Manohla Dargis

Mr. Perry is such a good filmmaker that he can make the embarrassing and the unbearable insistently, fascinatingly engrossing (and often funny).

It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.

24 Frames can’t help but be affecting because it is Kiarostami’s final movie. But it’s intellectually uninvolving, and its technical limitations prove frustrating.

All these attractions are a necessary balm given that Ho turns out to be a deeply uninvolving character (Mr. Shih mostly smiles, grimaces or looks amazed), a wan placeholder for a character in a narratively thin film that runs over three very leisurely hours.

For devotees of cinematic blowouts and dedicated students of screen masculinity (like me), 12 Strong is premium, Grade A catnip. Directed by the newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig, it is generally watchable, if unsurprisingly easier on the eyes than on the ears or brain.

The Nelmses don’t make enough of their more intriguing ideas (Mike’s familial history) and end up right where you expect they would, bang bang. But Mr. Hawkes keeps you tethered, whether he’s navigating the movie’s uneven tones or peeling down one of cinema’s lonely highways in a muscle car so lovingly shot it deserves a co-star credit.

There are times when the characters — and their director — surprise and genuinely delight.

By the end, it’s hard not to wish that Ms. Thomas had traded a bit of her art-film drift for something more direct.

In retrospect, the sheer amount of gush in the movie, all the praise and feverish shouts of bravo, underscores the limits of affirmational documentaries. It is also a reminder that a movie’s meaning is made (and remade) by its viewers, not just its content.

All the Money in the World revs up beautifully, first as a thriller. But while the kidnapping is the movie’s main event, it is only part of a story that is, by turns, a sordid, desperate and anguished tragedy about money.

It is hard not to wonder how this movie might have turned out if Mr. Sorkin had decided his protagonist was as much a weasel as the one he wrote for “The Social Network,” another story of an American striver. It’s hard not to wonder, too, how this story might play if its protagonist wasn’t a woman who, as this movie sees it, needed so much male defending.

As a filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg invariably comes down on the side of optimism; here, that hopefulness feels right. It also feels like a rallying cry.

While Mr. Moshé’s ambitions can be frustratingly modest, he does know that — however fraudulent the genre’s myths — the image of a man riding a horse into the sunset is in our cinematic DNA.

Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).

The writer and director Samuel Maoz (“Lebanon”) has an exacting eye. The framing is meticulous; soon it’s also very purposefully working your nerves.

As I, Tonya skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story. No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny.

It’s a divertingly funny movie, but its breeziness can also feel overstated, at times glib and a bit of a dodge.

Wonder Wheel, Woody Allen’s latest movie, is one of his more unfortunate contributions to cinema.

Ms. Dean relates Lamarr’s ventures, those onscreen and off, with savvy and narrative snap, fluidly marshaling a mix of original interviews and archival material that includes film clips, home movies and other footage.

Call Me by Your Name is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity.

The result isn’t another ho-hum documentary likeness in which all the elements neatly and often flatteringly stack up. “Jim & Andy” is instead a complexly layered and textured Cubist portrait, one that’s been constructed from fragments of its two title subjects and their work.

The story is a confusion of noise, visual clutter and murderous digital gnats, but every so often a glimmer of life flickers through.

Mr. Trier’s experimenting mostly works, especially when the genre pieces dovetail with his gifts and Thelma’s story.

Everything fits together too neatly in “Three Billboards,” even when chaos descends, but the performers add enough rough texture so that it doesn’t always feel so worked.

Directed by Rob Reiner from Joey Hartstone’s script, LBJ is a frustratingly underdeveloped vehicle for Mr. Harrelson’s talents as well as an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Marvel could have gone grimmer, broodier and sterner, but that isn’t its onscreen way; so it has made Thor sunnier, sillier and funnier. It’s a good fit, at least for a while.

Mr. Clooney gets some things right in Suburbicon, including visually and with his two appealing child actors, who together give the movie a heartbeat.... But he skimps on the adult characters’ inner lives, and, once the narrative weight shifts to the Lodges, he never finds the tone that balances the movie’s sincerity with its nihilism.

A leaden, clotted, exasperating mess.