Manohla Dargis

It’s a serious movie unburdened by self-seriousness, its own and that of the profession it explores with cool, analytic dispassion.

Part of what makes Nickel Boys striking is how Ross stays true to the novel but with his own voice, his own narrative and visual style, and how he uses moments in time and freighted images — faces, hands, flashing police lights, an alligator in a class, a mule in a hall — to build the story.

With deep feeling and lacerating and gentle words, Leigh creates a world that, like the vast, mysterious one hovering outside its frame, can seem agonizingly empty if you can’t see the people in it.

Adams is a performer whose emotional transparency can make her characters seem unguarded and appealingly vulnerable, and the movie works as well as it does in great part because of her.

[Lee] may have been Guadagnino-ized, and much about what makes him tick, his past and his art, remains obscured. Yet in Craig’s ravaged charisma you do see someone who’s ready to blow open other doors of perception.

Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence.

Despite its bumps, the movie is consistently amusing simply because it is “The Wizard of Oz” and it’s fun watching colorful, off-kilter characters singing, dancing and sometimes flying through the air (without a superhero suit).

One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.

Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in “Changeling” and “Richard Jewell.” This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.

From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect. Yet while Audiard has productively combined classic genres and present-day sensibilities before, even the more personal, confessional numbers here add little more than novelty.

Grant is clearly having a lot of fun in Heretic, and it’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish.

A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.

With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.

The movie’s intimacy is appealing; on occasion, it can be claustrophobic. Black Box Diaries is, at heart, a first-person account, and while it’s successful on those terms, it’s finally more emotionally engaging than intellectually satisfying.

Almut’s ambitions give her spark and grit, and they make the character appealingly contemporary, as does Pugh’s vibrancy and emotionally charged performance. The actress handles the shifting periods and deepening drama adroitly, even when the filmmakers begin selling out her character.

The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.

Intercepted is yet another crucial eyewitness document of the Russia-Ukraine war, one that makes the personal stakes painfully vivid. It’s a reminder that war isn’t waged by putative monsters but by monstrous human beings who sometimes need to hear the sounds of their mothers’ voices.

Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.

Saturday Night is a movie made by fans, but because Reitman assumes that his viewers are fans, too, and because he’s racing against the clock, he gestures at instead of digging into the show, its humor and history.

Jacobs’s women are at once clinging to the past and looking toward the future. It’s the present that proves so extraordinarily difficult for them, a truth that Jacobs beautifully conveys in a movie that is very much about agonizing loss yet is also, fundamentally, about what it simply takes to keep on living.

The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, Wolfs, written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.

Sleek and ever more unsettling, Speak No Evil is closely based on a far colder, downright nasty 2022 movie of the same title from the Danish director Christian Tafdrup. For the most part, Watkins adheres to the original’s overall design and trajectory while adding some new details and scenes; he also pads the running time an unnecessary 15 or so minutes.

To a degree and certainly by studio-sequel design, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a cozy familiarity. If the manic edginess of Keaton’s original performance suggested that his character had ingested way too much caffeine, though probably something a great deal stronger, he now seems more like a super-eccentric uncle — only, you know, dead.

The Front Room has its virtues, including the funereal production design, with its forlorn rooms and faded wallpaper. Yet from its goo to boos, the whole enterprise is so familiar and at times rote that it feels as though Sam and Max Eggers haven’t so much directed the movie as reverse-engineered it.

The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.

Close Your Eyes has its virtues, certainly, including some pleasurably loose interludes at the beachfront compound where Miguel lives. These have a delicate, unforced quality that creates pinpricks of light in a movie that, as it struggles to engage meaningfully with the past, sinks into ponderousness.

Red Island is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult.

Alien: Romulus is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials.