Owen Gleiberman

Part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. The Card Counter is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.

The Hand of God has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head

All of this should build, slowly and inexorably, in force and emotion. But for a film that’s actually, at heart, rather tidy and old-fashioned in its triangular gamesmanship, “The Power of the Dog” needed to get to a more bruising catharsis. In its crucial last act, the film becomes too oblique.

It’s a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama. Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama. But Parallel Mothers, while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party.c

The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.

In Last Man Standing, Broomfield comes close to answering the questions — of guilt and recrimination — that have hung over these murders for too long.

We go into The Meaning of Hitler craving that millimeter of insight, of intrigue and revelation. And the film provides it. It ruminates on Hitler and the Third Reich in ways that churn up your platitudes.

Reminiscence plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before.

At one point, a character in a coma is referred to as having Locked-In Syndrome, which means that she’s still aware of her surroundings but is totally unable to move. By the end of Demonic, you’ll know just how she feels.

What the documentary captures, profoundly, is that Leonard Bernstein was a fierce hedonist who worked hard to live the life he wanted.

The Lost Leonardo is the first art-world documentary I’ve seen that captures what art becomes once it goes through the looking glass of greed: not just a commodity, but a way of transferring and manipulating power. It’s enough to make the Mona Lisa stop smiling.

In the case of Don’t Breathe 2, one reason the movie, for all the operatic (and often absurd) grisliness of its second half, isn’t quite as good as the original is that the original didn’t have a trace of that franchise self-consciousness.

You could call the film a slightly absurd corruption thriller, an action movie with not enough action, or a by-the-numbers father-son bonding movie. Yet here’s what’s weird about it. The Last Mercenary thinks it’s a comedy, but not because anything in it is actually funny.

The Suicide Squad is cunningly scuzzy, disreputable fun.

It’s like watching a romantic comedy while strapped to a roller-coaster with a VR headset on. Jungle Cruise is at once a love story, a made-for-4DX action movie, a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style fairy tale featuring a ghostly conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) and his pewter-armored henchman with digital snakes slithering through them, and God knows what else.

As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.

It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.

Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.

Snake Eyes, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), has style and verve, with a diabolical family plot that creates a reasonable quota of actual drama. The movie is also a synthetic but infectiously skillful big-studio hodgepodge of ninja films, wuxia films, yakuza films, and international revenge films.

Men have been gorging on righteous, blood-splattering pulp action rides like this one for decades, and if women are now looking for the equivalent, Gunpowder Milkshake fits the bill. Its message is that there are a lot of Bills to kill.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

As a collage of the period, The Velvet Underground is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.

What makes Val a good and heartfelt movie, rather than just some glorified movie-star-as-trashed-parody-of-himself piece of reality-show exploitation, is that Kilmer brings the film an incredible sense of self-awareness.

If Bergman Island is a roman à clef about Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, it’s an oblique one. If it’s a “Before” film, it’s one that embeds a crucial element of emotional exploration in the educated guesswork of the audience. If it’s a cinephile shell game made with disarmingly clever sincerity — and I would say that’s just what it is — it’s one that leaves you grateful to have paid a visit to this island.

Even telling the story of this scarred, flawed, barely together family, Penn creates honest notes of nostalgia.

The last act of Tiny Tim: King for a Day is about Tiny’s descent, which the film portrays with a haunted majesty worthy of a Larry Karaszewski/Scott Alexander biopic.

The Price of Freedom is an absorbing, disturbing, and scrupulously well-researched documentary.

Larry Flynt for President tells a story so wild that the documentary plays as a succulent time machine of sordid 1980s mishegas.