Manohla Dargis

I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.

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

Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face.

Written by Mr. Vaughn and Jared Stern, The Internship spreads the corporate gospel with sporadic jokes, the usual buddy-film shenanigans (a visit to a strip club, a teasingly shared bed) and a lot of motivational cant.

Exuberant.

Slight and goofy, this cut-rate attempt to mine "Harry Potterville" is undermined by its ostensible draw: the lead casting of Jonathan Lipnicki.

The self-reflexiveness of the entire enterprise only breaks the spell that Slate and Camp work hard to maintain — one which Rossellini effortlessly keeps intact with intelligence, beautifully controlled phrasing and a soft, melodious warmth that feels like a tender caress.

An attractive, messy drama riddled with violence and edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics and three resonant, deeply appealing performances.

Time and again the movie stops short before it really gets started, as with the debates over the big business of organic food.

A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.

What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.

Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.

The family that fights together remains the steadily throbbing, unbreakable heart of Incredibles 2, even when Bob and Helen swap traditional roles.

Ms. Bullock, who excels at playing spunky, is as appealing as usual, but the role proves as awkward as those heels.

The latest James Bond vehicle -- call him Bond, Bond 6.0 -- finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.

Ad Astra is unambiguously a film of its moment, one about a man’s struggle for personal meaning and a place in the world in a time of fallen fathers.

In some ways, much like Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil. Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or - depending on your view - lost.

The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.

What is clear is that while there are several stories folded into Iris — a marriage tale, an ode to multiculturalism and a fashion spectacular — it is also about the insistent rejection of monocultural conformity.

Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any Star Wars obsessive, but in The Force Awakens he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost).

An old-fashioned weepie tucked inside a fiercely indicting political thriller.

Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.

In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.

There’s almost a cosmic dimension to some of the most beautiful passages, as if the world (call it nature or God or sensitive direction) were holding Charley in its embrace.

One of the strengths of Sunset Story is that it introduces us to a pair of extraordinary women who have kept their dignity and independence in a world that conspires against them having either. The story of Lucille and Irja may break your heart, but it will also make your day.

Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the “Barbie” that could have been.

For those who do enjoy being smacked around by the ocean, for those who thrill to the romance and hype of extreme surfing and dig the outsider aspect of this rarefied culture or at least its marketed cool, this film will likely be their ticket to ride a board by proxy.

Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.