Sentimental Value is an affecting look into a fractured family. Art and domestic life intertwine with each other, inform each other and perhaps support each other more than is at first apparent, leading to an ending that provides a satisfying union of the two realms.

Just as early youth means the endless fascination of new encounters, it also brings sudden, bewildering losses. “Little Amélie” brims with feeling for every precious moment of it.

Sly, wry, adorable and deplorable, Guillaume Marbeck is priceless as the endlessly irritating and yet frustratingly charismatic Godard in one of the year’s brightest pictures, a rare standout in a sea of multiplex mediocrity.

Mr. Davenport, who makes films “about disability” according to his website, also makes them from the perspective of the disabled—he has cerebral palsy and often uses a wheelchair. Like many people who find themselves on the anti- side of the assisted-suicide issue, he takes the concept to what seem very logical conclusions—with an assist from Canada.

There is no reason to adapt an existing work without doing something new, and Ms. DaCosta does plenty, though much of the updating shows how truly groundbreaking Ibsen was. And how little ground is left to break.

Ms. Mumenthaler has constructed her character study with subtly expressionistic imagination, deploying an enveloping, finely tuned sound design and finding a transporting musical motif in Holst’s “The Planets.” One daring sequence toward the end offers a vivid panorama beyond this woman’s world.

As the title suggests, this isn’t a film focused simply on the ruins of a relationship so much as one with an eye on what’s worth keeping.

Bugonia isn’t merely dark; it’s a black hole. But Mr. Lanthimos’s vision is sternly compelling, and Bugonia is that exceptional movie that’s extremely hard to forget.

Thin characterizations, bland acting and a surfeit of bubbly cuteness combine to make a throw-pillow of a movie: It’s soft and decorative without being particularly useful or interesting.

Occasionally the movie does offer up a pleasing little nugget about the creative process, as when Springsteen changes a lyric from the third person to the first: There is glory in such little adjustments. But most of the movie’s backstage material is uninspired.

The climax, in which police slowly drag the truth out of the central figure, is harrowing.

Notwithstanding some clunky moments, Mr. Ansari not only engineers up-to-the-minute twists on the musty Hollywood angel movie, but decorates his story with clever dialogue and wicked observations about street-level existence in the City of Angels.

The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime.

Directed by his longtime friend and collaborator Richard Linklater, Mr. Hawke makes the most of what might be the year’s most brilliant screenplay, by Robert Kaplow, by delivering a Hart full of mischief and wit, desperation and self-loathing. There has never been a great book written about Hart, but at last he has this movie to renew and restore his story.

The subject matter is worthy of serious dramatic interrogation, and there’s a good movie in here someplace. But “After the Hunt” feels like a messy first-draft script, shoddily directed, rather than an accomplished feature from a veteran filmmaker.

The laughs, the warmth, the love and the faith-based fellowship die out in the dismal final act.

The potential for an interesting sci-fi spectacle is there, at least at the start, but Tron: Ares does nothing with it.

Though Ms. Bigelow includes a few humanizing and even humorous touches . . . she is not interested in the imperatives of the action movie or the moral lesson. She simply lays out one nauseatingly possible future, which means A House of Dynamite is one of the most terrifying movies ever made, but not in a fun way.

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.

This critic is a sucker for Ms. Knightley, so please disregard anything here that sounds remotely positive. Because it really is a ludicrous exercise, the kind one hopes was fun for the actors because the results are so wacky, and the cast so prestigious.

Though all of the film’s events could be recounted in a few sentences, “Anemone” is a vivid character study and an acting showcase for the four lead performers, each of whom gets ample opportunity to show a deep understanding of their tortured pasts.

Despite the surface Mr. Safdie has designed—hand-held cameras, unglamorous sets, closeups of people in misery—The Smashing Machine is notably reluctant to go deep.

The filmmakers may have refashioned the book to make it a vehicle for Mr. Murphy, and done so successfully. But they were right about the POV: Witnessing the turmoil of these very troubled youths through the frustrations of their teachers makes for more convincing drama than would a delinquent’s-eye view of the same situation.

All horror film is metaphorical. But to qualify for the genre itself—and satisfy the base demands of the base—a movie is required to both accelerate toward lunacy and entertain a certain amount of mayhem. “Bring Her Back” contains enough gore to swamp a blood bank. But it also features a performance by Sally Hawkins that may be the best of the year, or even her career.

Rangy in tone, style and theme, it has so much going on that a single viewing hardly seems sufficient to absorb it all. Whether it’s a masterpiece or a hodgepodge will be a matter of some discussion; the reach is evident but the grasp is a little shaky.

The Vietnam echoes are everywhere. The vocabulary is mere embellishment

The documentary’s director, Linus O’Brien (son of the show’s creator), interviews fans and outside experts to piece together the still-amazing story of how “Rocky Horror” caught on.

It’s difficult to describe the astonishing beauty of “Porcelain War” without trivializing everything and everyone involved.

It ought to be a treat to see such charismatic talents falling in love, but the only overwhelming and unstoppable force in the movie is its love for cutesy and cloying gimmicks. It’s a cinematic crime to waste these two stars: I charge “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with unconscionably aggravated whimsy in the third degree.

Mr. Tipping ditches reasonable motivation to deliver a satirical haymaker aimed at those whose religion is football. Like many failed satires, the conclusion is more vehement than amusing.

The film is plagued by flaws: James Newton Howard’s relentlessly bombastic musical score, an elementary storyline, underwritten characters. As expertly as Mr. Greengrass recaptures the flaming horrors, his film is a somewhat superfluous successor to an excellent documentary on the same subject, Ron Howard’s 2020 feature “Rebuilding Paradise.”

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.

If you emerge from this movie with a strong urge to rewatch the entire saga, you won’t be alone. Neither will those who emerge with tears of gratitude in their eyes.

Both the underlying story and the dramatic re-creations possess an urgency that eludes so much televised—and sensationalized—nonfiction.

If “Spinal Tap II” doesn’t quite earn an 11 on a scale of one to 10, I’d say it rates a strong 7.

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.

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.

As the Roses start to become increasingly hostile to each other in front of others, the tone is meant to be hilariously nasty. Instead it’s merely monotonously vulgar, as a long string of one-liners relies more on the supposed shock value of profanity than on wit.

Who better to lead us into this netherworld than a late-night bartender, the kind who is still slinging shots at 4 a.m.? As Hank, Austin Butler turns in yet another starburst performance in Darren Aronofsky’s careening, sordid, often hilarious noir about a man on the run in a metropolis abounding with weirdos, poseurs and goons.

Hell of a Summer, as written and directed by Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, manages to mine some fresh mirth out of the mayhem while lampooning a format’s classic conceits.

It’s easy to smile at The Thursday Murder Club, with its veteran performers chewing the scenery and still having the teeth to do it. Does that sound ageist? It might, if the charms of this lighthearted, star-studded confection weren’t all about its main characters being advanced in years and still as sharp as an insulin injection.

What’s missing from Stans is a sense of humor—not among the stans, who are self-reflecting and self-effacing. Mr. Mathers, outside of his songwriting, seems to believe that amused self-examination is a weakness to be hidden. The stans, ironically, are hiding nothing.

Mr. Coen and Ms. Cooke’s plot is such a muddle that they more or less expect us to dismiss it. The interstitial moments and incidental comedy are meant to be the chief attraction here. Minus Joel Coen, however, the jokes are thin and tired.

The entire movie comes across as awkward, even flailing to hold our interest.

Mr. Hallström, who has made some emotionally satisfying and even delicate movies (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “My Life as a Dog,” “The Cider House Rules”), doesn’t really have the material here that he had in his other films. His cast is pretty; the Sagrada Familia is more eloquent.

It’s a lot of fun, but nothing special, another in a long line of semi-comical fight movies.

Mr. Assayas has crafted a beautiful and moving tableau of how one small group dealt with a bewildering change. The time when Covid-19 ruled our lives is one many of us might prefer to forget. May our most gifted artists resist that impulse.

Its title notwithstanding, the fascinating, frustrating Highest 2 Lowest ends up somewhere in the middle.

There are a few speedbumps of illogic along the gnarled route of Night Always Comes, but they can’t negate the pace of the storytelling, Mr. García’s gymnastic shooting, or the sense of there being no bottom to the well of darkness explored by Mr. Caron.

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.

Though the affair dragged on so long before Dreyfus was finally cleared that Mr. Polanski confines the resolution to an epilogue, he has nevertheless made an oft-told tale lively and urgent. “An Officer and a Spy” is Mr. Polanski’s finest work in many years.

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.

Ms. Carson is a photogenic commodity to have in your film; so is Oxford, and director Iain Morris (the rebooted “Time Bandits”) balances the visual dimension of his film upon these twin resources.

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.

In these days when flat-out comedy features are scarce, it’s one of the most welcome tenants at the summer multiplex. A mid-movie snowman gag puts the new one over the top, bestowing on it the honor of being mentionable alongside its predecessors. It sets the lunacy level to “inspired.”

Among the film’s strongest qualities is its suspense: Mr. Zürcher builds a wicked sense of anticipation about just how far its desperately unhappy characters may go. As bleak as it is, The Sparrow in the Chimney is a skillfully painted portrait of an unstable menagerie.

The film is more illuminating in its depiction of a distinctly contemporary war, in which men are augmented at every step by advanced machines.

There is a lot of untapped potential here, and a reality-TV series covering the same subject would be welcome. Nevertheless, inspiring true stories about youth are a little too scarce these days, and “Folktales” is not only magical and warm, it’s also a bracing interlude of good cheer.

Making your characters relatable, likable, charming and vulnerable might seem to be a fairly obvious assignment, but it conflicts with the comic-book-movie urge to make its characters completely and devastatingly awesome. In getting back to basics, “First Steps” proves to be easily the best superhero movie of the year.

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 several mediocre songs seem like filler intended to pad out the running time to 90 minutes, but then again, everything else seems like padding too.

“Dogs” is a beguiling recreation of one irrepressible childhood. The movie is sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending, but always invitingly candid and relatable. In its specificity it winds up being universal: As children, we really were odd little beasts, weren’t we?

May end up being the surprise delight of summer ’25.

Superman can be a myth, a god, an American emblem or a symbol of the overachieving immigrant, but making him a schmo who’s so weak he’d be in deep trouble if it weren’t for his ridiculous dog feels like a dizzyingly dismissive choice.

It may be a historical documentary, but it has blinkers on.

It is a very personal documentary, a designation that can connote the good, the not-so-bad and the distinctly uncomfortable. My Mom Jayne has it all, including a puzzle that Ms. Hargitay pursues throughout.

At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.

Here’s a brilliant idea for a rock documentary: Catch up with a band in the creaky fog of middle age, long after the hits. A certain toll has been exacted, a certain humility achieved, and yet the story is not yet over.

If Sorry, Baby isn’t exactly an assured debut, it nonetheless has a sincere purpose, thoughtfully expressed.

Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.

“F1” is a fun, exciting, predictable popcorn picture so formulaic it even contains a reference to formula in its title.

Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art.

Though the movie is consistently fun and has some clever ideas to go with its marvelous look, its story is thin and episodic, without much in the way of momentum.

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

Director Mark Monroe’s nearly two-hour Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is the most exhaustive exploration thus far.

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.

The movie generally looks great, thanks also to Dominic Watkins’s expansive production design, yet it thinks very little of its audience and comes across as a pee-wee “Game of Thrones.”

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

The Life of Chuck is an overstuffed suitcase of a movie, one that comes off as a bit graceless and misshapen with all of the cramming and jamming.

The movie is like a two-hour trailer, with one viscerally intense fight scene following another, filmed as usual for the series in long, fluid takes to maximize the wow factor.

The movie makes no attempt to dress up any of its many clichés.

If Bono is melodramatic, Mr. Dominik is an enabler. Thom Zimny’s matter-of-fact direction of another paternally damaged rock star’s concert confessional, “Springsteen on Broadway,” let its star’s charisma shine through. “Stories of Surrender” is more like an epic of self-parody.

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.

Mountainhead teeters on a precipice of dramatic irony and intentions.

It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.

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

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

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.

Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.

Nonnas is directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen”) with undistilled sincerity and dollops of goo. But Mr. Vaughn’s Joe Scaravella, who seems to hew quite closely to the story’s real-life restaurateur, is free of Vaughn-ish smirk. He approaches pathos.

The film’s airless, cramped quality demands consistently high-level dialogue—words that sting and burn. Instead, the two big speeches, especially the second one, land somewhat like filibusters.

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

Cobbling together ideas from other, better movies, Rust isn’t original enough to be a must-see, but it didn’t deserve to be canceled because of an accident, either. Mr. Baldwin has been largely absent from the screen in recent years, and this effort is a reminder that, to use a word often applied to Harland Rust himself, he remains formidable.

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

In short, every element here has the dusty funk of an item pulled off the back shelves at the Goodwill store for blockbuster story beats. Your enjoyment of the film will thus largely depend on the overall vibe: whether you enjoy hanging out with the new gang as they strategize and quarrel and banter, with occasional interjections of everyone punching, kicking and hurling each other meaninglessly around the set.