Zachary Barnes

The movie isn’t above using its star like a pin-up model. It isn’t above much, in fact, and it’s certainly below the level of the breezy rom-coms that Hollywood used to churn out with ease.

The legacy of the Emerson String Quartet includes dozens of recordings, and it’s probably in those that the deepest lessons lie. For anyone curious to meet the musicians who made them, Four Rational People is a decent introduction.

A cast this good would have a hard time delivering something less than watchable, and Goodbye June is watchable, even if little of it works.

Visually epic, sonically relentless and otherwise fatuous, the film has a dramatic inertia occasionally punctuated by eruptions of utter catastrophe—a series of shocks that leaves you singed, shaken and not much better for it.

Inserting glitzy musical numbers amid such drama could have come off as a subversive twist, but because everything is presented with the same gentle glow of sentimentality it ends up feeling merely tasteless. For “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” this is the kitschy kiss of death.

The documentary becomes a reasonably engaging if unpolished account of a legendary filmmaker’s most quixotic pursuit.

With his trilogy, Mr. Haugerud has shown himself to be intelligent, compassionate and possessed of writerly flair. But filmmaking is, among other things, a demanding balancing act, dependent on a director’s taste and discernment in answering a wide array of questions—about sound, image and character, big themes and minor details. Dreams suggests he’s still trying to find his cinematic equilibrium.

A feature debut from writer-director Nicholas Colia, it sees its premise stretched thin and undermined by an amateurish construction. But the commitment of the cast and a handful of good comic ideas keep the proceedings watchable and amusing.

Once Mr. Cregger starts to let loose his revelations, though, disappointment creeps in, and the scale and soul of the film shrink before our eyes. It’s impossible to say how without getting into spoilers. But the movie’s potential richness, kept in play by its ever-circling narrative style, is finally brought crashing to the ground by its denouement.

Together is less a fully conceived horror movie than a plodding relationship drama with some impressively disgusting effects superimposed on it. The two elements, alas, don’t quite complete each other.

When the movie stays more on subject, it can be engaging, and it helps that cinematographer Cecilie Semec has a talent for mining the mundane act of people talking to each other for visual interest.

Ms. Piani is too scattershot a storyteller for the eventual, inevitable romance to feel earned.

The great sin of “Sinners” is that, for all the audacity of its conception, it finally collapses into the familiar.

The Wedding Banquet has been awkwardly contorted to fit the world of today, with flat direction and a cast that largely flounders in a muddled middle ground between antic comedy and sentimental drama.

Ms. Fahy, who had a breakthrough with the second season of “The White Lotus,” tries admirably to dignify her character, but the attempt is overwhelmed by the plot’s silly hijinks, its twists more like arbitrary swerves.

Without the fizz of wit and humor the underlying emotional scenario ends up feeling flat.

While Mr. Holland is a clear talent with a screen presence at once natural and vivid, his character is passive to the point of emptiness. Any interesting resonances that might have been found in the idea of an actor having to relearn his own character, so to speak, are unfortunately absent here.

It’s decently entertaining action; Mr. Campbell knows what he’s doing in that regard.

The new movie has all the oft-mocked pretension of classic art film and none of the poetry. It’s a work of almost ostentatious mediocrity.

Much of it has a potent force, thanks in large part to the performance of Ms. Torres.

Did the film fail the actress? Or vice versa? In the case of The Last Showgirl, I’d say they failed each other.

The resulting film is curiously anachronistic and unconvincing, less a journey to a distant time and place than an Instagram post of one—pretty, posed and denuded of deeper feelings.

It simply never comes together with the sort of gathering force that we witness in its own scenes of artistic creation. Mr. Kaphar might yet make a movie that vibrates with the power of a great painting. Exhibiting Forgiveness, though, still feels like a jumbled sketch.

A mawkish core remains, though, and the resulting disjuncture—between the film’s indie style and its sludgy sentimentality—makes the whole effort feel phony.

The result is impressively if overbearingly grotesque, boasting an ecstatic surface of blood, guts and deformities. But it’s all in service of obvious ideas about the intertwined pressures of sexism and the spotlight, themes too little developed to sustain the nightmarish, queasily satirical fantasia splashed and spattered atop them.

The documentary gets by on its interviews, archival footage and fascinating subjects, who in some respects always seemed like stalwarts of a fusty tradition.

It feels mostly believable but a bit too obvious, as the meaning of the movie seems to shrink in its final minutes to fit a theme. Still, as a debut, “Good One” is good enough, a sensitively performed drama of a journey into the wild.

As Only the River Flows follows its winding course, the movie seems to lose its grip not merely on the mystery but on its protagonist, becoming less psychologically penetrating and more haphazardly hallucinatory. Looking for clues, we find only the fragments of a fractured mind.

It’s a feel-good fable of companionship that is just a little too simple, in both its sadness and its sweetness.

Babes is the kind of comedy that makes you wonder what jokes are, exactly, and if what you just saw contained any.

There’s an affected, self-mythologizing solemnity to the storytelling that can’t quite disguise some flaws in the fundamentals.

The movie has its funny moments, and even some halfway-poignant ones, but it occasionally gives one the feeling of watching a bawdy New York-set sitcom and listening to a segment of “This American Life” at the same time.

Written, directed and edited by Ivan Sen and shot (also by Mr. Sen) in black-and-white, the film is spare, sunbleached and serious in its study of people long neglected and abused. Yet the drama is thin, and the mystery halfhearted.

Ms. Stewart, who has maintained an impressively adventurous career since her “Twilight” days concluded more than a decade ago, helps keep the film upright, beautifully blending a moody exterior with the care of a lover and the anxiety skittering beneath it all as Lou tries to keep her world from coming completely apart.

Mr. Garrone seems so desperate to create a powerful humanist plea that he has neglected to provide his movie with the detail and artistry that would give it force, and he conspicuously concludes his story just before it would have started to become more contentious—and more interesting.

Though not a bad movie, exactly, Perfect Days is a bit too much like a ready-made rendering of a good one, replete with a number of great songs that give scenes a semblance of emotional force.

Torn between Tarantino-esque genre pastiche and stilted art-film seriousness, The Settlers is at once unsettling and tonally unsettled. The result is a muddled study of brutal history.

Mr. McQueen has created a documentary that gives little life to history—or, for that matter, to the present that treads forever in its shadow.