There’s only one trouble with his semi-autobiographical account. It’s so polished—so spirited, funny and skillfully calibrated—that it could be taken for a while as a crowd-pleaser and not a lot more. Sign me up for the crowd, though. This is surely the most pleasing film I’ve seen so far this year, but also the most affecting.

Pablo Larraín’s film, written by Steven Knight, calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy.” It might also be called a fever dream, a surreal nightmare, a reductio ad tedium or just an inherently limiting concept that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of itself.

The physical locations are spectacular, a surprise because most examples of the genre are shot in the augmented reality of high-tech soundstages. The spirit of Ms. Zhao’s film—and it is Ms. Zhao’s film—ranges from buoyant to playful during the downtime between generic battles to the almost death.

Among the charms of Finch is its willingness not to overexplain, trusting our patience while involving us visually.

To call The Harder They Fall transgressive would be giving it too much credit: Its various outrages are obnoxious because they have so little to do with anything like a story—which, for all the subplots and posing to come, is about payback for that first scene.

With its exuberant images (cats, oodles of cats), quaint Victorian settings, damask palette, odd camera angles and old-fashioned screen proportions, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain might have been too clever by more than half, except for its startling tenderness and depth of feeling, and the brilliance of its starring performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy.

So what does the film, playing in theaters, want to make millions of moviegoers feel? Delight in graphic design? Sure, but the filmmaker’s familiar motifs, playful and inventive as they may be, operate in an emotional void.

There is simply not enough dramatic development to fill the film as a whole.

Ms. Hogg has outdone herself with an even stronger film about grief, self-discovery, the daunting uncertainties of the creative process and, before and after everything else, the mysterious power of the movie medium.

Rather than belabor the what that was chosen—the silly lather the story works up—I’ll reflect in my turn on how fine “Last Night In Soho” turns out to be when its co-stars are fully engaged in their eerily mysterious dance of identity.

This singularly gripping work, timely for obvious reasons, is eloquent testimony to American political life today.

The Velvet Underground is a beautifully poetic meditation on the emotional and cultural power of rock and the allure of making a life in art.

The Last Duel is often ponderous, and no wonder, given its ambitious but erratic script.

This ingenious and beautiful film by Mia Hansen-Løve isn’t for chewing so much as savoring. The more you think back on its mysteries, the more pleasure it bestows.

It’s a humanistic endeavor, essentially, out of which emerge memorable people doing heroic work in inglorious places.

In scene after scene we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait, especially because of Ms. Rapace’s presence.

The stuff of heroism is always mysterious. In this case it’s also marvelously strange.

The real-life Arizona case was likely a lot less funny than Queenpins, which was adapted by the film’s directors and uses the comedic gifts of its lead actresses (reunited from both “Veronica Mars” and “The Good Place”) to remain both outrageous and entertaining without ever abandoning an undercurrent of sadness.

Even the pleasurable sight of Michael Gandolfini —son of the late James Gandolfini, who played Tony in that series—as young Tony was never going to make up for the complete absence, in this film, of anything remotely reflective of the tone and color of “The Sopranos.”’ Or of anything resembling a credible character or plot line.

The greatest reward of Old Henry is Mr. Nelson’s performance.

An astonishing and horrific thriller that has been constructed, like few films I’ve ever seen, to make you turn away from its frequent eruptions of savagery but then look back, just as often, to savor its mysterious beauty.

The new installment is exciting for its energy and scale, despite its flaws and derivative themes, and makes a lovely valediction for its star.

To its perverse credit, “Venom 2,” as it’s being called, manipulates its audience with all the tentacles it can deploy, most of them cheerfully ridiculous, although a climactic battle between Venom and Carnage is the dreariest face-off since the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel duked it out in Zack Snyder’s 2016 “Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice.”

The film is poetic in its turn, as well as deliciously funny, and pretty much perfect except for a slightly didactic coda. But that’s a minor flaw in a major achievement. To err, even slightly, is you know what.

The film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scaled production in all of its live-theater iterations has become a ponderous movie that turns earnest into maudlin, lyrical into lugubrious.

Jessica Chastain is the only reason, though a good one, to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a shrill biopic of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.

It’s a slow-release dose of sincere feelings.

With his Maasai-influenced braids or canopy of Jheri curls and his use of sex and misogyny to sell himself, James is a kind of dinosaur. But he’s also one whom Mr. Jenkins—one of our better cultural critics who happen to make films—pursues to enlightening effect.

The Gateway is a bit like the movie’s drug robbery—they know how to get in, but don’t know how to get out. It’s Mr. Whigham who keeps you watching.

Acting may be a collaborative art form, but Mr. Ahmed also flies solo with considerable grace.

Social media is not an inherently cinematic subject, but Ms. Binoche is, and in the hands of director Nebbou and cinematographer Gilles Porte the story of Claire becomes, both visually and psychologically, a bridge between worlds, ethereal, tragic and more than a little scary.

There’s always a point in any Marvel extravaganza where somebody exclaims “Holy s—!” just to remind us how awe-struck we’re supposed to have been all along. When Awkwafina does it, it’s funny. She is good for Mr. Liu, who carries the action while she carries the humanity. They leave no doubt at the end of “Shang-Chi” that they will be back and they will be welcome.

What begins as a chamber piece, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin from a screenplay by Dennis Kelly, becomes a full-fledged movie with a pair of marvelous performances at its claustrophobic center.

The filmmakers find a way to expand their slashifications into provocative reflections on the white world’s fear of ostensibly menacing Black men, and, secondarily but importantly, art’s power to shape our understanding of the world around us.

It’s an unwieldy subject Ms. Tragos has taken on, and the results are somewhat scattershot.

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father. But the characters don’t add up. The complexities and nuances that might have brought them fully to life never made it to the screen.

Almost every sequence contains references to other films. Spotting them is a pleasant distraction from figuring out the plot, an absurdly rococo structure that rivals the most flagrant befuddlements of “Inception” or, for that matter, the latter stretches of “Westworld.”

This ambitious and mutedly angry film also assumes an ironic tone in examining the Hitler phenomenon from angles political, sociological, psychological and, very intriguingly, cinematic.

Where the Ruby-teacher relationship falters is not the fault of the actors, but the writer. Mr. V is meant to be slightly unreasonable, a hard-liner about Ruby being both serious and on time. But the script takes the very common and dubious tack of not letting the characters simply explain their situations to each other.

In its way, it pokes at the very delicate membrane between horror and comedy.

Occasionally, he allows his gift for creating poetically beautiful and architecturally elevated cinema to spill out across the screen. The thing that eludes Mr. Carax—as Annette so amply and painfully demonstrates—is balance.

Mr. Reynolds can do goofily perplexed as well as anyone and is quite charming as Guy, who doesn’t know what’s going on, except that as “Blue Shirt Guy” he’s rocked the worldview of online gamers everywhere.

Matt Damon, in the central role, confers a somber grace on a man who always thought he had none.

The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them.

What gives the film its distinction is the grace and intimacy with which it depicts the cousins’ girlhoods, and the quality of the performances—superb throughout, remarkably well-matched at every stage of each character’s life, and, in the case of a homeless wanderer who was once a lovely, ardent child, nothing less than extraordinary.

The Boy Behind the Door is an underwritten movie and an underpopulated one, though missing people are less of a handicap to the narrative than missing information.

This one’s pretty entertaining, although increasingly noisy and ultimately ridiculous.

Playing With Sharks has its visual thrills but also tells one good story after another, not only about making movies and flirting with death but about the nature of the fish and the steely character of the movie’s human subject.

The Blues Chase the Blues Away is almost alarming in its departure from convention—much like Mr. Guy, as it happens.

[Ms. Huppert] is fascinating again, but in a wonderfully nimble way that could be considered campy if her style weren’t so assured and her performance weren’t so witty and precise.

The result is a documentary that keeps drawing you in, even when you think it’s keeping you at a certain distance, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who, through good times and dreadful ones, has remained devoted to his art.

For many reasons, none of them good, Old is in a class by itself. M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller-slasher-sci-fi-creep-out is peerlessly clumsy, silly and alarmed.

It’s a fertile idea, beautifully executed.

A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.

The film is much too long—the first couple of acts feel like an overture to the reunion of Sam, Scarlet and the lethal librarians. It is also, occasionally, hilarious.

It tests your tolerance for ambiguity as well as your visual acuity. Yet the spell it casts justifies the intense anxiety it creates by depicting a black-and-white society in which men have worth and women don’t.

The flashbacking narrative addresses, with surprising subtlety, buoyant wit and fearless theatricality, several matters that superhero sagas aren’t supposed to trouble themselves about.

However you look at it—as concert footage enriched by cultural history or cultural history raised up by glorious music—Summer of Soul is a thrilling documentary and a remarkable feature debut.

It’s another Soderbergh film whose allure is sure to endure.

One of the funny things about America: The Motion Picture—not all of which is screamingly funny—is that the more you know about America’s past, the more amusing it probably is (the past and the film).

Mr. Gaines occasionally loses confidence in his audience—the parallels that can be drawn between Gregory’s times and now are pretty obvious and don’t really need the punctuation. Most of the time, though, The One and Only Dick Gregory is a memorable portrait, of someone whose story deserves to be better remembered.

F9 makes a mockery of itself before anyone else can—it’s a gleefully shoddy goof on a pseudo-epic scale.

The production, which grew out of the filmmaker’s friendship with the two men, Iván and Gerardo, is so heartfelt, and the material so intrinsically powerful, that I Carry You With Me slowly catches up with itself, and lights a fire fueled by food and love. That’s a winning combination in this story, just as it is in real life.

The issues in the film add up to a rat’s nest of athletic, economic and gender questions. But they’re given only superficial scrutiny in a production that’s essentially propaganda, powered by pumped-up music and pumped-up players.

The sometimes hilarious Good on Paper is actually an anti-romantic comedy.

This delightful and useful documentary by Mariem Pérez Riera catches its subject at a piquant point in her career

As pleasing as the film is, some of it feels arbitrary, underdeveloped, possibly rushed.

Mr. Bulger does a fine enough job defending his own legacy, being, at age 87, a still-charismatic figure and one who refuses to condemn his brother, or even concede that the family knew everything about its black sheep’s nefarious career.

Infinite was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who like this film is always very busy without any particular destination.

It’s a gentle, often funny meditation on advancing age and the fragile joys of youth.

The energy feels authentic, and endlessly renewable. The cultural matrix is specific, yet the passions are universal. This grand and welcoming entertainment is exactly what’s needed to bring movie audiences back into the fold.

Fatigue has caught up with the Warrens, and the question about the franchise is not where it can go from here, but how much longer it can be sustained by humdrum deviltry.

Undine isn’t a conventional romance, or a readily accessible one, but open yourself to this special film and you’re liable to be hooked.

Every joke is leaned on, as if it were some Shavian gem; every pregnant pause eventually aborts.

This follow-up offers the solid satisfactions of suspense and intensity without the delight of discovery.

The material is often intimate, often heartbreaking.

The new film, playing in theaters, devotes itself more obviously to making us feel good, but it succeeds.

Watching the film is such an intense experience that most of its flaws fall away and its red herrings serve only to enhance the local color.

Many movies are about only one thing, just as many performers display only one emotion at a time. Mr. Jensen’s film is about so many things, and varies its tone so fearlessly, that watching it gives you whiplash: I for one loved the whipping.

A comedy afflicted with terminal unfunniness, Here Today, which is playing in theaters, may well be gone tomorrow.

Some films make do with stories that present an interesting surface and little more. In “The Boy From Medellín” undercurrents run constantly. Depression and anxiety provide two of them, but the most dramatic one—the source of the film’s genuine suspense—flows from politics.

A film like About Endlessness invites comparisons not to other movies, but to other media. The Preludes of Chopin or Debussy, for instance, brilliant flashes that don’t need to go anywhere, but might. Or something like Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen,” an intriguing whole composed of incongruous poetic fragments.

Percy Vs Goliath has a solid sense of place—the Canadian prairie—and Mr. Walken gives us a solid sense of Percy, a man whose instincts are so contrarian he sometimes seems unsure whom to disagree with, or what to refuse to do.

Golden Arm could be interpreted as having a profound feminist message and liberating agenda. Mostly, it’s just goofy fun. An antic romp. A briskly paced gag fest. A lot of wrist, no relaxation.

Lucy the Human Chimp is a creative assemblage of sundry parts: The archival footage, of which there is a wealth; the news coverage given Lucy when she was a celebrity; and extensive restagings and re-enactments, a device that in many documentaries is either stiff or profoundly unreal but under Alex Parkinson’s direction—and with Lorna Nickson Brown in the role of Janis Carter—rings true.

There is a bit of gore toward the end of Things Heard & Seen that seems gratuitous, like a bone thrown to the genre audience. But it also points out how smart the film has been for so long, and so allergic to clichés, while still being satisfyingly scary.

Sweet, funny, a little melancholy and a little obvious.

That the film is online because of the Covid-19 pandemic might be considered a silver lining: Not only will more people be able to see it, but they can, and should, experience it through headphones. A big screen would be nice, too, given Ms. Rovner’s hallucinogenic way with pictures. But the sound, as she would probably agree, is paramount.

All in all, Mr. Papadimitropoulos maintains a delicate balance between the wryly hilarious and the heartbreaking, and sometimes the high wire trembles. But danger is intoxicating, and Chloe and Mickey—along with their audience—spend much of “Monday” delightfully drunk.

Mayhem is the point. And on that, at least, the movie certainly delivers.

Joy may not be sweeping the nation portrayed in Our Towns, exactly. But a certain amount of happiness abounds.

The filmmaking is strong and confident throughout, while Mr. Brummer’s performance is a constant revelation.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

Concrete Cowboy is far from perfect, but it’s vividly alive. If the choice must be between that and careful craftsmanship, life carries the day.

It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.

The otherworldliness of “Tina,” which exists for many minutes in a kind of vacuum created between the various silent images and the distanced voiceover, is transporting; the ambient score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans helps transform what might have been a series of mere tawdry recollections into a kind of prison memoir.

The good news here is Mr. Odenkirk’s performance, not to mention his endurance in strenuous action sequences that must have taken a real-life toll on his physique; he certainly doesn’t look computer-generated.

There’s an old Broadway joke about a musical being so bad that you walk out humming the scenery. Six Minutes to Midnight is a spy thriller, not a musical, and it isn’t bad at all; the factual history it was based on is fascinating. Still, the scenery was what stayed with me most vividly.