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.

The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.

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.

This is not a deep movie. A lot of it isn’t even good. The images and story are chaotically assembled. The arrangements bring the music too naggingly close to the rounded, boppy, angsty gleam of certain 21st-century stage musicals . . . Even so, the people who’ve made this thing understand what the Indigo Girls are all about.

The sad news is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as fun — or funny — as those commercials. This project doesn’t seem to have brought Lopez any closer to serenity or levity. It’s an occasion for even more toil.

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.

Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.

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.

It’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could.

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.

The new, live-action The Little Mermaid is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing.

The best I can say about all of this is that it didn’t bore me.

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.

It’s all a mess of ideology and theology, of flowing robes, flying fists, karma, camp, cant and can’t: can’t act, can’t kick, can’t marshal any art.

The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone.

No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.

If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.

There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.

Marry Me is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.

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.

It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.

The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.

The Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.

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.

Berman can’t quite juggle it all.

The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.

I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?

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.

You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough.

More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone. Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight.

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

This is Jenny from the blah.

It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.

Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.

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.

Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.

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.

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.

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

Parental Guidance is overly generous with regard to the silliness. However, it's not clueless. Crystal seems determined to give as generously as he gets. When a bully whacks him, Crystal covers the bully in vomit. Good for him.

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.

This movie is the height of by-the-book dullness.

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.

There is one bright spot. Ellie Kendrick plays Dolly's silly, breathlessly romantic little sister, Kitty.

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.

Huppert's character, who's a tornado of demands at work, is almost as obnoxious as Poel-voorde's. She just not as willfully disgusting. He chews up all the scenery with his thick Belgian accent and splaying limbs and general cartoonishness.

This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.

The movie observes the general misery of needing serious medical treatment and the particular awfulness of needing medical treatment you can't pay for.

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

Cooper gives the performance just the right lunacy and doubt.

This fifth and mercifully final installment features so much idle anticipation that it's unclear whether we're watching a movie or an Apple product launch.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

The film has sprung from the mind of the Frenchman Leos Carax and ought to be seen to be believed, on the largest screen you can find, and probably sober, too, since it becomes its own narcotic.

The movie captures a kind of tragedy of self.

Flight is a so-so movie with Denzel Washington as a commercial-airline pilot who crash-lands a plane while drunk, high, hung over, and horny. It doesn't do much that you couldn't anticipate just by seeing the trailer - the trailer is more exciting than the movie itself.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

It's done persuasively enough that you wonder how you'd feel under similar circumstances.

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.

It's delicately made, yet forceful in its delicacy.

The comedy in Robelin's movie veers from wacky and overwritten to truly, beautifully sad, especially the whimsical final sequence, which is as apt an existential tribute to the afterglow of Fonda's fabulousness as you'll see.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

For some, Atlas Shrugged Part II is a ridiculous movie. For others, it's scripture.

It's inspired of Sachs to lean on Russell for a kind of oblique emotional depth. But it's possible to leave this movie mistaking Sachs's soul for Russell's.

Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.

With "Dogtooth," the point was: Don't try this at home. Now, the expanded lesson is: Don't try this anywhere.

I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

Argo is absurdly suspenseful for both of its hours. I've never been this stressed-out watching people shred documents.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

It's a stupid movie by smart people who aren't smart enough to realize it's stupid.

The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.

The movie has a lot going for it. In less than 90 minutes, it walks us through sketches of Vreeland's private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point.

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.

An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.

The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."