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.