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.

Spectacular? I guess, if you’re wowed by soulless CGI chaos. Thrilling? Not really. At the end, I was left feeling the way Kong does at the beginning: tired and bored.

The aesthetics of Mr. Wiseman’s visual storytelling have seldom been so prominent or important as in “Menus-Plaisirs.”

The acting is first-rate, a disquieting pas de deux written by Indianna Bell and directed by her and Josiah Allen, who edited the piece.

Who doesn’t love Bill Shatner? The theatrical documentary “William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill” reminds us why, stylistically channeling what became the actor’s signature: a dedication to sustained gravitas so portentous that it becomes absurd, then keeps going until it emerges, triumphantly, into the realm of the genuinely spellbinding.

Written, directed and edited by Ivan Sen and shot (also by Mr. Sen) in black-and-white, the film is spare, sunbleached and serious in its study of people long neglected and abused. Yet the drama is thin, and the mystery halfhearted.

What was once thrilling, inventive and funny is now desiccated and limp. The pertinent question, it turns out, is not “Who you gonna call?” but “Why did they bother?”

The main attraction, so to speak, of “Road House” is ne’er-do-wells getting their comeuppance, to put it as gently as possible. The amount and degree of fighting defy most rules of physics, respiration and orthopedics. But it is a fantasy, mostly, which is a blessing.

Mr. Cailley is interested in the allegorical implications of his story, but not interested enough to pursue them very seriously.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

Mr. Chambers presents an attentive, sometimes painful and admirably unsentimental study of the everyday struggles of senescence and caretaking alike.

Ms. Stewart, who has maintained an impressively adventurous career since her “Twilight” days concluded more than a decade ago, helps keep the film upright, beautifully blending a moody exterior with the care of a lover and the anxiety skittering beneath it all as Lou tries to keep her world from coming completely apart.

Given that the character is a literal saint, and the script never stops reminding us how brave, honorable, loving and committed Mother Cabrini is, the movie suffers from a certain steadfast tone. It’s warm with fondness but never boiling with passion, and a major star might have succeeded in making Cabrini larger than life. As it is, she comes across as so pure that it’s a little difficult to relate to her.

Ms. Brown, who first came to our attention in “Stranger Things,” and for good reason, is surrounded by a cast that may have lost a bet.

Ricky Stanicky is, per the Farrelly aesthetic, eager to offend, gleefully vulgar and takes every joke too far.

Asleep in My Palm is a virtuoso debut feature from writer-director Henry Nelson.

Instead of a theme park, it’s more of a cathedral—solemn, sober, beautiful and forbidding. Greig Fraser’s photography and Hans Zimmer’s score are full of majesty.

Problemista is a brilliant comedy of the surreal and the absurd, and it finds no shortage of either in the bureaucratic processes of immigration.

About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips.

Mr. Garrone seems so desperate to create a powerful humanist plea that he has neglected to provide his movie with the detail and artistry that would give it force, and he conspicuously concludes his story just before it would have started to become more contentious—and more interesting.

The film is a lesbian-road-trip gangster farce with a hint of political satire, and though it’s admirably offbeat I found it only mildly amusing.

Even though it starts out likable, it gets sillier as it goes along and winds up as camp.

If the film is ambitious, it is also inert.