Zachary Barnes

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.

Running only 76 minutes, the movie is a veristic and voluble delight, an exercise in eavesdropping on a pair of smart, funny people who wear posterity—there’s a tape recorder running, after all—with wry lightness.

This is not the kind of 3-D that sees things leaping off the screen, though a few wandering wisps of smoke appear to escape the frame; it instead lends these images a sometimes uncanny, sometimes mesmerizing sense of depth. While it doesn’t feel integral to the project, it does, now and then, enrich it.

Advancing toward its end, Hit Man becomes the least predictable of romances and the most oddly riveting of thrillers, managing all the while to deconstruct the Hollywood fantasy invoked in its title even as it indulges in a yet more timeless one: that of two gorgeous people falling in love.

The portrait that emerges is that of a fanatical protector of her public image, a movie star turned director for whom the camera was a miraculous and endlessly manipulable tool, no matter which side of it she was on.

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.

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

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.

Formally and dramatically, the movie has poise, which only strengthens its depiction of girls thrown off balance by growing up.

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.

The Testament of Ann Lee is primarily a film about the pull and power of belief. Delivered in a style that evokes its historical moment while also cutting across time to the present, it lands with the enthralling, incantatory force of urgent prayer.

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.

The Beast has sequences of such insidiously effective suspense and arresting, even moving strangeness that the film could only have come from exactly those to whom it pays singular tribute: thinking, feeling humans.

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.

The movie is both a thought experiment about individual choices (and the conditions that influence them) and a formal exercise in repetition and variation.

An achievement as unlikely as it is inspired.

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.

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 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.

Blank created an enduring record of hubris, exploitation and unrelenting misadventure in the pursuit of artistic greatness, all ideally symbolized in both films’ central image—fashioned from mud, sweat and timber—of a huge boat being hauled over a mountain.

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.

Father Mother Sister Brother is no doubt true enough to many a family gathering this Christmas—awkward, amusing, a bit dissatisfying, but not a disaster. Sometimes that’s reason enough to call for a toast.

Mr. Chambers presents an attentive, sometimes painful and admirably unsentimental study of the everyday struggles of senescence and caretaking alike.

It’s a graceful, unassuming portrait of relationships old and new as a handful of characters consider their pasts and look wonderingly toward their futures, soju flowing freely all the while.

The final act of the film turns into an extended shootout, made gripping through Mr. Kurosawa’s expert construction of the scene, which is methodically paced and adept at keeping us oriented within the labyrinthine warehouse in which it unfolds. But beneath the action-movie surface lies a more despairing subject.

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.

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.