Manohla Dargis

Alvarez tries to pep things up with chases, near escapes, dramatic rescues, fetish wear and female nudity. But the whole thing is a bummer, at times risible.

Neville was inspired by Josh Karp’s engrossing book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie,” which goes into greater detail than Neville can in 98 minutes. Karp also pays closer attention to Welles’s artistic process, which in the documentary can seem little more than pure chaos.

What we have is something of a seductive tease, a haunted film that at times entrances and delights and at times offends and embarrasses.

While each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or answer the fundamental question that burns through this brilliant movie.

As the first hour of Suspiria grinds into the second and beyond (the movie runs 152 minutes), it grows ever more distended and yet more hollow. Unlike Argento, who seemed content to deliver a nastily updated fairy tale in 90 or so minutes, Guadagnino continues casting about for meaning, which perhaps explains why he keeps adding more stuff, more mayhem, more dances.

Goddard keeps everything smoothly, ebbing and flowing as the characters separate and join together, but at some point during this logy 2-hour-and-21-minute exercise you want something more substantial than even Hemsworth’s admittedly mesmerizing snaky hips.

Fiction that hews close to fact, the movie is serious and meticulous, yet hollow.

This latest and fourth version is a gorgeous heartbreaker (bring tissues). Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema. That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.

It’s hard not to root for Nina, even if this prickly, intriguingly difficult character becomes considerably less interesting as the story progresses and the dialogue veers toward the therapeutic

The movie keeps moving, the story keeps flowing, but these images — which feel suspended between cinema and still photography — create a pause in the action that your anxious imagination can’t help but fret over. That’s especially true because Mr. Saulnier’s images are often in service of spooky, blood-drenched tales.

Colette is an origin story, a tale of metamorphosis rather than of already formed greatness. What interests Mr. Westmoreland is how a self-described country girl became a woman of the world, a transformation that in its deeper, more intimately mysterious registers remains out of reach of this movie and of the hard-working Ms. Knightley.

Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in The Sisters Brothers, which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them.

Mr. Feig handily manages the mood and scene shifts, using regular laughs to brighten the deepening dark. By far his smartest move was to give Ms. Kendrick and Ms. Lively room to create a prickly intimacy for their characters, a bond that’s persuasive enough to push the story through its more forced moments.

Squint and you can sometimes make out the bigger, more complex stories in White Boy Rick, including those of a great city violently brought low; of fragile communities left to fail and rot; and of a legal system that seems permanently broken. Too often, though, the movie traffics in genre clichés and the usual suspects.

It’s a consistently engaging trip. Ms. Scott has assembled a nice, fairly well-rounded group to testify on her subject’s behalf, including people who were part of Ashby’s foundational years in Hollywood — most important, the director Norman Jewison.

A formalist experiment that soon devolves into a mannerist indulgence.

Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.

Mr. Hunnam isn’t yet a movie star, and given current industry trends (big-studio cartoons, superhero flicks, etc.) might never get that chance. His talent is for quiet, unshowy moments, not leading-man grand gestures and important speeches.

There’s a whole lot of everything in the Mission: Impossible — Fallout, an entertainment machine par excellence that skitters around the world and has something to do with nuclear bombs, mysterious threats and dangerous beauties. Mostly, it has to do with that hyper-human Tom Cruise, who runs, drives, dives, shoots, flies, falls and repeatedly teeters on the edge of disaster, clinging to one after another cliffhanger.

Mr. Washington is especially strong when he trusts his director, as he did with Tony Scott and does with Mr. Fuqua. Like all great actors, Mr. Washington commits to the performance, but every so often he also breathes fire, imbuing a scene with such shocking ferocity and bone-deep moral certitude that everything else falls blissfully away.

The movie opens with the defendant bashing in the victim’s head and then burning the corpse. A trial seems almost beside the point, a view that the writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda goes on to dismantle with lapidary precision.

Ms. Reed has taken on a vital story in Dark Money, which is why it’s frustrating that her storytelling isn’t better. Some introductory text or explanatory narration would have better helped historically ground viewers, who need to juggle a lot of information.

Eighth Grade is a simple story of an unremarkable girl, tenderly and movingly told.

There are intermittent pleasures, including Ms. Campbell, who seems ready to transition to a new career phase playing hard-hitting maternal types with Mona Lisa smiles. Mostly, though, Skyscraper is about the movie’s other, far more towering figure: Mr. Johnson, a performer whose colossal physicality is strikingly complemented by a delicate expressivity too rarely seen in contemporary blockbusters.

It’s funny how little things, like personality, can lift a movie. Ant-Man and the Wasp features kinetic action sequences, but what makes it zing is that Mr. Reed has figured out how to sustain the movie’s intimacy and its playfulness, even when bodies and cars go flying.

In its best moments, Leave No Trace invites you to simply be with its characters, to see and experience the world as they do. Empathy, the movie reminds you, is something that is too little asked of you either in life or in art. Both Mr. Foster’s and Ms. Harcourt McKenzie’s sensitive, tightly checked performances are critical in this regard.

Mr. Wardle relates that story smoothly and persuasively, but his telling sometimes provokes more questions than it answers.

Wildly ambitious, thoroughly entertaining and embellished with some snaky moves, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King is a lot like its nominal subject, Elvis Presley.