Nicolas Rapold

The first installment’s critics might think this sequel further desensitizes viewers to violence along national or religious lines. It’s a movie of the current moment, which isn’t exactly a comfort.

As Denji and his adversaries converge on and above city streets, it’s possible to enjoy the combat on the level of pure sensation. Here, the rapturous ability of anime to isolate and prolong movement and emotion within a frame is on full display.

The film, which could definitely focus more on the multiple-Grammy-Award-winner’s music, peters out around 2024, a year before Ye released a song called “Heil Hitler.” But Ballesteros, who started the project when he was 18 years old, does his best to portray a reflexive iconoclast without excusing the inexcusable.

The film’s often frenetic editing tends to weaken this strong story. But this hopeless history does have the flair to deploy Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” capturing the tragic absurdity to Goudreau’s ambition.

Checkpoint Zoo portrays a caged and dependent menagerie that bewilderingly experienced humans at their worst and, fortunately, their best.

A little of Sunlight, which she directs and co-wrote with Allen, goes a long way. But there’s still something to seeing a performer go for broke, purging a character’s shame and despair through a screwy, confessional sense of humor.

Impressively, nearly everything was shot by the documentary’s subjects. Yet although their double duty is an awful fact of life in Ukraine, the film lurches between its varying components and tones.

The documentary tends to linger on some assertions about sexuality in Lincoln’s era while papering over others. But the general effort of bringing to light (and potentially to history books) an underrepresented part of American experience remains vital beyond defining Lincoln’s identity.

Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew, the storied group of session musicians.

Pine wisely avoids winks to the audience. But he whiffs at making the mystery especially gripping, leaving one instead to savor the moments, like a note-perfect Bening calmly talking Pine’s befuddled pool man through his latest setback.

Even as the movie is lampooning one trope, it keeps taking refuge in other conventions in ways that undercut the pop of its premise and make one wish for greater depth to its thought experiments.

The movie (directed by Janeen Damian and written by Kirsten Hansen) skips over Maddie savoring the outcome of her wish, and shifts right into charming comedy around her confusion, including having no memory about how she got engaged.

Stallone’s flair for words — and his references to Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” and the 1968 dynastic drama “The Lion in Winter” — make one wish he’d talked about much more than his greatest hits and misses.

The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge).

Despite the impressively sweeping C.G.I. running battles in Thai fields or seaside settlements, or the gritty “Blade Runner”-lite interludes in crowded metropolises, the story’s engine produces the straightforward momentum of your average action blockbuster — one thing happens, then the next thing, complete with punchy (sometimes tin-eared) one-liners.

The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies.

It’s an intriguing scenario, though not always played out skillfully. For better and worse, we feel Charlie’s confinement fully, as he watches another’s life go by and yearns for a proper home of his own.

The movie doesn’t need to achieve the same levels of sensation as a wildly popular racing simulator, but it should convey excitement and dynamism in its own cinematic way. When the novelty of watching a gamer become a driver wears off, we’re left with an adequate racing drama in a medium built for so much more.

Its splashy, curiously filter-free adventures unfold in Italy and Germany during World War II, to sometimes awkward effect.

The film’s biggest trick might be casting Moore, Stan and the positively glowing Middleton and still never quite catching fire.

The ticktock horror plotting muffles the romantic spark that brought Maja and Leah together in the first place — the thrill replaced by a lukewarm chill.

The message of manifesting your goals reigns supreme, which is great, but it’s worth mentioning that Watson’s willpower benefits from the privileges of financial security, family support and a curmudgeonly-turned-selfless coach.

Pathaan is in some ways a save-the-world superhero movie without suits, and while less self-serious, the hefty length can lag. More is not always better — though the gusto of Padukone speedskating to the rescue at one point goes a long way.

A serviceable slab of possession horror.

It can’t fail to trigger shudders of recognition as well as feelings of release, but the filmmaking lacks a certain drama.

The actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes.

The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.

Plan A never quite rises to the challenge posed by this remarkable chapter in history.

If only the story of Hinterland felt as engrossing and alive as its setting.

Decency prevails in a somewhat ludicrous finale involving an army of children and a train containing a high-ranking officer. It’s an ending so tidy as to undercut the effort to broach a shameful side to the American war effort.

Getting peeved at Mottola and Hamm’s easygoing efforts would be like getting mad at a cat for sleeping too much.

The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.

You couldn’t ask for richer reading material, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.

The movie’s charms are limited by what comes to feel like a coddling conceit.

The film’s dramas are ornately costumed but often stilted and lacking the verve of the battle staging. Even the glories of war can turn stultifying when you’re shown one too many thousand-yard-stare reaction shots by military leaders.

The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured.

The fun is not always contagious, even for someone like me who grew up reading Tom Clancy’s wonky Cold War fantasias.

Marceau beams with unshakable good vibes, like a lion in the sun, though that makes her woes feel not so woeful. But Azuelos’s film does glimpse moments that feel true to the sometimes strange complexity of emotions.

Stu’s travails feed into his salty homilies about getting closer to God, delivered with Wahlberg’s usual bluffness. That doesn’t automatically translate into a religious experience, and watching the movie can feel like a two-hour hearty handshake.

There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.

The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.

Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.

Despite some flourishes (such as a mirror-like crystal cave), “Transformania” feels locked into the routine rhythms of its plotting and makes one-note jokes out of its human incarnations.

The tell-all promise of the film’s title dwindles away into predictable perspectives from members of his family. But this introduction to Chaplin shines whenever he performs, displaying his comic genius for doing everything wrong to absolute perfection.

The movie, directed by Swinton O. Scott III, plays like an extended series pilot, built out of largely interchangeable episodes.

The landscape can go only so far in expressing Toichi’s mind-set, and the movie turns hokey when it dramatizes Toichi’s inner thoughts.

The film does strike one long, nerve-jangling note, but the style leaves Molly with nowhere to run.

Despite some nifty freak-outs, the movie’s buildup can lack a certain snap.

King works to portray a tight mesh of relationships around Cole, directing Elizabeth Palmore’s valiant adaptation of the sensitively rendered Carter Sickels novel. But lacking a strong central performance from Ettinger — who gets stuck on a half-pained, half-exasperated setting — much of the movie feels like a series of comings and goings, entrances and exits.

Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter.

Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor.

The standoff with authorities dawdles and languishes, and a side plot with a TV journalist (Labina Mitevska) feels one-note. Still, we should all look forward to seeing what Petrunya does next.

The “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production.

The film’s drama wrestles itself to a standstill (along with leaving some characterization sketchy, like that of a concerned social worker). Yet Leblanc might come closer to the sensation of concealed trauma than movies with more familiar storytelling beats.

The many red herrings and the dark-secret finale recall the reliable, compulsive appeal of a page-turner, although the tensions don’t always feel fully translated to the rhythms and demands of a film.

The film feels both hermetic and declarative, and it’s folly to constantly remind a viewer of Fassbinder’s impossible-to-replicate alchemy of color, lighting, angles and passion.

Based upon a 1999 young-adult novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster conveys the ache for all that its protagonist could lose, but it can’t escape the dramatic ruts of its own creation.

Reinhold exerts a Svengali-like hold on Franz and the women they know, though the character’s questionable magnetism makes this dynamic increasingly baffling.

At least for the uninitiated, the drift of the filmmaking seemed to fall short of the transcendence envisioned by its story.

The lustrously shot movie breaks Sam out of the gallery grind through Hollywood-grade somersaults in storytelling (one of them so breezily violent as to feel a little tasteless)

I did yearn to see more of his talents in action; his header goal in that year’s Italy final feels cosmically liberating. But however conventional as a whole, the movie feels troubled by the traumas of Pelé’s heyday.

By the time Beauvais dismisses some chestnut trees as “bland,” the movie screams nothing so much as the pained self-absorption of depression — an anguished revelation, but dead-on.

Soko gets credit for not softening Mwangi’s landing, and the outcome of the election is dropped as nearly an afterthought to his valiant efforts. But the on-the-ground campaigning and complex history could use a better shape than the film’s fits and starts.

The film’s director of photography, Matthew Libatique, makes “Pelé” more than an eye-moistening anthem for a built-in global audience.

As more and more perfect shots drift by, the reality of the characters and their relationships dissipates, and we’re left with just picturesque moods.

Despite much talk of diversity and tradition, Mr. Levine has little fresh to say about gentrification issues or documentary storytelling.

[A] serviceable but slightly drawn-out documentary.

At its sloppy heart, this is meant to be an affirming movie, but the filmmakers could have taken a cue from one line of dialogue: “Don’t just feel special. Be special.”

Mr. Sobel’s film skates past any persuasive sense of motivation.

Many little touches in the film reflect the offbeat hand of Ms. Delpy. But she sells herself short by not giving the mother-son conflict a bit of a sharper edge beyond Lolo’s awfulness.

As written by the TV veteran Robert Carlock, Kim’s rise-and-fade arc is sympathetically rendered, with humor and the urgency of an underhand pitch.

King Georges feels stretched into feature length, but its ending neatly portrays a man with a fierce personal code who seems to have accepted change.

The conclusion would be chilling if it weren’t so reserved. For Denmark, the film, an Oscar nominee in the foreign-language category, might seem quietly radical, but Mr. Lindholm errs too far on the side of quiet.

The screenplay, by John M. Phillips, is the written equivalent of a toddler discovering curse words. Yet some riffs draw chuckles.

Some of this recalls Stephen Chow’s “Journey to the West,” minus the brilliance.

The baggy 137-minute story drowns out Mr. Feng’s assorted sharp moments with hoary family drama and clumsy plotting, and Li Yifeng is generic as Mr. Six’s son.

The brisk clip and dashes of dark humor ward off actual despair, but the length poses challenges for some of the heavy lifting of character growth.

Mr. Corbijn picturesquely frames the back story to the shoot, but his muffled retelling drifts with Dane DeHaan’s murmurous impersonation of Dean and Robert Pattinson’s almost perversely listless turn as Stock.

The film’s four-person shuffle turns into a bit of a hash.

Ms. Bagnall’s baffling story about a trio of oddball outsiders is stricken with a galloping case of romantic whimsy and falls short of its serio-comic aspirations.

Mr. Sembène was an inspiration; as a film, Sembène! is something less than that, petering out as it goes on, but at least offering a fair-minded tribute to a master.

Shot in sunny locales, Difret has an earnestness that hovers between plain-spoken and pedestrian, and there are scenes and sequences that just don’t come together as written and edited, no matter how admirable the film’s existence is.

Whatever the facts, Mr. Gracia’s messily structured film works best as a document of fear in today’s Ukraine and as a kind of ghost story about the Soviet Union.

More often than not, Mr. Letterman uses his movie as a toy chest of characters more than as a medium, the muggy Mr. Black included.

Mr. Miike’s narrative model is essentially the Kool-Aid commercials of the 1980s: Periodically, somebody new bursts into the room or onto the street, and a fight or something bizarre takes place.

There’s something woebegone about the film itself as it staggers along, ever in danger of tipping into the abyss inhabited by one of its subjects.

Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.

Too many scenes feel routine or clichéd, sometimes even those depicting extreme experiences.

A credit-sequence television clip of Mr. Warren and the real Ms. Smith with Oprah Winfrey makes the entire movie feel like the strangest book infomercial in memory.

Home From Home is imbued with the villagers’ attachment to the land, but while dutifully capturing the period, the film feels less layered than Mr. Reitz’s past work.

What’s most curious is Mr. Labute’s kid-glove treatment of the scenario, forgoing real sexual gamesmanship, much less the opportunistic rug-pulling in past films. That baseline of sincerity is refreshing to a point, yet he’s written a fairly weak-tea story of conflicted self-discovery that would make for a mildly engaging evening on the stage.

The filmmakers pop their story’s bubble in a confusing finish, but it all ends up feeling like a mystery novel that simply never revealed the key clues.

The crisscrossing pursuers and pesky police suggest a watered-down version of the treacheries in “City on Fire.” But the cluttered, unfolding dynamism of Mr. Lam’s action scenes remains resilient when gunplay or knife fights are thrust into street life.

The director Mark Neveldine deploys queasy lighting and a trembling score, but his best choice is to let Ms. Dudley stare at us. She conveys unnerving shifts in self-awareness and sinister intent with her eyes.

Mr. Toledano and Mr. Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. That comes in handy when their points about French identity miss the mark, or when the main characters share special moments without really acquiring depth.

Though Mr. Holdridge and Ms. Saasen feel genuine, they lack acting chops, and their screenplay’s self-consciousness about romantic clichés plays like a cliché itself.

Despite an appealing fondness for New York locations and habits, Mr. Buschel and his cinematographer, Ryan Samul, have embalmed their film in style. J. J.’s ostentatious speeches feel like a projection of self-conscious cleverness, and the film’s virtuoso lighting doesn’t always match up to the needs of a scene.

Despite the urgent subject matter and lyrical touches, it’s a film that needs further layers of complication and texture.