Manohla Dargis

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.

Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the “Barbie” that could have been.

The German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s spiky and at times mordantly funny Afire is a tonic for moviegoers tired of nice, squishable, likable, relatable dull and dull characters.

There are moments in Earth Mama, a drama about motherhood at its most fragile, when the movie’s quiet intensity seems to settle in your chest, as if a heavy stone had been placed over your heart.

Despite the new faces, there are, unsurprisingly, no real surprises in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” which features a number of dependably showstopping stunts, hits every narrative beat hard and, shrewdly, has just enough winking humor to keep the whole thing from sagging into self-seriousness.

It’s an inviting, paradigmatic story of female self-discovery and empowerment, so it’s too bad that the movie’s hold on you proves far less firm than Gainsbourg’s.

That character, or rather Ford, or really the two of them together are the main arguments for seeing “Dial of Destiny,” which is as silly as you expect and not altogether as successful as you may hope.

Even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.

I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.

It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy.

While Dalíland occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.

One of the attractions of Scarlet is that it doesn’t fit obvious categorization, which means that you’re not always sure where it’s headed or why. The vibe is by turns sober, warm, melancholic and playful to the point of near-silliness.

The movie’s modesty — its intimacy, human scale, humble locations and lack of visual oomph — is one of its strengths.

As the documentary repetitiously circles its subject and piles on greater numbers of clips — more than 50 movies are dropped into the 20-minute final chapter (“Dig”), hosted by the director David Lowery — whatever points Philippe is trying to make have been hopelessly lost.

The story’s romance is warmly inviting, and DiCaprio and Gladstone work beautifully together, their different performance styles — Ernest is physically demonstrative while Mollie is reserved — creating a contrapuntal whole.

Time is stretched differently in Occupied City and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past.

Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.

The tame and the wild roam through R.M.N., nipping at its edges, adding visual texture and deepening its themes.

The spiritual dimension of Pietro and Bruno’s bond has its appeal, and one of the movie’s pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously. There’s an expressly erotic dimension to the men’s love for each other, as can be the case with intimate relationships, though not an explicitly carnal one.

Zlotowski is telling a story about a specific woman. She’s also telling a complex, bruising, much larger and quietly self-aware story about both the messiness of life and the fragility of bodies that exist in the real world, not just in fantasies.

Despite these attractions and in spite of Phoenix’s aura and his focus — and how he plays with the character, opening Beau up a wee bit with flickers of yearning and teasingly humanizing fissures — it is tough to care about a mouse who matters so much less to the filmmaker than the shiny mousetrap where he’s imprisoned you both.

Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.

Written by Alex Convery, Air nicely hits the sweet spot between light comedy and lighter drama that’s tough to get right. It’s funny, but its generous laughs tend to be low-key and are more often dependent on their delivery than on the actual writing.

In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.

The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.