Art is supposed to help us see the world in novel ways. The Sound of Silence, in its quietly exhilarating manner, may make us hear it differently, too.

Moonlight Sonata is not a children’s film, of course. What it deals in, regardless of how buoyant its characters, are the most serious issues imaginable. Not that there aren’t moments of pure mirth. “Did Beethoven ever play it?” Jonas asks of the sonata, “and is it on YouTube?” Even the formidable Ms. Connolly is given pause by that.

While there’s not exactly a lot of plot in The Goldfinch there is a lot of stuff, too much for even a 2 1/2 -hour movie.

If Mr. Fessenden had a gospel to preach it would be about the virtues of low-budget, intellectually rigorous, topical, mayhem-rich movies. Of which Depraved is a perfect example.

Mr. Nelson’s movie is a gossipy and very musical primer on Davis, who is, needless to say (though it is said and said), among the giants of jazz.

As played by Keira Knightley, Katharine is sympathetic, as is the cause of an unabashedly political movie that is, essentially, a procedural, but also a very sophisticated, ornate, complex and convincing thriller.

One can understand the draw of The Fanatic for someone like Mr. Travolta: It calls for full immersion, mentally and physically. And he pulls it off.

The extraordinary thing about this film by Rodney Evans is how well it conveys the complexity. Vision is precious, it reminds us frequently. At the same time we’re brought to understand that blindness, far from being the end of the world, constitutes another mode of living in it.

It is by turns harrowing, affecting, unexpectedly funny, truly scary and fantastical. (The cinematographer was Juan Jose Saravia.) The fantasy grows overlush from time to time, but Ms. López has created an original work of art in genre disguise.

It’s all B-movie stuff, though sporadically entertaining and occasionally witty on the intertwined subjects of bedevilment and in-laws.

A work of singular beauty and a significant technical achievement, the film makes water audible — the thumps and groans of calving glaciers sound like the planet coming apart — and almost palpable; heaving mountains of blue-black waves in an Atlantic storm convey stupendous mass and titanic energy as in no motion picture I’ve seen before.

The trip is entertaining and even instructive — not about the facts of the case, which go from murky to opaque, but about the slip-slidingly elusive nature of truth.

As you watch Blinded by the Light, don’t let its earnest trappings blind you to the beauty of its core. Gurinder Chadha ’s coming-of-age drama transmutes the raw feeling of Bruce Springsteen ’s music into another kind of feeling, no less raw but leavened by giddy excitement that culminates in joy.

Shocking as it may be, One Child Nation needs to be seen. It’s a document that deepens our understanding of the totalitarian state that China was, not that long ago, of the enormity of the inhumanity that the central government visited on its most vulnerable citizens.

Maybe there’s no such thing as an innately bad dog — or, who knows, maybe there is. But there are inherently bad ideas for dog movies, and one of them has just manifested itself in The Art of Racing in the Rain.

This lovely debut feature by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz trafficks in the pleasure of watching intriguing people working through outlandish problems in unlikely ways. Go in expecting the best and you’ll come out smiling.

The narrative, framed as a psychological mystery, labors under more layers of significance than it can handle without falling into contrivance and argumentation. Still, the dramatic core is strong, an exceptional young man struggling to find, and become, whoever he really is.

The action is impressive and the stars are personally as well as gladiatorially appealing, but the filmmakers seem to have shot the treatment instead of the script, or never bothered with a script.

Avi Belkin’s documentary offers fascinating insights into what made its subject tick.

As one might expect from Mr. Tarantino’s previous films, his new one is violent — extravagant violence is visited on men and women alike at several points — as well as tender, plus terrifically funny. Yet this virtuoso piece of storytelling also offers intricate instruction on the pervasiveness of violence in popular culture.

The heart of the film, though, lies in what remains closest to Mr. Crosby’s heart—not the bum one with the eight stents but the musical one that has been churning out new songs and albums with improbable, unquenchable zest. True to its subject, who has been true to his muse, David Crosby: Remember My Name is about music in a revelatory way.

This all-too-realistic animated feature will impoverish, rather than enrich, those who watch it by asking less rather than more of their imaginations. That’s because its images have been stripped of the animator’s true art — daring, bedazzling designs that can thrill us with their surreality, and lift our emotions to hyperreal heights.

The film as a whole feels audacious and original, a case study of violence begetting more of the same, and Mr. Eisenberg is ideally cast as the soul of fearfulness, as well as the embodiment of mixed motives that include courage, lust for power and revenge.

A funny, emotionally intricate and deeply moving tale of severed connections and renewed family ties.

It’s a daring movie in its way—suicide is often inexplicable, and Phil treats it exactly that way. But Mr. Kinnear might have had more confidence in his audience, and maybe in himself.

Far From Home rather quickly segues from a soapy tale of life and love among the denizens of Midtown High School into a narrative where characters invoke George Orwell, question objective reality, claim truth as their own, and are enveloped in the kind of catastrophic inter-dimensional destruction that just seems like a way of not telling a coherent story.

While the title Marianne & Leonard sounds as if it’s out to give the female half of a famous partnership equal time, it does something quite close to the opposite.

A modest film about a modest man and benefits enormously from Mr. Wyman’s apparent obsessive-compulsive drive to collect, record and photograph.

Many things are possible in Midsommar, but the surest is that there’s nothing else like it at the movies.

What we have from director Alex Holmes — a guy who knows a great cinematic story when he hears one — is a documentary with all the nervous-making energy of a first-rate drama; a cast of sailors who are both endearing and intelligent; and a delicately wrought suspense story.

It’s not as if the people never existed, only the band, and the logical conclusion of all this speculation is exactly where the movie takes itself. I don’t want to spoil the party, but it feels like exploitation.

Ms. Buckley brings her own truth to this mostly synthetic confection, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

As Woody struggles to resolve his fears and feelings, Toy Story 4 transcends toydom. It feels exquisitely alive.

This fascinating film, which goes into national distribution this week, reconstructs the event with 16mm footage shot during the voyage, interviews with surviving crew members, and a narration taken from the anthropologist’s diary in which he reveals himself to be a spectacularly cockeyed judge of human nature.

The settings seem shopworn and the whole exercise feels hollow. Long ago, when the first “Men in Black” hit the screen, the most conspicuous of its many delights were Will Smith’s street-smart but sweet-spirited cop who became Agent J, and Tommy Lee Jones’s wearily imperious Agent K. Now they’re gone, and all delight has gone with them. Only weariness remains.

Mostly, though, The Last Black Man in San Francisco — which is what Jimmie sometimes feels like in the gentrifying city of his birth — glides from moment to meaningful moment with cumulative power and singular grace.

The most surprising thing about the production, which was written and directed by Simon Kinberg, is how grindingly dumb it becomes after a promising start.

The problem lies with the central role. The character may be comic, as conceived, but Mr. Landry’s performance is flat. Pierre-Paul is certainly likable in his earnestness, amusing in his confusion and touching in his innocence. Yet he isn’t very funny — there’s no sparkle, no buoyancy, no surprise — and the blame doesn’t lie only with the actor, given the underlying earnestness of the writing and direction.

Nothing funnier, smarter, quicker or more joyous has graced the big screen in a long time. Every performance pulses with wit, whether drawing-room-precise or burlesque-broad. Every joke fires infallibly, whether blithe, barbed or raunchy. Every fresh face conceals a surprise. It’s a thrilling achievement by any measure, an AP course in the exuberance of youth.

What makes Rocketman a gift of entertainment that keeps on giving is the brilliance of the musical numbers coupled with the complexity of the star’s portrayal.

It is, every bit of it, the cat’s meow.

I enjoyed the film, as many will, in a split-brain way that goes to the essence of fantasy — half-believing what I wanted to be true, embracing the emotional manipulation whenever possible.

Either way, though, Mr. Assayas, whose previous work has ranged from the tossed-off beguilements of “Irma Vep” to the docudramatic brilliance of “Carlos,” has created a small but special diversion that fairly vibrates with stylish performances and flies in the face of marketing fashion — a talkie with an abundance of good talk.

Its inventions and speculations aren’t very interesting. Nowhere do they hint at the man who gave us the plays.

Mr. Zhang’s film is elegant fun. Along with all the ying-yangery, there’s the governing concept of movies as entertainment.

As interviewers — and filmmakers — go, Mr. Herzog is one of a kind, his searching curiosity complemented by his instantly recognizable German accent. His new film, he goes out of his way to note, is a love letter.

The movie is cheerfully absurd, often funny and occasionally touching, a surprisingly successful coupling of two ostensibly mismatched stars. But the pleasingly adolescent absurdities soon regress to grindingly infantile and the raunch grows repetitious until the comedy wears out its welcome.

While Mr. Fiennes plays passivity with subtlety, Adèle Exarchopoulos deploys subtlety in the service of quick wit and suppressed passion. She plays, quite beautifully, Clara Saint, the young Parisian who, in real life, befriended Nureyev during his six weeks in the French capital, and then, in the heat of that moment at Le Bourget, helped guide the intricate, perilous steps of his defection.

Succeeds at its daunting task: summing up an epic struggle with bedazzling action; with a style that progresses, apart from a few lapses, from the elegiac through the episodic to the symphonic; and with more humor, zest and feeling — the real, heartfelt stuff — than you’d dare to expect from what is, after all, an immense industrial undertaking.

It’s a fascinating documentary about ragtag political activists making fundamentally serious mockery at a high level of media savvy. It’s about jujitsu as performance art — turning an opponent’s outrage to one’s advantage; about deadpan as dramatic technique, and about the damnedest strategy you could imagine, summoning up Satan as a champion of religious freedom.

This startlingly accomplished debut feature by Nia DaCosta has the eyes and ears of a documentary — the opioid crisis is everywhere, the nearest hospital is far away — but the heart of a drama, and a stirring one.

Both performances are strong; Ms. Ben-Shlush is especially appealing in what might have been a clichéd role. If anything, Working Woman goes out of its way to play fair by making Orna insufficiently self-protective. All the same, she’s an innocent on the way to becoming a victim in an understated polemic that becomes an affecting drama.

How bad can a movie be? Hellboy expands the possibilities. It’s brain-numbing and head-splitting.

There’s a link between this Marcello and the Marcello played by Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci’s seminal “The Conformist,” a functionary ripe for corruption in Mussolini’s Italy. Both men are mesmerized by power, and both movies pose, in different ways, the same question — what happens when no one stands up to tyranny? In the Dogman’s case, another question presents itself. What happens if someone finally does? The answer is surprising, and, like the whole of Mr. Garrone’s film, eerily memorable.

You could call it, more accurately, a middling notion that flies off the rails.

Peterloo starts slowly, takes its time and sometimes tries one’s patience. Don’t expect heartwarming domestic stories. The people are vivid and the acting is superb; as always, the director and his cast have collaborated on the screenplay through improvisations that coalesce into a working script. But the search for understanding — of the massacre and the events leading up to it — is more structural than individual.

It’s terrific fun, and none of the things that were threatening to turn DC Entertainment into the cinematic equivalent of a black hole. Just when the world needs a superhero with a gift for silliness, here he is in a movie whose best superpower turns out to be a good heart.

Diane navigates some challenging narrative disjunctures en route to a spiritual dimension, but it also has quiet moments that speak volumes. They’re all about Diane achieving a state of grace by awarding it to herself.

What The Brink does best is show the missionary zeal that sustains this eccentric warrior — “this gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk” is how he says he was perceived during the 2016 campaign. The film lets him speak for himself, which he does with wry charm, combative zest, scary certainty, unquenchable energy that can’t be explained by all the Red Bulls he gulps, and an ego undiminished by adversity.

Disney’s new Dumbo is one ponderous pachyderm, a live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with a grim tone and a dead soul. It’s astounding that Tim Burton and his colleagues could have created such a downer from a long-beloved source of delight.

As a thriller it’s efficient, if formulaic, and technically proficient, if undistinguished.

Us is great entertainment, a fearless mixing of serious and silly by a filmmaker who started out as a funnyman and continues to sharpen his comic chops.

No one makes movies like Mr. Jia does. He’s a dramatist with the eye of a documentarian and the instincts of a historian, even a geographer. But he’s also a romantic poet, and his heroine, a strong woman with a pure heart, is driven by love as far as it can take her.

Ms. De Clermont-Tonnerre’s direction is a revelation — not just a good first try, but a first-rate achievement by any measure. She clearly watched such relevant classics as “The Black Stallion” and “The Misfits,” yet found a laconic style that is all her own.

The result is provocative, even startling, and more edifying than you might expect.

The film doesn’t give Ms. Larson enough good stuff to fulfill her role’s potential. Her Captain Marvel is an appealing character who becomes an impressive one, wrapped in a shimmering aura of blue and white energy. What’s missing, though, is what helped make “Wonder Woman” an exemplary figure of female empowerment two years ago: unforced warmth, along with strength, and flashes of delight.

This evocation of the mission half a century ago is as good as it’s likely to get — meaning not just good but magnificent.

A marvelously loopy and deeply serious film from Iceland.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

A surfeit of spectacular images from top-of-the-line computer animation. And the love story branches out beyond a boy and his dragon into gladdening fulfillment on both sides of the species divide. That will certainly be sufficient for kids and families who’ve been waiting for the final chapter of the big-screen trilogy. Over much of the territory it covers, though, the film feels like it’s flying on empty.

The film can be harrowing in its repetitive violence, but never less than fascinating as a piece of ethnology, with magic-realist dimensions, that amounts to an origin story of the Latin American drug trade.

I loved watching this sci-fi spectacle’s moving parts. I just couldn’t get past its brain.

The stupidity lacks smarts in the script department, and the joke, such as it is, wears thin, then turns sour.

A hugely ambitious sequel, joyous and genuinely complex, that’s charged with dramatic and musical energy to the very last frame.

Never Look Away makes an eloquent case for art as an expression of hope, a way of searching for meaning in chaos.

Daughter of Mine is a triptych of vivid characters and superb performances (including that of young Sara Casu), a study in contrasting and competing passions.

Arctic is a lesson in lessness, coolly observed and warmly felt.

As entertainment, however, the film is calculation impure and simple. It’s a box-ticking exercise in female jeopardy, survival and empowerment, oppressively efficient in its relentless way but unrelieved by emotional resonance.

Of the 7,000 Jews who resisted, about 1,700 survived. The stories of these four don’t constitute high drama; there’s none of the dramatic clarity of “Schindler’s List.” But they testify to that part of the human spirit concerned with ironic humor, improbable daring and unlikely generosity.

Details like these are delightful. So is the notion of Stonehenge as a transport hub to another temporal plane, and the spectacle of Alex and his dauntless cohorts in tin armor they’ve bought in a souvenir shop. What’s destructive, and eventually benumbing, is the kitchen-sink clutter of fantasy, reality, wish-fulfillment and glib enchantment. To say that the film lacks simplicity would be an oversimplification.

In Fyre, Mr. Smith tells a story of character, or lack thereof.

Mr. Shyamalan’s movies have often been turgid in a distinctive way, with overtones of lofty sadness, and dramatized deliberately or violently, but seldom spontaneously. This one follows the pattern, for not so good and worse. It’s a lofty letdown.

The film as a whole never takes flight, though not for lack of trying.

The real head-scratcher is how such an endearingly modest, gentle film can say so much with such eloquence about a professional partnership that amounts to a love affair; about the mysterious business of being funny; and about the toll taken by the passage of time. (Messrs. Reilly and Coogan are both wonderful; so are Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as, respectively, Ollie’s wife, Lucille, and Stan’s wife, Ida.)

The good news about the production is that Ms. Kidman gives a formidable performance in what’s essentially a classic noir thriller reconceived, with a woman at its center, and Ms. Kusama’s direction is superb. (Julie Kirkwood did the stylish cinematography.) The bad news concerns tone, or emotional weather. The film is intentionally dark, but it’s also almost ceaselessly grim.

Is the film worthy of her? Not really. It’s informative, in a didactic way, but basically an exercise in hagiography, a skin-deep celebration of someone who has never settled for superficiality in her life’s work.

Exhilarating but ultimately off-putting.

Like “Roma,” another glory of the current season, the film was shot in black-and-white; the shooter was Lukasz Zal, who was co-cinematographer, with Ryszard Lenczewski, on “Ida.” As in both of those films, the result here is mysteriously ravishing, so much so that you either forget it isn’t in color or take the rich blacks and radiant whites to be colors in their own right. Also, black is the color of the screen between the chapters of a story that takes bold narrative leaps off-screen; the impact of these ellipses is stunning.

The results are mind-numbingly immense, joylessly violent and utterly lifeless.

I found this sequel deeply slumping, not to mention unnecessary, unmagical and often unfunny. The misuse of talent is what slumped me the most.

The Mule is based on a true story, and a good one, but it’s weakened by a mediocre script.

There’s never been anything like this animated exaltation of the Spider-Man canon. The animation is glorious, and more faithful to its comic-book roots than any big-screen graphics in the past. The story is deliciously witty and preposterously complex, but perfectly comprehensible, whether or not you have studied quantum physics. The scale feels vast, yet the spirit is joyous. It’s as if everyone had set out to make the best Spider-Man movie ever, which is exactly what they’ve done.

We’re watching a period piece that feels beautifully and painfully present: beautifully because love stories are timeless, painfully because the spectacle of racial injustice feels up to date.

Director Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “Step Up”) aims for the tear ducts, directing for maximum anguish, righteousness and/or schmaltz, and much of the Dumplin’ message arrives with postage due.

What’s mysterious about this film is why, with so much on its mind and such gifted stars to express it, the drama should be so unaffecting — even when the two women finally meet, as they neglected to do in the less shapely drama of real life.

Beneath the glitzy surface of Vox Lux — the title of one of Celeste’s studio recordings — lie deeper superficialities, so many that I found myself admiring the movie’s wild ambition while grinding my teeth at its pretentiousness.

Anna and the Apocalypse does have its singular moments. On the whole, though, I’d say don’t bite.

But all of that — the visual style included — changes as the film develops an edge, then expands into a lyrical realm that is both very Japanese and entirely universal.