Thanks to a few sweet father-daughter moments and a relatively direct plot, this entry is a notch better than some even-more-febrile recent efforts such as “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.” But overall it’s another lackluster blockbuster.

It may be cheaper than a trip to see the gentlemen of Chippendales but, artistically speaking, it’s on roughly the same level.

Cinema Sabaya, a quietly affecting little film about unexpected connections and unseen sorrows, shimmers with a bright optimism about how people might overlook one another’s differences if only they took a little time to learn about each other.

We can all see where this is going. In fact, if it didn’t go there we’d feel cheated, even though the route—as navigated by writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote “The Devil Wears Prada” and co-created “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”—is as roundabout as the performances and casting are straightforward.

Without exaggerating any characteristic of suburban-mom life, steering clear of sentimentality or contrivance, Mr. Gravel succeeds breathtakingly in making us appreciate how much grit is contained in the Julies of the world.

No catharsis redeems the horrors we’ve witnessed; no useful lesson is learned; there isn’t even so much as a sociological observation. One leaves the theater with an unpleasant feeling, equal parts depleted and cheated.

The power of the film lies in how it crafts excitement out of a granular understanding of Russian state brutishness and the degree of determination it will require to evade it. It will take a spy’s level of resourcefulness to emerge from the labyrinth, and Kompromat has the punch of a first-rate spy thriller.

The intended overarching message is that vile men can exercise a kind of mind control over their innocent girlfriends. Perhaps. But Alice, Darling delivers an equally striking unintended message: that two people in a failing relationship have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other.

After Love may be a bit thin on story, but it nevertheless shines with feeling.

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

Chess Story is a nerve-scraping exercise in grand deception.

The gothic sense of unease that informs the early stages of The Pale Blue Eye gives way to hysteria—not the kind that Poe used to underlie his various narrators’ incipient madness, but just a horse-drawn trip to Crazy Town.

The Drop finds its humor in cringe comedy and the kind of cultural caricature that isn’t just tiresome but offhandedly so.

The film is quiet, deliberate and low-key, and some may find it underwhelming, but writer-director Gabriel Martins has a novelist’s feel for his characters, taking us under everybody’s skin with deep sympathy for their differing outlooks.

M3gan is wittily written and smoothly plotted by Akela Cooper, from a story by her and James Wan, as well as tautly directed by Gerard Johnstone, who hearkens all the way back to Mary Shelley’s warning. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we’ve created a monster, but there’s no way to kill off tech.

There’s laying it on thick, there’s laying it on with a trowel, and there’s laying it on like A Man Called Otto.

Though the documentary is clearly meant as a fan letter, not an even-handed report, it does overlook some important matters.

Wildcat is not a fairy tale. The rigors endured by Mr. Turner’s principal sidekick, an ocelot named Keanu (the actor should be pleased), seem very basic compared to the human subject’s process of rehabilitation. But it does reconcile its realities with the elusive nature of happiness, which for both men and cats can mean what’s within their grasp.

Following closely the standard playbook for biographical movies of the kind that television smoothly produced in the ’80s and ’90s, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody may score low on creativity and originality but it’s effective throughout.

In Living, Mr. Nighy excels again in a performance that is magnificent in its restraint and eloquent in its sparseness of words.

Ms. Polley, a longtime actress who got started in movies as a child, does an admirable job of keeping the dramatic temperature at a high level despite the strictures of the format, and Ms. Mara, Ms. Foy and Ms. Buckley all make a vivid impression. Yet no one in the movie seems to have a grasp of the practical realities.

In keeping with the exuberance of early Hollywood, Mr. Chazelle and his creative team—Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, Florencia Martin’s production design and Mary Zophres’s costumes all have to be dazzling to maintain Mr. Chazelle’s vision, and they are—create the feeling of a madcap, whirling ride.

Low-key indie dramas sometimes overstate the understatement to a degree that becomes dull or even exasperating, but The Quiet Girl is consistently fascinating throughout its 90-minute runtime.

Many have observed that the first “Avatar,” despite its outsize box-office, didn’t leave much of a cultural footprint. The second is more of the same. It may be a visual buffet, but the pickings are merely eye candy.

As directed by Celia Aniskovich and Jennifer Brea, Call Me Miss Cleo is an affectionate portrait of a fringe character who was more a tool than a beneficiary of PRN’s seamy efforts.

The film does a poor job of illuminating human frailty because everything in it is so transparently contrived, so clumsily aimed at your tear ducts.

Mr. Fraser looks so spectacularly awful as Charlie in the film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, that this chamber piece amounts to a variation of torture porn for highbrows, with a fat suit rather than a meat cleaver as the bringer of cinematic shock.

There are many smart comic ideas in Violent Night, but they are scattered unevenly throughout, the villains are dull, and most of the imaginative energy goes into devising spectacularly gory murders involving the distressingly off-label use of Christmas paraphernalia.