As raucous as The Invite gets when it’s in go-for-broke comedy mode, it’s just as powerful in its dramatic stages. Movies rarely venture so far into the hearts of ordinary people trying to do their best but suspecting they have made a great many irreparable mistakes.

Toy Story 5 doesn’t overdo its lachrymose side; it’s at least half a breezy comedy, albeit one tinged with worry.

Robin Hood, but he’s a bloodthirsty killing machine,” seems to have been an irresistible pitch that led to the curious if watchable drama The Death of Robin Hood. This Robin is anything but a merry man, and the film is anything but a fun adventure.

A virtual two-hander, Miss You, Love You is a rare accomplishment—just enough of a good thing.

There’s an idealist’s energy here that grows a bit too earnest, but the information is accessible. And basic.

“Macabre” doesn’t begin to describe “Maternal Instinct,” one of the more gruesome entries in the catalog of true-crime TV. In terms of nonfiction storytelling, however, it is a virtuous undertaking, as long as one can separate the subject from the storytelling.

Flag Day may train its cameras on a small town, but its vision is expansive.

As attempted profundity, this doesn’t quite land, and neither does much else. Mr. Spielberg combined fairy tale with sci-fi beautifully in his 2001 masterpiece, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Disclosure Day is underwhelming when it tries to do the same.

None of the band members interviewed are out to beatify White—he didn’t pay them fairly; he took the publishing rights; he routinely overspent on tours, to the tune of half a million dollars at a clip. But he created an institution. Even when they’re shrugging off his sins with a smile, his old bandmates have to give him that.

Best to keep in mind that the whole franchise exists not to advance the craft of storytelling but the magic of merchandising. Forget it, friends, it’s Toytown.

The cast’s choices are like weather-balloon data that presage the disaster of the movie’s climax, when everyone behaves like an emotionally incontinent millennial.

Backrooms may not be a fully explained wonder but it’s well worth the wander.

Mr. Carney steers things back in a more pleasing direction in the end, but for a light comedy, “Power Ballad” contains far too much perplexed agony.

The movie takes on some formulaic thriller trappings in its final act, relying too heavily on strained coincidences. So its second half is more conventional and less grounded than its first. What both halves have in abundance, however, is Mr. Woodall’s unforced charm. He strikes every chord like a virtuoso, and he’s going to be a major player in the movies.

Director Jon Favreau’s film, which he wrote with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, features a grindingly simple plot that provides the weakest possible pretext to staple together a series of uninspired monster and droid fights.

Ladies First invites pointed as well as pungent jokes, and the opportunities are fully exploited, sometimes with enormous wit.

Considering the gravity of the subject, and its immense potential, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is not just a letdown, but something more like an insult. The film will do less damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation than to those of Mr. Assayas, Mr. Law and Mr. Dano.

Minus the flash, the neon, the tailoring and the quipping, LifeHack is a kind of Ocean’s Eleven for Gen Z: a breathless, ingenious caper that moves at about 200 megabits per second.

This soft, sedate mystery comedy seeks nothing more than to be like its heroes: warm and fuzzy. Less attractively, it’s also a bit cloddish and tame, falling into that unsatisfying category of children’s entertainment that seems to be styled in accordance with the tastes of old people.

Mr. Urban has natural swagger and he’s the best aspect here, although that’s like singling out the most fragrant part of a swamp.

The film has a remarkable formal and narrative fluidity, not presenting its three stories as discrete chapters but cutting effortlessly from one to the other, with Ms. Enyedi sometimes dipping into a period for the length of only a shot or two before spinning off to a different storyline.

Much of this roams pretty far from Orwell’s vision, but that’s not the reason the film fails. It fails because it’s obvious, witless and dull. The animation is charmless and bland.

The film seeks no more than to be fan service, a two-hour hangout with favorite characters and situations. Like many a runway trend, it isn’t going to last more than a season in anyone’s memory.

Everyone is doomed in Mr. Diaz’s account of European colonialism and exploratory naval history—not just the primitive Filipinos and Indonesians but the Portuguese on the mission from their silent God. And their covetous king.

Writer-director Kirk Jones doesn’t do a great job finding anything fresh to say about this unnerving situation, with one exception.

Mr. Tirola has fashioned a portrait of the man that is engaging if not exactly revelatory, and occasionally a little broad in its attempt to fill out the social context, with footage of Hitler, Vietnam and the KKK coming in sweeping succession early on.

Those too young to remember Jackson will get what they want, which is a fantastically effective introduction to the talent.

It will prove a literally breathtaking adventure, depending on one’s phobias about heights, water and psychopaths. But it is an ordeal saga, a predator thriller with horror-film accents—and a considerable amount of violence and pain for the character played by the ageless Ms. Theron, who may be giving the most athletically demanding performance of her action-movie career.

The tale doesn’t need any artificial twists. They occur naturally. There’s character development. Foreshadowing.

Even a day later, contemplating this willfully nauseating work carries much the same sensation as having ingested a plate of bad clams.

Amrum is a stirring example of how childhood reminiscence can stand for so much more.

It takes a series of self-reflexive turns that are overelaborate in their conception and slightly inert in their execution, rendering the movie’s poignancy more theoretical than fully felt.

“The Logo” is directed by “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris, who is too much of a presence in his own movie. It’s his first documentary. It may be the first one he’s seen. Documentarians usually hide themselves unless they have something to add, which he doesn’t.

While Ms. Gillespie can’t solve the mystery of why exactly her subject did what he did, she has created a novel kind of crime film, one aided in no small way by what seems to be the complete flight recording from Russell’s mad act. And a group of loved ones willing to listen to it.

The film loses its edge as it proceeds, turning into something more generic, less credible, and overly explicit in its statement of themes.

The movie isn’t above using its star like a pin-up model. It isn’t above much, in fact, and it’s certainly below the level of the breezy rom-coms that Hollywood used to churn out with ease.

The Christophers is zingy fun. Whichever world Mr. Soderbergh decides to visit, he invariably makes the trip worthwhile.

Some movies are toxically misconceived, and “The Drama” is among them. It wants to be wicked and outrageous but it’s really just dismal and depressing.

For those who half-remember the novella from school (as I did) and didn’t especially enjoy it (as I didn’t), Mr. Ozon both honors his material and reinvigorates it.

Ms. Zenovich possesses the interviewer’s most valuable skill, knowing when to shut up.

There’s nothing wrong with making movies for 5-year-olds. But, as directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, “Galaxy” seems very much like a movie made by 5-year-olds.

An English-language debut by Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who also co-wrote its script, They Will Kill You is tongue-in-cheek but not witty, reveling in its excesses without bringing anything fresh to the party.

As a love story, Fantasy Life isn’t particularly original, but the low-key way Mr. Shear realizes some familiar situations is warm and human, with comic aspects and sad ones kept in an appealing balance.

The film may not propose a solution to any of our maladies, but it’s a bitterly convincing diagnosis.

“1000 Women” is briskly entertaining and wildly informative as a clip show, insightful in its academic analysis, and the structure of the film enables a tidy organization of an often messy bunch of films.

Straightforward storytelling was never the strong suit of the show, which relied very much on Mr. Murphy’s charisma and that of his co-stars, notably Sophie Rundle, who plays sister Ada Shelby. The future always looked grim in Peaky Blinders, but the fate of the show, which apparently has two Murphy-less years to go in a planned sequel, is beyond uncertain.

Why an Oscar-winning screenwriter would make a film that makes so little attempt to dig into its central character is baffling. That an Oscar-nominated director with a celebrated eye for the ethereal, strange world of girl-women living in beautiful boxes could make a film as workaday as this one is frustrating.

The movie has an elegant, almost symmetrical narrative economy. It’s at once orderly and disorienting, as though following a plan drawn by M.C. Escher.

Combining the best aspects of “Interstellar” and “The Martian,” but more satisfying in the end than either, this 2 1/2-hour epic Christian allegory recreates the same mix as the best Steven Spielberg fantasies—wonder, adventure, humor, warmth and pathos, all infused with a child’s sensibility.

An experience that’s like being slowly asphyxiated by puffy clouds of baby powder.

The movie generates a pleasing fog of suspense as it makes the audience pay attention to each new audio cue. Seeing the movie in a hushed theater is ideal; viewing it at home would almost certainly bring in distractions that would dilute the experience.

The lean, athletic Mr. Herzog, 83 years old, seems as spry and eager as ever, and his global enthusiasm remains a force of nature in itself. Ghost Elephants takes its place as yet another of the director’s essential forays into the wild and unknown.

If there’s a single witty idea in the entire two-hour slog, I missed it.

Ms. Buckley quickly becomes the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal’s over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

Pixar, which is notable for its emotionally rich soul and its irresistible fancy, this time comes up with almost none of the former and very little of the latter.

While essentially a disaster film, the visually alarming and nerve-racking “Fukushima” is also a cross-cultural psychodrama, about an industry, and perhaps a society, having a meltdown all its own.

In a deliberately raggedy film, we find a raggedy man.

Like Sun Ra’s music, the motion picture is deliberately fractured, the virtues to be found in the departures from the expected, the familiar, the comfortable.

The legacy of the Emerson String Quartet includes dozens of recordings, and it’s probably in those that the deepest lessons lie. For anyone curious to meet the musicians who made them, Four Rational People is a decent introduction.

Ms. Findlay’s work is nevertheless so delicate as to be slight, so unassuming as to be unsatisfying. The friction between the two leads could form a strong backdrop to the film; instead, it is the film.

As a comedy “Killing” is simply dead.

Mr. Luhrmann successfully makes Presley’s concerts fresh again.

Director Rory Kennedy strives to make Ms. Polgár’s story—that of the greatest female player in the game—a validation of women in chess, without paying much attention to their continued under-representation, post-Polgár, in international competition. What she does come close to validating, however hesitantly, are the unorthodox educational theories of Judit’s father, László.

Having simplified matters, Ms. Fennell sloughs off the psychological depth of the novel and instead lavishes attention on the heavy breathing and the decor, exhibiting much interest in the ornate mansion in which the Linton family lives (one room is set aside for ribbons only) and the costumes and accessories with which Ms. Robbie is gloriously draped.

An achievement as unlikely as it is inspired.

That “Crime 101” seeks to position itself as a successor to “Heat” is laughable. A more accurate title would have been “Lukewarmth.”

Lush romanticism, bloody action and a certain winking distance from the material keep Mr. Besson’s picture vivid if not quite compelling.

Approaching the glum realities of aging with an often deft and even lightly comical tone, the Spanish-language film Calle Málaga is a pleasing character study of an elderly lady who is more resourceful than she appears.

The two lead actors, both superb, strike a delicate imbalance.

That mildness is characteristic of the film, which is colorful to look at but dull. The story is plodding, the characters are boring and earnest, and the supposed comic-relief act provided by the trio of stumblebums on Arco’s trail is a wince-inducing failure.

The director’s trying-too-hard approach to everything, meant to make the film exciting, instead makes it so frenetic that it’s a slog, and the script by Marco van Belle falls short of the standard that you would expect to draw a star of Mr. Pratt’s magnitude.

Beast of War is a rare animal—a hybrid shark movie and a war film—and it takes care to deliver some tweaks.

Quirky touches, dry wit and first-rate characterizations make “The Bone Temple” a rare treat and one of the finest zombie movies I’ve seen, not to mention a major improvement from last summer’s third entry in the series.

The attraction is in the haunting texture of the picture, its delicate, breathy wonder.

The Rip is a sturdily entertaining, hyper-kinetic avalanche of action propelled by equal parts bullets and f-bombs.

Mr. Birney’s exotically low-fi imagination makes for a freaky and feverish trip.

Mr. Chase still tries to be funny here, sometimes desperately, and isn’t. Which along with a career’s worth of ill will puts the sting in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.

The Testament of Ann Lee is primarily a film about the pull and power of belief. Delivered in a style that evokes its historical moment while also cutting across time to the present, it lands with the enthralling, incantatory force of urgent prayer.

Father Mother Sister Brother is no doubt true enough to many a family gathering this Christmas—awkward, amusing, a bit dissatisfying, but not a disaster. Sometimes that’s reason enough to call for a toast.

You’d be unwise to look to the movies for economic insight—this one amounts to an extended fatuous argument that an individual who behaved like a corporate restructuring would be a psychopath. But among contemporary socio-economic parables, Mr. Park’s latest is an amusingly cutting one.

For those who complain that movies are too pat and formulaic, “Marty Supreme” is mostly a bracing tonic—pungent, wild and weird.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd are nearly always enjoyable, even when working with less-than-scintillating material, and each has a boyish streak that’s exactly the right register for this exercise in silliness.

Universal conscription for every able-bodied man from 18 to 40 is about to be instituted, and the events of this shallow, cheap and corny story seem unlikely to offer much in the way of comforting memories for those who get sent to the trenches.

The determination to find greatness in the ordinary gives Song Sung Blue a magical, unforced luminescence that much more immodest films usually lack.

The third entry features visual effects that are no longer novel, which means the writing deficiencies are now impossible to overlook. Without a compelling story, what emerges is not a movie but . . . a ride.

David may be a towering figure of biblical lore, but this telling of a chapter of his story is not merely animated, it’s cartoonish.

Just when this thing seems dead, though, the movie picks up considerably, and the much-better second half nearly redeems it. I give the credit to an experienced conjurer of the unexpected triumph: Peyton Manning.

I love a good film-clip movie as much as the next cinemaniac, and “Breakdown” provides plenty of great moments snatched out of what has been called the New American Cinema of the ’70s—the Scorsese-Coppola-Polanski-Malick heyday. But Mr. Neville is going for something deeper. Deeper even than what is usually attributed to the zeitgeist. Or its cousin, coincidence.

The Housemaid is a delightful hall of mirrors in which reality turns out to be subject to infinite modification.

For an animated feature, Scarlet is unusually ambitious: It’s a “Hamlet”-adjacent existential pacifist revenge parable. It contains lots of instances of its heroine stopping to wonder what everything means, which is another way of saying it’s ponderous and pretentious.

Ella McCay is not quotable. It is not believable. It is not likable. It’s not even digestible. For an ordinary filmmaker, it would be merely a disaster. For James L. Brooks, it’s more like a tragedy.

A cast this good would have a hard time delivering something less than watchable, and Goodbye June is watchable, even if little of it works.

Influencers both dwells in and demolishes an online, text-happy, selfie-saturated world, one that thrives on misinformation and FOMO-mongering and drives CW more than a little crazy. Watching poseurs brought down is fun, though. So is Ms. Naud.

While it isn’t the intention of the film to generate sympathy for Mr. Út, one can’t quite help it.

As naturally and insistently buoyant as Mr. Strassner is, Ms. Larsen is a marvel.

There is an implicit story within—about the ancients building with marble for eternity and us moderns building with concrete for a virtual moment. But it isn’t just beauty Mr. Kossakovsky is concerned with here. It is how humans view their world and, more importantly, themselves. And their place in the universe. And their disposable landscape.

“Reflection” is a highly playful exercise in its kaleidoscopic approach, though “kaleidoscopic” is about as useful as “surreal” in describing the film’s effect or philosophy.

The film honors maturity and all its weighty deliberations without putting a sheen of sentimentality on the condition.