Manohla Dargis

However sincere and justified, the digs are so innocuous that their main purpose seems to flatter Western viewers who will nod along as they coo at the landscapes and chuckle knowingly about ugly truths they think have nothing to do with them, but do.

It has sweep, romance, violence and spectacle, but what makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen.

Manning Walker sets the scene and stakes well enough, though after the millionth drink and shriek, whatever contact high you have is obliterated by a contact hangover. The largest problem, though, is that Manning Walker seems weirdly insensitive toward Tara, who endures a trauma that’s meant to say something about something — sex, consent, friendship — but mostly just gives the story some queasy heft.

Totem is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat.

Love suffuses Pictures of Ghosts, a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.

What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising.

Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured.

It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.

Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to.

Mann shoots this lunatic race from every conceivable angle — with cameras in and out of cars, bearing down on drivers’ faces, agitatedly hovering midair — creating an immersive, visceral intimacy that, as engines whine and thunderously roar, you feel in your bones.

There’s pleasure and meaning in the sons’ roughhousing and camaraderie, as well as beauty, heat and melancholy in their heartbreakingly fleeting physical perfection. Yet as the story’s uglier side emerges, Durkin hedges.

All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.

It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.

It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.

Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power.

Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of La Syndicaliste, a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry.

Napoleon is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character.

There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.

Maestro is as ambitious as Cooper’s fine directorial debut, “A Star Is Born,” but the new movie is more self-consciously cinematic.

Fallen Leaves is consistently funny, but its laughs arrive without fanfare. They slide in calmly, at times obliquely in eccentric details, offbeat juxtapositions, taciturn exchanges, long pauses and amiably barbed insults.

Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in Rustin.

The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.

Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.

It’s frustrating what weak tea this movie is because the director, Nia DaCosta (“Little Woods,” “Candyman”), has talent, the cast is appealing, and there’s a lightly gonzo scene that shows you what the other 100 minutes could have been. It’s almost as if the suits at Marvel Studios know it doesn’t matter if their movies are any good.

Washington is unsurprisingly the primary reason to watch “Equalizer 3,” which is basically a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and light up the screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly beautiful town on the Amalfi coast.

[Simien] keeps things moving along, more or less, and the appealing cast hit their marks, but it’s dispiriting to see him directing what is effectively a feature-length Disney promotion. I hope it’s his last big-studio ad.

“Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.