Michael Phillips

Contrivances come, and go, but The Ballad of Wallis Island rolls along, with just enough casual wit to buoy the story.

Writer and director Alex Sharfman’s splurchy dark comedy carves itself into halves, a clever first half followed by a more routine second one. Yet it’s a feature film debut signaling a filmmaker of actual wit. So you go with it — I did, anyway, most of it, more or less — even when its sense of tone and direction goes sideways.

The movie’s a rom-com at heart, but there is no other one like it.

Places come; places go. Every human being deals with loss differently. “Eephus” acknowledges that, but it’s a sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion.

Director Marc Webb moves it along, with a rock-solid lead, very well sung, courtesy of Rachel Zegler.

This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.

Black Bag may be modest, and frivolous, but it’s sharp-witted. Every performance feels right.

Opus has its moments. But even the surprises aren’t especially surprising.

By the end of Novocaine, it’s as if the filmmakers — who have talent, and who are now off and running in a commercial sense — forgot how their movie started: with Quaid and Midthunder getting the material and the screen time needed to hook an audience’s interest, before the jocular sadism commenced in earnest.

It’s a lot. Seyfried, who has worked with writer-director Egoyan before on the super-ripe erotic drama “Chloe” (2009), finesses some zig-zaggy tonal swerves confidently and well. The writing, however, wobbles.

Even a first-rate director can get a little lost in the tone management and narrative streamlining process.

While I hope Perkins doesn’t lean into jokey sadism as a dominant creative impulse — we have too many jokey sadists with movie deals as is — The Monkey asserts his stealth versatility as well as his confident technique.

Rounding, named after the hospital rounds medical students conduct with their mentors, casts enough of an atmospheric spell in its tale of psychological demons haunting a young medical student to linger in your psyche a while.

The movie wouldn’t feel human at all, really, if not for the convincing emotion bond established between Mackie and Carl Lumbly as Isaiah.

It’s such a drag to see Ke Huy Quan undermined so persistently by the script and the role handing him his first lead in a movie.

It’s a riveting and humane experience pulled from the rubble of a never-ending war.

If You’re Cordially Invited strains to bring its amped-up, often wearying feud to a satisfying conclusion, the stars give it their best shot, while the ringers do their thing with blithe assurance.

Torres is one of those screen veterans with a surgically precise relationship to the camera, never pushing, always searching for emotions expressed even as they’re being hidden, or held in check, because someone’s watching.

The movie operates with a nicely unpredictable rhythm, both short and longer shots ending abruptly, sometimes comically, popping us into the next one.

What’s missing, even at its trim, tidy run time, is the sort of glancing realism and true nuance of a Paul Greengrass docudrama such as “Bloody Sunday.” What’s there, though, is enough for a consistently absorbing version of what the media did right and what it did wrong.

The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror. They’re also a bit of a plod — especially in the second half, when whatever kind of horror film you’re making should not, you know, plod.

Palmer delivers an on-the-fly masterclass in overlapping comic skills, sometimes heightened (I love her eyeblink-quick, frozen-statue reaction to the good-looking, possibly homicidal hunk named Maniac, played by Patrick Cage), sometimes subtle and heartfelt.

The results in this, Coppola’s third feature, are roughly half-good, half-less. The good comes when the director, working with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, focuses on evocative silent footage serving as interludes and visual grace notes capturing Shelly, primarily, in moments of reflection. The dialogue and the dramaturgy, in contrast, strain for jokes and over-ladle the pathos.

The Brutalist is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable.

Nickel Boys is a subtly radical act of adaptation, with a striking intuitive and meticulous visual strategy, and the result is fully equal to Whitehead’s achievement but in a new direction.

The actors, by and large, are first-rate. And the songs don’t hurt.

Kidman rises to the occasion, and while one-note mediocrities like “The Substance” offer gallons of fake blood where the provocations should be, Reijn’s film — seen the second time, at least – only needs its nerve and its interest in what Kidman can do, which is more than I even realized.

It’s solid craft, but it’s craft wedded to a style of filmmaking that feels wholly impersonal, even with a top-flight director at the helm.