Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s funniest and finest movie in many years is perfection all the way through: the perfect casting choice, the perfect balance of comedy and pathos, the perfect wacky route to the perfect ending.

There's no deeper meaning to Steven Soderbergh's thriller than what meets the eye, yet its lustrous surfaces offer great and guilt-free pleasure.

I have an aversion to such intricately interlocked movies as "Babel" or "Crash" -- for all their pretensions and astral connections they're basically stunts -- and my feelings about Jellyfish are much the same. But this film is handsomely made, and I won't soon forget the almost Jungian image of a wide-eyed child -- emerging from the sea with a red and white lifesaver around her little belly.

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.

Many of the characters are cut from recycled cardboard, while Kennedy himself, played by Jason Clarke, remains a cipher. (Mary Jo is played by Kate Mara.) The movie makes a point of not judging him, but that only highlights the impossibility, after all these years, of penetrating the mystery of his behavior.

The movie is much too long, but mostly, and sometimes very, entertaining.

A fine, heartfelt film, sometimes harrowing in its violence but blessedly free of pretension or bombast, even though it aspires to -- and achieves -- the stature of a classic Western.

The content can be raw, sometimes startling, but before and after everything else the film is hilarious, and constitutes a cockeyed pantheon of comic performances. On top of that it is beautiful. The more you laugh, the more deeply you’re moved by its portrait of a lost manchild trying to find himself in a present that’s missing a precious piece of his past.

Quick cuts, jangly ’80 synth music and an impressive pool-hall tracking shot distinguish the picture, but the familiar tropes of Hong Kong cinema, including predictable fight sequences and a moralizing conclusion, subtract from its appeal.

That's one of the puzzles of this piece. You'd think a film with talent to burn - would provide some electrifying encounters at the very least. No such luck. Words fly, some of them medium-witty, but lightning doesn't strike.

It's a violent roundelay that throbs with scary energy, startling characters (almost all male) and marvelous, scabrous language.

The Sapphires isn't flawless, but who cares? It's a joyous affair that's distinguished by its music, and by the buoyant spirit of its stars.

Mr. Braff's idea of self-discovery is my idea of narcissism.

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.

In the wake of Walker’s death, it constitutes a farewell of fitting elegance.

Mr. Tyrnauer is a serious filmmaker — his “Valentino: The Last Emperor” was a first-rate documentary portrait of the legendary fashion designer Valentino Garavani. His new doc, which was based on Mr. Bowers’s memoir, “Full Service,” combines tell-all appeal with a seriously significant story of prejudice and hypocrisy on a literally mythic scale.

"Wrong" is the operative word with Death at a Funeral, which in the first very funny 30 minutes shows its hand and then, unfortunately, continues to wave that hand frantically for the next hour.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 probably couldn’t, and definitely doesn’t, recapture the sweet and singular silliness of the original, though the new edition from Marvel Studios and Disney has its rewards.

The story refuses to combust; it's a strangely unsatisfying combination of bloodless observations and unresolved sexuality.

The Life of Chuck is an overstuffed suitcase of a movie, one that comes off as a bit graceless and misshapen with all of the cramming and jamming.

The movie has a couple of problems. The lesser one arises from its opaqueness about the involvement of Mr. Stewart and “The Daily Show” in these events. The larger one lies in its narrative — enlivened from time to time by instructive absurdity, yet awfully familiar, overall, and padded with a notably clumsy dramatic contrivance.

Pulls us along in a state of pleasant expectation.

Ms. Clarkson's performance as Juliette, the fashion-writer wife of a United Nations functionary, is the film's reason for being. She makes yearning palpable. She turns mysterious silences into a language of love.

Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not have the same flaws as Marvel’s other recent disappointments, but it continues what amounts to a creative losing streak.

The script, adapted by Matt Greenhalgh from a memoir by Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, is flagrantly Oedipal; almost every scene between John and his mother is sexually charged. The curse is taken off most of these encounters by Anne-Marie Duff's eloquent work in the mother's role.

The film as a whole operates in Mr. Anderson's patented, semi-precious zone of antic and droll. It's not as if the filmmaker has gone off the rails. He's just not solidly on them.

What the film does sustain, and quite remarkably, considering its serious theme, is a delicately comic tone. That’s due in large measure to the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.