Being appalled by people who get their comeuppance is always entertaining, and American Pain fills that bill, though the misbehavior Mr. Foster chronicles is so shameless that viewers might start to lose their bearings.

Mr. Thayi doesn’t tell a straightforward version of the Hwang story, because he’s after more—the story of cloning itself, which will be enlightening for those of us on the fringes of science.

It was one of the last moments when the balance between 1940s-style uplift and what became known as cinema’s American New Wave still held; within a few years, boomer culture simply subsumed all else. “Desperate Souls” does a fine job of exploring the tectonics of that shift.

Uneven though it is . . . No Hard Feelings devises some smart new twists for the teen sex comedy while expertly counterbalancing Mr. Feldman’s doe-eyed innocence with Ms. Lawrence’s vamping.

The pair’s growing fascination for each other is as unmistakable as the beauty of their surroundings, and so a film about inanimate elements turns out to be a delightfully human love story.

Asteroid City may be infused with the powers of the Atomic Age, but no Anderson movie except “The Darjeeling Limited” runs so low on energy.

Although the climactic battle sequence is, as usual in these movies, teeming with spectacle . . . it feels busy rather than exciting.

The age when such images held firm positions in the culture may be over, but Mr. Corbijn’s film has given it a glorious and stirring elegy.

“Rise of the Beasts” is shamelessly vapid filmmaking that stacks up poorly against several other entrants in the series.

As in much modern horror, humor resides just under the surface of “Brooklyn 45,” except when it erupts like a punctured artery; the cast has to walk a fine line, though they do behave as people might under extraordinary and extraordinarily unnerving circumstances.

It is an inspiring story, no surprise, told with a great deal of warmth.

A horror flick is only as good as its ending; It either delivers on its promises, or it disappoints. This one builds up to a climax that is meant to be spectacular, but is actually a bore thanks to its literalism.

As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.

Movies about the mini-problems of normal people are vanishingly rare these days, mainly because it’s hard to make normal people seem interesting enough to be worth the price of a ticket. Ms. Holofcener has more than managed that, in a thoroughly engaging conversation-starter of a film.

Though the new Little Mermaid makes excellent use of all that digital wizardry has to offer, its heart is lost at sea.

The entire film feels like an exceedingly stale stand-up comedy routine, which is to say it’s exactly like one of Mr. Maniscalco’s stand-up comedy routines.

Directed by James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”), the HBO documentary is almost too balanced.

In addition to the disco rhythms, glitzy fashions and alarming hairstyles, Love to Love You, Donna Summer might strike a nostalgic nerve with how natural, funny and forthcoming its subject is.

Throughout The Hong Konger, Mr. Lai exhibits amazing composure as he tells a story that is both inspiring and enraging, in interviews filmed both before and between his arrests.

Though the metaphor becomes somewhat strained as the film goes on, the religious implications of Narvel’s pursuit give the story considerable heft as Mr. Schrader beautifully balances outer tranquility with inner tumult.

Hiring France’s Louis Leterrier to direct was a bit like managing the pandemonium at a toddler’s birthday party by bringing in a soda machine.

Ms. Kim strives to remain true to her subject’s sensibilities—her imagistic narrative amounts to energetic homage—and this includes not romanticizing his life.

The pace is nonstop, the humor abundant, the devotion of Mr. Fox’s wife, actress Tracy Pollan, is made plain, and there’s no small amount of nostalgia in store for people who know and love the Fox filmography. But the heart and soul of the film are the face-to-face interviews, which are far less delicate than one might expect. And all the deeper for it.

The movie about his life and legend, written and directed by Sean Mullin, has two purposes and succeeds delightfully at both.

BlackBerry is a biography of a once-great business that is fascinating enough on its own terms without being reshaped to fit a narrative formula.

What God’s Time affords us, as few Hollywood movies do anymore, are performances that rely on sustained craft and emotion, an ability to mesmerize the camera and justify why it isn’t cutting away.

Chile ’76 subtly illustrates how difficult it becomes to separate the personal and the political in an authoritarian state. As it goes on, it develops from a character portrait into an unusually realistic thriller, with danger asserting itself everywhere.

GOTG 3 is a blahbuster that, like other recent Marvel disappointments (“Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”), jogs along from one visually extravagant, strenuously jokey set piece to another without offering much in the way of either dramatic engagement or actually funny ideas.