Manohla Dargis

Like most commercial movies about feminist history, though, it also has a toothless vision of protest and empowerment that’s doomed to fail its subject because its makers don’t (can’t) risk making the audience uncomfortable.

Every faded dress looks attentively fitted, each ramshackle house artfully weathered. If the performances are considerably less persuasive it’s partly because Campos shows no interest in the inner lives of his characters. And while Pattinson’s and Keough’s roles are risible, the actors at least show signs of (comic) life.

There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.

It’s lightly funny and a little sad, filled with ravishing landscapes and juiced up with kinetic fights (if not enough of them). It has antiseptic violence, emotional uplift and the kind of protagonist that movie people like to call relatable.

The scenery is pretty and the actors appealing enough to almost excuse the thinness of the material.

Here, after the gunfire dies down, terror at times gives way to a melancholy that can be quite affecting even if the message remains familiar: We have met the zombie, and it is us.

By eliding the Legion’s history and focusing on winning personalities, the filmmakers have made an engaging movie about some kids who — as their jokes give way to debates, stratagems and even shocks — already seem to be drafting their own more interesting sequel.

The humanity of the leads fills up the hollowness, putting flesh, or at least charm and attitude, on their archetypes.

There are some very good scenes in the movie’s second half; even so, it’s striking that the most unsettling aspect of “La Llorona” is that history doesn’t simply shape the movie. It also haunts and finally overwhelms it with terrors far more unspeakable than any impressively manufactured shock.

The movie tries to convince you that Douglas is better than his worst self and can transcend the dehumanizing degradations in which he’s mired. But not even the filmmakers seem convinced, which may explain why they embrace baroque brutality topped by a dollop of audience-mollifying sentimentality.

Radioactive, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades — including two Nobel Prizes — this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary.

This is Garai’s feature directing debut, and it is as satisfying as it is promising, despite an unfortunate wind down. She has a great eye — and a real feel for the power of silence and visual textures — but she stumbles when she explains too much.

The story gradually emerges through an accretion of details and personal dynamics, often in families that stand in for the larger world. Things happen quietly or offscreen. The drama is measured out in sips, in gazes, gestures, silences, off-handed humor and shocks of brutality.

Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.

More than anything, Mr. Jones is an argument for witnessing and remembrance.

The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.

The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.

No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.

The “Trip” movies have always been self-aware about their own weightlessness, wringing laughs by needling the men and their vanity. That’s as smart as it is convenient; this time, though, it also feels like a cop-out.

It’s always nice to see characters break free, but you need to care whether they do. One insurmountable problem with this story is that Iris just isn’t interesting enough and certainly not developed enough either as a character or in terms of the performance.

In “Never Rarely,” the hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation.

There are different ways to describe Garbus’s telling of this mystery: it’s serious, respectful, gravely melancholic. Yet anger best describes the movie’s atmosphere, its overall mood and its authorial tone.

In this sensational genre whatsit, a town finds itself fighting for its very existence. (Good thing Sônia Braga lives there.)

For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, The Banker spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.

Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism.

Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.

Austen’s story and words, it turns out, prove unsurprisingly durable and impervious to decorative tweaking. And so, after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive.

The sparks fly fast and persuasively — Rae and Stanfield make sense right away — and you’re soon cozying up with the couple while they share stories and increasingly heated looks in a dimly lit restaurant. The writer-director Stella Meghie understands that you want to see these two beautiful people get together, and she smoothly delivers on your own romantic (and romance genre) longings.