate life with her frustratingly generic children — the character overwhelms everything, including the fragile realism.

The title character is one of those difficult women that the movies just can’t quit and rarely prove as interesting as filmmakers seem to think. Anne obviously has issues — psychological, behavioral, familial — but the movie isn’t big on specifics. It’s a pretty, uninvolving blur.

It’s easy to shock viewers with splatter but the old gut-and-run gets awfully boring awfully fast. Far better is the slow creep, the horror that teases and then threatens. The dread inexorably builds in Candyman, which snaps into focus after Anthony learns of the boogeyman.

Flat acting, risible dialogue, a witless story — sometimes when a movie hits this trifecta so completely, it engenders a feeling of disreputable pleasure. It’s bad, and you know it, and maybe the filmmakers know it too.

Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, Reminiscence is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts.

If In the Same Breath — the title becomes more resonant with each new scene and shock — were simply about China and its handling (mishandling) of the pandemic, it would be exemplary. But the story that she tells is larger and deeper than any one country because this is a story that envelops all of us, and it is devastating.

Washington is a likable actor and easy on the eyes, but the character is unproductively one-dimensional and so is the performance, which remains reactive and opaque. Here, at least, he can’t turn an underconceptualized character into one whom you either care about or want to watch gasping and grimacing for several hours.

Respect succeeds in doing exactly what is expected of it. You may argue with this or that filmmaking choice and regret its overly smooth edges, but it does give you a sense of Franklin as a historical figure, a crossover success story and a full-throttle, fur-draped diva.

It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting.

The violence is the most consistently inventive part of the whole package, though it grows tiresome in its thudding repetition. Like the story’s superficial finger-wagging at American wrongs, the brutality is both decorative and ritualistic.

It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.

Etched with precision and conveying a world of feeling, The Power of Kangwon Province is the second feature by the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and one of the best films you can see this year.

Patty Jenkins is behind the camera again, but this time without the confidence. Certainly some of the problems can be pinned on the uninterestingly janky script, a mess of goofy jokes, storytelling clichés and dubious politics.

Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.

The story unwinds with histrionics and homilies, jazz hands and twinkle toes, overly busy camerawork and hookless lung bursters.

Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving, it offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light.

The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice. But as Collective lays out with anguished detail and a profound, moving sense of decency, it takes stubborn, angry people — journalists, politicians, artists, activists — to hammer at that arc until it starts bending, maybe, in the right direction.

It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.

City Hall runs four and a half mostly engrossing hours, making it one of Wiseman’s longest. That sounds daunting, but I could have watched hours more of people simply talking to one another in auditoriums and across conference-room tables.

Zemeckis improves on the first film adaptation, a 1990 oddity directed by Nicolas Roeg. There’s more heart in the new version and more emotion, qualities which can go missing in those Zemeckis movies that get lost in his technical whiz-bangery.

The true miracle of this film is how Marcello translates both London’s scabrous tone and his lush, character-revealing prose into pure cinema. Lines have been plucked from the novel, yet even at its wordiest, the film is never weighed down by the burden of faithfulness.

Some filmed stage shows die on the screen from a sheer lack of visual energy and invention. Lee, a master of the art, uses cinema’s plasticity to complement this production, making it come alive in two dimensions.

The dirt bikes and their exuberant operators are the saving grace — and joy — of the sincere if overstuffed drama Charm City Kings.