Zachary Barnes

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.

Mr. Bessa’s performance is a pained and bitter thing, his character committed to some form of justice even if the attempt to get it keeps him submerged in a traumatic past.

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

With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.

Pavements is certainly hard to pin down. In that, though, it embodies the band it loves.

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.

By its end, “Misericordia” emerges as a drama by turns chilling and absurd, with some of its twists daring us toward incredulity. Yet Mr. Guiraudie’s mix of mischief-making and straight-faced conviction keeps us continuously unsettled, and continuously curious.

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.

With “Seven Veils” Mr. Egoyan has done something more interesting, weaving a new narrative into and around the opera until the two become a dense, dark thicket of their own.

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

The performances are admirably committed, the scenario likably loony, and the jokes come in swift succession.

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.

The heart of the film is the emotional triangle of Petey, Li’l Petey and Dog Man, as the two erstwhile enemies both find something like love for the kitten (voiced by Lucas Hopkins Calderon and full of disarming innocence) and something like forgiveness for each other.

We live in an age choked with unfunny comedy, from winking advertisements to recycled memes to the limp quips that punctuate most superhero movies, and yet Flight Risk still stands out for the laughless void that opens up beneath its putative comic relief. It’s almost eerie.

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.

Mr. Henry’s performance, by turns firm and funny, is the highlight of the movie.

While “Kraven,” like “Venom,” is refreshingly Earth-bound relative to the soporific celestial bombast of the Marvel films, it’s still low on real liveliness.

Ms. Jean-Baptiste portrays a character on an extreme end of human temperament, and she brings to it an intensity of focus and feeling that abolishes the easy contours of caricature.

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.

What makes Ms. Kapadia so clearly an artist is her ability to let a scene breathe, to be patient but not ponderous, suffusing the film with atmosphere and unarticulated feeling.

Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of Bird don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.

The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn.

As a witness to some small rectification and the still simmering problems that surround it, Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.

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.