Wesley Morris

Misericordia is film noir with the lights turned on. Even when its characters are working your nerves, it tickles. Guiraudie is playing those nerves like a harp.

Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.

I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to be supremely conscious of one’s self and yet be vividly unselfconscious, but that’s where Beyoncé finds herself.

There’s a sharpness to the comedy, some attitude and freshness, some wisdom. That maybe comes, in part, from the kids looking a little older than their characters are. It also comes from Payne’s emotional finesse.

Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut.

This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.

This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets. But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish.

On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.

There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.

Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.

All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.

Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.

The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.

It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.

You get both the most lovely gaze a professional camera’s ever laid upon Aretha Franklin and some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you. The woman practically eulogizes herself. Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel.

Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.

Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.

The trouble is that despite how earnest and committed Mr. Zahs appears to be, the story of what’s in the collection might be more be more fascinating than the man who’s collected it.

The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.

The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.

An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.

After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.

What Hoss is asked to play - and does play with great skill - is the fine line between self-protection and hauteur.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it's tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in "The Graduate." But there's a difference. Swanson's pool is empty.