Manohla Dargis

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.

In I Was at Home, but…, the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world.

This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.

In effect, with I Wish I Knew, Jia is building not just a portrait of a city, but of a fragmented people — one story and memory at a time. He is finding meaning in collective remembrance and revealing a world, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “under the gaze of the melancholy man.”

The point is cleverness and looking cool, though, mostly the movie is about Ritchie’s own conspicuous pleasure directing famous actors having a lark, trading insults, making mischief. There’s not much else, which depending on your mood and the laxity of your ethical qualms, might be enough.

The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.

The charm of this fantasy has always been dubious and will presumably fade as the natural world continues to disappear and more and more species become extinct.

Actors make lousy choices all the time and if Like a Boss makes money no one will care that it’s formulaic, unfunny, choppy, insults women and seems to be missing much of its middle.

Woodard’s performance gathers its astonishing force incrementally, in subtle choices and inflections that you might not even register as actorly decisions.

A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

Generally, Hooper pulls away from loony-tunes excess, tries for sexy rather than freaky, and plucks at heartstrings, a reflex that pulls the story into mawkishness, particularly when he cuts to Victoria.

Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close-ups.

Part of what works in the movie is that it does a good job of presenting the ordinary assaults that women, even those with great privilege, can endure simply to get through a day, including dehumanizing “compliments.”

Johnson’s own sleight of hand is estimable, even if his effort to add politics into the crowded mix rings hollow. The machine is what matters here, and he has clearly had such a good time engineering it that it’s hard not to feel bad when you don’t laugh along with him.

There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.

The ensuing adventure is lively, amusing and predictably predictable with revelations, reconciliations and some nebulous politics for the grown-ups. It’s never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination — snowflakes that streak like shooting stars — keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren’t waiting for life to happen.

You do feel Haynes’s touch now and again, particularly in the sense of menace that seeps into a crepuscular law office and in the everyday eeriness that suffuses outwardly ordinary homes that are anything but normal.

All of Shults’s stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.

Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.

Feig is an adroit director of comedy and he gives Last Christmas some fizz now and again. But he’s stymied by the romance and the gimmick, and the pairing of Clarke and Golding proves an impossible hurdle, making even the seemingly simplest moments — an intimate walk, a heartfelt talk — feel badly labored.

It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history.

Furious, brilliant, exhausting, Synonyms is the story of a man in self-imposed exile.

Despite her shaky handle on the movie’s ideas and the appealing if uneven performances, Waddington holds your attention with visual beauty and humor.

You don’t wait long to be disappointed.