Don’t Think Twice really shines as an improv procedural, a film that celebrates, in illuminating detail, the skills and anxieties of this showbiz subgenre.

This one, a debut feature, is awfully inept, whereas the short isn’t long enough for ineptitude to take hold, or for a story to develop.

Star Trek Beyond is better than not-bad. By any earthly standard it’s good.

If you’re looking for something to lift you up and take you away from the tumult and anguish of the moment, seek out Our Little Sister, a lovely new film, in Japanese with English subtitles, that’s going into national distribution this week.

The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it’s meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner: “Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the examined life is no bargain.”

Untold billions are laundered in The Infiltrator, while Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel moves mountains of cocaine into U.S. markets. But the drug of choice here is acting, and the highs in this hurtling, often violent thriller are doubly intense, since two of its stars play flamboyant double roles.

Silly is endangered these days, and normal has come under withering fire from stupendous, yet tedious, visual effects. Busting ghosts used to be a lot more fun.

There’s no secret life because there’s no life, only the promise of pets in perpetual motion.

You’ll want to see Zero Days — just not when you’re counting on a good night’s sleep a few hours later. Alex Gibney’s documentary about cyberwarfare is many things, none of them lulling: a thriller, a detective procedural, a startling chronicle of science fiction transformed into fact, and an urgent plea for public discussion of a new way of waging war that could wreak havoc on a scale akin to that of nuclear weapons.

Ben is the family’s rock, and Mr. Mortensen gives the story unshakable grounding. He’s a star who doesn’t act like a star, yet everyone in his orbit feels his power. He and this strong, adventurous film deserve each other.

The BFG has fizz to spare. It’s an effervescent charmer.

The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.

Asked to define his job, Zappa gives a simple answer with convincing sincerity: “I’m an entertainer.” Simplicity gives way to intriguing complexity as the film covers other things Zappa was.

Strong acting often lends authenticity to writing that lacks it, and Mr. McConaughey is, to be sure, an exceptionally strong actor. Yet this screenplay is so arid in its didacticism, so pallid in its would-be passion, that it defeats his efforts and our involvement.

Has its share of misfired jokes and pseudo-mythic sequences that semi-fizzle. All in all, though, it’s majestical nonsense that is anything but nonsensical.

What’s most significant, though, is the merciless nature of the cyberbullying, and the terrifying ease with which it’s inflicted. Tickled opens a smudged window on a dark alley of contemporary life.

Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it’s compulsively, preposterously and steadfastly funny.

Suffice it to say that the film is a must-see for fans of the man (who, like many of his gifted colleagues, has given up on what’s left of the Hollywood studio system) and a should-see for anyone who cares about how movies are made, as well as how, in certain near-miraculous cases, really good movies get made.

Morgan Neville’s documentary is a joyous revelation, a group portrait of superb musicians from all over the world offering music as an emblem of what people can do in these fractious times when they live in concert with one another.

All ups with no downs, it’s a motion picture in the truest sense of the term. I’ve never seen anything quite like it and I loved every one of its 72 minutes.

The Witness is remarkable for its emotional impact, and its clarity. The picture that emerges isn’t perfectly clear; the whole truth will never be known, Bill Genovese says. What he has made known, though, is valuable.

There’s plenty to enjoy in the film, starting with a pair of affecting performances by Clémence Poésy and Laura Birn, and ending with a perverse twist on the notion of blissful parenthood.

The good news is that Mia Wasikowska is back in the title role, bright-spirited and skillful as ever, but she’s burdened by the manic direction of James Bobin, working from a dramatically inert script by Ms. Woolverton.

The previous episode, “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” was as fresh and enjoyable as this one is semicoherent and dispiriting.

Ms. Miller proves to be an original, setting her comic characters in motion like mini-planets that spin in eccentric but overlapping orbits.

A consistently entertaining, frequently violent and generally slapdash action comedy.

Weiner, an extraordinary documentary feature about the disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner, has it all — the surreal spectacle of contemporary retail politics, the sizzle of media madness and the mysteries of psychodrama.

It’s the film Hesse deserves — lively and concise, though calmly comprehensive; thoughtful and essentially serious, but with a witty appreciation of the oddity, recklessness and absurdity that its subject valued; rich with history, and beautifully made in its own right.

Jacques Audiard’s superb drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, rises to the challenge with the power of art and not a scintilla of sentimentality.

Mr. Clooney’s prancing, dancing and clowning for the TV camera feel tame and vaguely self-conscious when measured, as they will be, against the calculated craziness of his role’s model, Mr. Cramer, who usually manages to seem simultaneously shrewd and stridently unhinged.

Where Dark Horse shines brightest is in its portraits of individuals, and of a town raised up from the depths of economic despair by the promise of one of its own making good.

Marvel’s new “Captain America” is anything but bleak — what’s so audacious about the film, and so pleasing, is its quicksilver mix of hardcore action and bright comedy.

The film, produced in conjunction with NASA, also fulfills its inspirational function with screen-filling, soul-filling views of the main space station in the story — the one that harbors all our lives and hopes.

You can survive this comedy, which was directed by Garry Marshall and written by too many people to shame by naming, but only if you’re immune to febrile calculation complicated by chronic ineptitude.

A startlingly beautiful movie.

It is shabby, as well as disjointed, superficial and just plain dull, a dislikable rendering of a tumultuous life.

It’s a reasonably clever contrivance built around a pair of droll, skin-deep performances that are smart and entertaining, yet oddly lacking in intensity.

Susan Sarandon is Marnie Minervini, a recent widow and the meddlesome mother of The Meddler. Marnie is an Italian iteration of Molly Goldberg minus the charm. She might be charming if there were a full-fledged movie around her instead of a display case —Ms. Sarandon is, of course, a deft comedian.

The star shouldn’t be blamed, though, for the failings of the direction and script. Here’s a case of consistently miscalibrated tone, from the first clumsy stabs at humor to the hero’s default expression, which is painfully pained.

The new production, computer-animated except for a living, breathing boy at the center of the action, isn’t pretty or sweet but utterly stunning, as well as very funny; all those vaudeville antecedents haven’t been forgotten.

The whole film is unlikely, a joyous story of youth, innocence, sweet earnestness, charming ineptitude and a shaky but productive belief on the hero’s part that he can do anything he pleases.

Ms. Kawase’s sweet, slow film — very slow, I’m obliged to say — becomes a meditation on solitary lives lived at the margins of society; on old age, and on the urgency of telling our stories, which may sometimes include recipes.

The film turned out to be plodding and boring. No one can accuse Hardcore Henry of being plodding. It does get to be boring, but in the high-tech, cutting-edge mode of first-person-shooter videogames that dazzle your eyes, spark your synapses and numb your brain.

The result feels perfectly American — I wonder if Conrad was named in honor of the troubled brother in “Ordinary People” — yet the film lives and breathes with a lovely intimacy and density of detail that we associate with fine independent features from Europe.

The Dark Horse brings Cliff Curtis back home, and he gives a performance that’s transcendent in more ways than one.

Toward the end of this loose-jointed and endearing new film, a freshman says to her boyfriend, “It’s kind of beautiful that we get to feel passion in this world—about anything.” She and he, and everyone around them, have passion to burn, and we get to feel great about them.

The writing and direction, by Robert Budreau, range from pedestrian to lethargic — not a good thing when the subject is passive more often than not.

A fascinating and downright lovable documentary.

Spasms of highfalutin philosophy, and howlingly pretentious dream sequences, serve only as the thinnest of veneers for incessant action in one of the most assaultive movies ever made.

What you call Mr. Shults’s first film is spectacular.

This isn’t only a wise and graceful film but, in its tossed-off way, a great one, with a debut performance — by a young actress named Lou Roy-Lecollinet — that will prove to be unforgettable.

A beautifully strange and stirring sci-fi adventure.

Plain-spoken and unpretentious, he’s a fount of surprising information and informed opinion.

Eye in the Sky is literally all over the map in its depiction of drone warfare, and right on target, if flagrantly contrived, in examining the ethics of killing by remote control.

The film is neither kind nor cruel, but wise, great-spirited and wonderfully enjoyable. It’s an addled dream of beauty unlike any other.

The Wave, Scandinavia’s first-ever disaster film, is the polar opposite of a disaster. It’s a triumph of modest means, a tribute to the power of storytelling on a human scale.

As for Ms. Fey, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot doesn’t serve her fully, but this is her best work yet on the feature screen.

Like the movie as a whole, she (Judy) is funny, sweet, sophisticated and adventurous.

The most remarkable thing about The Mermaid, though, is its clarity as a cautionary fable.

A shamelessly fictionalized biopic.

The brightest touch in the whole tale is a transvestite hooker’s little papillon, decked out in a DayGlo pink vest, but even the pooch seems glum, pricked-up ears notwithstanding.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time frames, rather than telling Karamakate’s story in linear fashion, and these juxtapositions deepen the film’s resonance.

If the story’s psychodynamics are familiar, Mr. Eggers makes them seem newly discovered. The intensity of his writing and direction, as well as the eerie austerity of Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography, Craig Lathrop’s production design and Mark Korven’s music, all conspire to create a film of exceptional originality.

For all the luster of its subject, though, this earnest biopic lacks the spark of life.

One of the hallmarks of contemporary Danish filmmaking is a seemingly effortless naturalism that springs from superb acting and skillful direction.

Where to Invade Next is documentary filmmaking gone wrong, a churlish polemic that uses the tools of propaganda to construct its world view. The film itself is an invasive presence, wreaking havoc in the realm of truth.

Some movies keep you in a state of suspense. Zoolander 2, a dud glitter-bomb of a sequel, eventually leaves you in a state of suspended animation, with eyes glazed over and brain in sleep mode.

The psychology of The Club is warped and gnarled, the thinking of its members less-than-jesuitical.

Few viewers anywhere will be immune to the movie’s charms, or the performances, notably that of Mr. Sigurjonsson, who makes Gummi a slightly mournful, enormously lovable and quixotically heroic figure.

A dispiritingly vitriolic, only sporadically funny satire of ’50s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar! verifies a suspicion long held here, that the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, really hate the movies.

It’s a strange piece of work, full of paradox — sharply analytical about the ways of love, yet sometimes plodding to the point of self-parody; intentionally distanced, yet offputtingly so, despite an exquisite performance by one of the stars, Clotilde Courau.

In Hollywood’s franchise game, sequels are seldom the best they can be. This one isn’t, but it’s pretty, perfectly pleasant and good enough.

The drama is almost stillborn, thanks to a slow, deadly dull romantic preface, and it’s subverted by incessant switching between spectacular struggles on the Atlantic and generic anxieties on shore.

The film is far from perfect, but it’s certainly ambitious, often entertaining and, compared to the feeble competition from new American films of the moment, a singing, dancing, stomping and chomping “Citizen Kane.”

The film almost suffocates on overripe dialogue (“We are messing with the primal forces of nature here”) and finally loses its way in the logical contradictions — or the nonlogical implications — of time travel.

Like the high desert that provides its main setting, William Monahan’s Mojave is dry, often windy and full of hot air.

This wonderful little film, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa and set “somewhere in the Balkans” in 1996, is extremely witty and light on its feet, yet it manages to be thoughtful, even philosophical, in an absurdist way, about the roots of human conflict.

The movie is a relentlessly intense, grotesquely overblown and numbingly long account of extraordinary heroism on the part of six American security operators in the midst of horrific chaos.

In a truly weird way Anomalisa provides an immersive experience that is no less compelling, though lots more authentic, than the one you get in a megahorror show like “The Revenant.” Once you’re in that puppet’s head it’s hard to get out.

The great strength of Concussion is its star’s performance.

The Hateful Eight wears out its welcome well before the halfway point, leaving the equivalent of a whole other movie to sit — and suffer — through.

Joy is at its annoying worst when it’s clamoring to be antic, and at its brilliantly funny best when Joy and her adversaries — including one played by Bradley Cooper — are deadly serious about business as mortal combat.

I came out of this would-be epic feeling physically exhausted, psychically mauled and none the better for wear.

Less is not only more in 45 Years, Andrew Haigh’s study of marriage and memory, it is eloquently and anguishingly more, and what’s unspoken is almost deafening.

The whole movie is a sinkhole — not because it’s smutty or raw, but because it’s lazy, and demeaning to the talented people at its center.

Good movies summon up worlds. Son of Saul, a great movie and a debut feature by László Nemes, summons up a world we may think we know from a visual perspective we’ve never encountered — the willed tunnel vision of a Jewish worker in a Nazi death camp.

Rarely have age and shining youth been juxtaposed more affectingly, but that’s only one of many moments of grace in a movie that mines its resonant mythology while moving its story ever forward.

The script, by Charles Leavitt, is dead in the water, and the drama is too, despite billowing sails and pods of whales. Instead of “Jaws” it’s a turgid “Tails.”

Only in America, though, could filmmakers illuminate such a dire subject, and the financial debacle that ensued, with the sort of scathing wit, joyous irreverence and brilliant boisterousness that make The Big Short an improbable triumph.

From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.

This English film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is also wonderfully funny, terribly touching and a vehicle — with comically dilapidated vehicles — for the boundless gifts of Maggie Smith.

This superb film, by Kent Jones, adds three more layers to the book’s alluvial wisdom: stunning clips from Hitchcock features, audio clips from the original conversations and fascinating comments by contemporary directors.

The film, directed by Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) is beautifully visualized and steadfastly interesting, yet I kept wondering why I didn’t feel more involved in it.

The buddies’ adventures are dramatized delightfully, but a case could be made for the movie’s real subject being scenery, and, particularly, water.

Many of the boxing genre’s conventions are observed in the screenplay by Mr. Coogler and Aaron Covington, and the fight sequences are brutally effective.... But the film is full of life and loose humor...and Creed often transcends the genre by playing with movie mythology.

This sneaky shocker of a debut feature —sneaky because it’s so good at depicting the sisters’ joyousness before, and even after, darkness descends — was directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven from a script she wrote with Alice Winocour.

Loneliness and longing are at the center of these two women’s lives, at least for a while, and they’re expressed by nuance and implication in a pair of superb performances, and by a lovely evocation of the period.

Katniss has remained, in Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal, a vividly vulnerable creature of flesh and blood surrounded by sci-fi extravagance of variable quality.