Manohla Dargis

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.

Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.

The first time I saw War Game, it shook me up; the second time, my visceral response was tempered by a skepticism about power that the movie doesn’t invite.

Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.

It’s easy to smirk at these and other miscues; Costner also has a weakness for speeches, like many filmmakers. But he has a feel for the western and the landscapes of the West, and among the good scenes mixed in with the groaners is a beautifully filmed chase set against a midnight-blue sky that finds two riders galloping after a third, who changes horses mid-chase.

The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat.

Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.

Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.

As Sy continues obliquely gesturing at meaning, you remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently.

In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.

Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it. It’s a blast watching his characters fight over oil, water and women, yet while I’ve long thought of him as a great filmmaker it’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom.

It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.

The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.

One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.

The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.

Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.

A horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about.

Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Patel does some fine work in Monkey Man even if its fight sequences rarely pop, flow or impress; they’re energetic but uninspired.

Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).

Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them.

The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.

Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.

This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.

Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.