Taken strictly as drama, the film is tartly written and superbly acted, at least until it takes that polemical turn in its final stages. I’ve seen and heard enough about Trump to actively, if ineffectively, avoid content relating to him, but most of The Apprentice held me in thrall.

Borrowing the look of The Lego Movie, Piece by Piece is as bouncy and playful as a room full of rambunctious toddlers.

Mr. Dauberman, abetted by cinematographer Michael Burgess (“Malignant”), finds ways to make the Lot both anxious and dour, though the moods don’t always match up with the wobbly storytelling, or help set it on a purposeful path.

Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.

In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.

This kinetic, documentary-style, fly-on-the-wall and in-the-halls tale proves that in the hands of capable dramatists the rack of suspense can be tightened to an almost unbearable degree even when the outcome is known.

If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.

This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.

Neither the director, Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer and documentarian whose debut narrative feature this is, nor the film’s three screenwriters can solve its essential problem, which is that it amounts to a string of grisly anecdotes.

There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.

There are reasons to watch, principally Dianne Wiest’s outrageous Ruth Gordon impersonation and the presence of the gifted Julia Garner.

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 plot beats are so dull, contrived and poorly engineered (for a few minutes the wolves must pretend to be rivals who don’t know each other) that the movie becomes an onerous chore comparable to the one that launches the action. Who can I call to make this dead movie disappear?

This is a kid’s movie for kids and may find a fervent audience among them, thanks to the way it conforms to the idea that virtue, hope and integrity are the exclusive purviews of youth.

Bolstered by a spooky musical score, credited to the musician Rob, a tightly wound performance by Ms. Berry, and creepy unexpected appearances by beings who may or may not be manifestations of the Evil, Mr. Aja makes the most of an uninspired script. In this type of film, however, everything depends on the third-act resolution. It doesn’t deliver.

When it comes to taking this premise in interesting directions, however, Ms. Park proves inept.

The film should have been cleverly dark and dripping with insider takes. Instead, it’s boringly schematic.

As lean and effective as its thriller elements are, especially in a breakneck third act, the movie is most intriguing in its subtext—an implied clash between conceptions of masculinity and the eras with which they’re associated.

No doubt this would flounder spectacularly without gifted actors, but Mr. Jacobs is lucky enough to have three.

Aptly enough considering its title, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is two pictures in one: a dead section set with the living and a lively part that takes place among the dead.

The documentary gets by on its interviews, archival footage and fascinating subjects, who in some respects always seemed like stalwarts of a fusty tradition.

Though on the surface Slingshot looks like a space-exploration thriller with many cinematic forebears, it makes elegant use of misdirection.

Mannered acting, dismal cinematography, clunky attempts to enhance excitement via gimmicks such as slow motion, and a musical score like a fountain of goo all serve as flashbacks to Reagan-era network schlock.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

Though Mr. Skarsgård (who played the terrifying Pennywise in “It”) is gravely charismatic and FKA twigs is touching, the dour, depressing dankness of Mr. Sanders’s vision makes The Crow a turkey.

Now age 84, Mr. Erice has made what is unmistakably an old man’s movie, and I mean that as a high compliment. Close Your Eyes moves with the serious, searching energy of a great artist through a cold and cloudy sea of memory, loss, grief and regret, pausing in the patches of warmth it finds in longtime friends and humble pleasures.

Alien: Romulus occupies a strange position: It’s lovingly aimed at fans who have seen its Carter-era predecessor 15 times, yet it’s unlikely to scare anyone except those who are new to the “Alien” shtick. In space, it turns out, no one can hear you yawn, either.

The director’s best-known film, “BPM,” drew from his later experience as an AIDS activist, and whereas that was an insular, immediate and impassioned portrait of a movement, Red Island takes a lusher, more leisurely approach to its mix of history and memory.

The tone is dry farce that never strays into camp, with a mildly sardonic appreciation of oddballs recalling such Robert Altman films as “The Long Goodbye.” A creepily discordant musical score by Fatima Al Qadiri adds immensely to the feeling that everyone is hiding something and no good will come of it.

Parts of the film (which can be seen in select theaters and via video on demand) are so good that it’s a shame it strikes so many false notes.

For the mangy, flea-bitten TV reviewer, there would be no quicker route to ignominy than trashing a show about dogs. Fortunately, even cat ladies will like Inside the Mind of a Dog, which has an abundance of furry charm and retrieves a kennel’s worth of information from those sniffing around the cutting edge of canine science.

It feels mostly believable but a bit too obvious, as the meaning of the movie seems to shrink in its final minutes to fit a theme. Still, as a debut, “Good One” is good enough, a sensitively performed drama of a journey into the wild.

Cuckoo brings up a lot of ideas but doesn’t organize them into anything like a satisfying resolution. As frenzy follows frenzy, it aspires merely to create a feeling of senseless chaos.

Documentarian Nanette Burstein has a wealth of photographic material at her disposal, much of it breathtakingly lovely, and she uses it gracefully and in the noble cause of forward motion.

The charming, gentle simplicity of the book, with its childlike art, has been displaced by a mania for digital images and frantic attempts to be funny. This crayon should have been left in its box.

Mr. Liman handles each plot beat maladroitly, piling one utterly absurd contrivance or coincidence upon another.

At times, it’s scary how derivative it is. Still, as crepuscular weirdness seeps across the story and leads to a delirious ending, it’s largely effective.

As Only the River Flows follows its winding course, the movie seems to lose its grip not merely on the mystery but on its protagonist, becoming less psychologically penetrating and more haphazardly hallucinatory. Looking for clues, we find only the fragments of a fractured mind.

Messy as it is, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first MCU movie in several years that’s mostly enjoyable.

Mr. Kauffman is interested in pure storytelling, the rise and fall of his various characters, which covers at least the last 10 years; he has created a beautiful film in terms of its aesthetics and affection for the machinery and people. But he is also telling a cautionary tale about the cluttering of space, and the pursuit not just of profit but power.

Hardcore horror fans will get their dose of mayhem from Humane, though in its modest, tidily organized fashion the film might also get under the skin.

We are set up to dislike her, but we do not. We like her very much, despite, or thanks to, the potent sense of diva that lingers in the air.

Oddity is everything a horror film should be—creepy, exciting, unpredictable—and it leads to an ending that’s both shocking and inevitable.

Thanks to a polished script by Mark L. Smith, exciting yet human-focused direction by Lee Isaac Chung, and two likable stars, the quiet scenes work too. This is one of the few Hollywood movies this year to achieve everything it sets out to do.

It’s easily the most effective work of horror I’ve seen this year.

Martin Scorsese is the ideal moviegoing companion: His fandom is so exuberant, so well-informed, and so contagious, that he makes you want to see every work he mentions (or see it again) to luxuriate in the images as he does.

Touch is a worthy consideration of the things that matter most when the clock is running out, but it could have been more focused.

Fly Me to the Moon could have worked beautifully, if only someone had first figured out a coherent story.

“Sound of Hope,” like its predecessor, is a big-hearted film made with a homespun sincerity that comes as a refreshing surprise at the multiplex these days, though it has the gauzy, simplistic feel of a cable-TV movie.

The heart of the Gru-niverse is slapstick and capers, but the balance is all off here.

Despite Mr. Molloy’s tapping into his inner Michael Mann and turning Wilshire Boulevard into a scene from “Heat,” there are scattered human moments in “Alex F,” thanks largely to Mr. Murphy, who has always been a provocateur capable of tenderness.

Last Summer is a provocation and a melodrama, and yet in Ms. Breillat’s hands these characters are precisely rendered humans—in their sensitivities, their wants, their vile follies.

Daddio is a bracingly naturalistic conversation with a sneakily brilliant screenplay and two wonderfully textured lead performances.

The film may be pretty to look at, but this passion project isn’t likely to generate much of it.

As a parody of Hollywood excess and narcissism it is frequently laugh-out-loud; as a wannabe Hallmark Channel holiday movie—a segue that is nothing short of baffling—it is less than amusing, except in the notion that the project got waylaid on its way to Christmas.

If a thriller can make you hold your breath for fear of being eaten by aliens while you’re sitting in the multiplex, it’s working pretty well, and “A Quiet Place: Day One” appropriately kept me in a frozen state, afraid to so much as crinkle a page in my notebook.

It’s a film that demands to be watched several times to figure it out, but although I occasionally enjoyed its mordant humor, it’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to sit through once.

Thanks to an inert story and disagreeable characters, its 90 minutes go by slowly.

One of the virtues of Ms. Baker’s spare style is the profundity that lurks in every line, which here comes out at its most clearly and movingly distilled.

There’s no goal to be met or secret to be uncovered. Instead, it’s a collection of odd, wonderfully realized vignettes that plunge us into an alternative way of life that it neither glamorizes nor satirizes but simply strives to understand.

The drama is by turns rushed and overplayed, but it has a haunting core and moments of slippery, surprising cinematic style that make the movie linger in the mind, if only for a little while

Fresh Kills could have been a psychologically penetrating character study but settles for merely reiterating that it’s unpleasant to be a gangster’s daughter.

Rejecting all Hollywood trends pointing the other way, Inside Out 2 goes for the penetrating over the shallow every time, never allowing the premise to devolve into a mere gimmick.

Among the ironic lessons of MoviePass, MovieCrash is that the people who used the service the most helped ruin it, though it wasn’t really their fault—it was a great deal. One that seemed too good to be true. And was.

What it does have is wonderfully natural dialogue that allows two talented actresses to spin a convincing friendship out of a gossamer narrative, and an engaging relationship out of pure charm. Is it enough? Probably not. They say you can’t have everything, which is especially true here.

The one selling point of No Way Up is that it makes you scared of being scared, which may be enough for a lazy evening on the couch with a friend, a drink and a meal, though it probably wouldn’t work on sushi night.

Without straining to make an obvious point, Mr. Tomnay uses black comedy and shocking splatters of gore to tweak the class of jaded plutocrats who are as asset-rich as they are morals-poor.

Fewer and better-drawn supporting characters would have helped give some substance to Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s script, but as it is the movie centers on the chatter of the two principals, creaky one-liners and blowout action scenes that mistake frantic editing for excitement.

It’s a feel-good fable of companionship that is just a little too simple, in both its sadness and its sweetness.

Though rousing in places, “Young Woman and the Sea” is a routine effort that feels made for television, and was (originally slated for Disney+). Clichés and predictability are more forgivable at home, but asking people to take the plunge on a movie ticket for this so-so offering is asking a lot.

Here she accomplishes something her father has done many times: making two-thirds of a reasonably compelling supernatural thriller. But that’s like saying the “Agony of Defeat” guy had two-thirds of an excellent ski run before things went amiss.

You can’t say too many nice things about “Atlas.” You wouldn’t want to encourage people. And yet this cacophonous, big-budget, Jennifer Lopez-powered movie/videogame just might offer up a justification for humanity, while at the same time suggesting we need one.

Mr. Bellocchio, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Susanna Nicchiarelli, has crafted a weighty, suspenseful family drama that touches on the eternal conflicts of religion but widens into a consideration of law, personal development and power politics.

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.

At its best, “Furiosa” is like a more fun, less ponderous and mysticism-free “Dune,” with every pedal properly to the metal. But it’s closer to numbing than enthralling, like a long ride with no shock absorbers.

Babes is the kind of comedy that makes you wonder what jokes are, exactly, and if what you just saw contained any.

Swamping the audience with Michael Giacchino’s oceans-of-syrup score, IF expects viewers to cry at the end, but if so it’ll be due to regret at wasted time, or possibly from hyperglycemia.

The film is detailed, vivid, enthralling—and necessarily full of pain. The performances are top-notch, led by Ms. Abela, who does her own singing in an amazing re-creation of Winehouse’s muscular soul vocals.

Living With Leopards is superior nature content, largely because of the evident devotion of its humans.

The second half, in particular, exemplifies science fiction at its best: thoughtful, exciting, provocative and pointed. It’s fantasy wrapped around ideological substance, making “Kingdom” the best of the franchise films to make it to theaters so far this year.

It’s a finely wrought story of palace intrigue enriched by lush sets and decors, having been shot at Versailles.

Unfrosted is a bonbon, a truffle, a trifle and a distraction from dispiriting news and disappointing drama upon which one can gorge as if it were a package of Fig Newtons. No, too healthy: Honey Smacks.

As pleasing as the film may be to those who treasure ambiguity and nuance, it strikes me as dry and tedious.

There’s an affected, self-mythologizing solemnity to the storytelling that can’t quite disguise some flaws in the fundamentals.

Mr. Pearce (“Iron Man 3,” “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation”) and his director have no idea what kind of picture they want to make. Instead they have four or five different concepts which they set loose like cars ramming into each other as they jostle for position.

It is a modest, methodical movie-in-vignettes that demonstrates the far-reaching, constrictive force of Iran’s regime and the society it has created. It is also a canny representation of the kind of straight-faced authoritarian illogic that creates its own delusional reality, which is then forced upon a people.

Boy Kills World should have stuck to gonzo comedy and been 15 minutes shorter. But Mr. Mohr exhibits the kind of flair for comic action that makes him an obvious choice to direct a big-budget Hollywood superhero epic.

Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot.

The movie has its funny moments, and even some halfway-poignant ones, but it occasionally gives one the feeling of watching a bawdy New York-set sitcom and listening to a segment of “This American Life” at the same time.

As this frequently lyrical and touching portrait of youth reminds us, for many thousands of people over the years, Cabrini-Green was simply home.

The gags seem fun and refreshing at first, but they get stale quickly. Moreover, since there is no plot and no dialogue, the quirky central idea never takes on any narrative momentum. What might have been a brilliant short subject—at, say, 15 minutes—gets stretched to its limits, and then some.

Civil War is superficially silly—Mr. Garland writes himself into a trap in one tense scene and gets out of it with an absurd moment of action-hero gusto that is, as presented, not possible—but it’s also deeply silly. It’s a statement movie that contains no insights at all.

While it contains little for the devoted in the way of outright revelations, it’s an affecting film around which admirers and newcomers alike can gather to bask in the unique beauty of her work, and to follow the similarly distinctive trajectory of her painful and abbreviated life.

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.

Written by Tim Smith, Keith Thomas and Arkasha Stevenson, and directed by Ms. Stevenson, The First Omen relies heavily on gory imagery, jump scares and shocking dream sequences to cover for its weak plotting.

Reining in his famously discursive dialogue, and designing a clean, punchy plot, Mr. Allen limits himself to suggesting one big point with one big twist, which he makes emphatically, even wickedly.

The audience is left to feel sorry for characters we’re meant to find amusingly contemptible and to groan at the way the writing keeps taking potshots at the most obvious targets. When the film thinks it’s being wicked, it’s closer to being trite.

The past can be fetishized, commodified, dreamed of, but it can never fully be returned to—a stubborn impossibility that “La Chimera” dramatizes with playful, peculiar grace.