There’s something singularly fulfilling in a film, like this one, that truly demands that most precious commodity: our attention.

After an intriguing start and a strong middle, however, the film can’t quite deliver a satisfying ending.

Mr. Stanfield is a gifted performer. Thanks to an amateurish script, however, Clarence is a lifeless Brian.

Torn between Tarantino-esque genre pastiche and stilted art-film seriousness, The Settlers is at once unsettling and tonally unsettled. The result is a muddled study of brutal history.

The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.

A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

For a movie with such a nose for nuttiness, its human element is genuine and warm.

The film should have been played for pure farce and is not, hence the head-scratching in which a viewer will engage before very few bodies are cold.

Mr. McQueen has created a documentary that gives little life to history—or, for that matter, to the present that treads forever in its shadow.

Tiresome digressions mixed in with philosophical banalities add up to a pointless, inert drama.

It’s a passable bloody-knuckles action piece for those who enjoy relaxing with a couple of hours of crazed carnage.

The direct, intimate way in which the movie is filmed and acted, however, makes it an affecting study of two people’s attempts to forge some kind of relationship despite huge psychic damage on both sides.

The movie . . . doesn’t have the smarts to embrace its own stupidity.

The length of his film is an essential element in Mr. Bayona’s message about desperation and hope and, dare one say it, the resilience of the spirit. The soiled, ailing, sunburned husks of men who emerge from the mountains are heroes, though they look every bit like ghosts.

It’s as effective as one of the fabled machines it celebrates.

Of all the versions I’ve seen, the latest one is the best, a holiday spectacle bursting with spirited sisterhood. Its characters may be broadly drawn, but their sorrows and triumphs come across with more feeling than ever.

The film, though lush, thoughtful and at times affecting, never fully escapes a certain therapeutic mode. It doesn’t depict life lived, exactly; it depicts life theorized.

The film has so much visual imagination that it tends to squander it.

Leonard Bernstein was a towering musical figure and a complicated man. Netflix’s “Maestro” has a great deal to say about the latter characterization and surprisingly little about the former.

The Iron Claw is either a cheesy professional-wrestling hold or the unbreakable grip of a hostile fate. Or perhaps it’s how a father clutches his children. Whatever it is, it’s a resonant image for a potent tearjerker.

The Taste of Things is at once a delight for all five senses and an affecting drama of a relationship, as idiosyncratic as all loving ones are. Lingering on the tongue like a sip of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the film leaves one feeling a little drunk, desperately hungry and entirely alive.

American Fiction is being heralded as a brilliant satire, which is almost correct. I’d say it’s sharp and funny, but its targets are low-hanging, and the film’s writer-director, Cord Jefferson, is hardly the first to take a poke at them.

It settles for being amusing when it could have been interesting as well.

It’s lacerating, a master class in how to show without showing.

This is not the kind of 3-D that sees things leaping off the screen, though a few wandering wisps of smoke appear to escape the frame; it instead lends these images a sometimes uncanny, sometimes mesmerizing sense of depth. While it doesn’t feel integral to the project, it does, now and then, enrich it.

The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.

Both literary and cinematic, “Poor Things” gives the audience everything we can ask for in a film—beauty and wonder; hefty ideas and clever storytelling; twists, shocks and laughter.

This movie seems proud, even smug, about recycling scraps from other fairy tales.