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.

Emancipation is tonally discordant, attempting to merge serious historical drama with the silly dynamics of an action thriller.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

The director Don Hall and his co-director and screenwriter Qui Nguyen (who last year collaborated on a slightly less mediocre Disney picture, “Raya and the Last Dragon”) seem to have put all of their effort into gaudy backgrounds, wacky gadgets and strange ancillary monsters instead of into dramatic urgency or conflict.

The film is smartly structured, and many viewers will happily cue up a repeat viewing to savor all of the matters that were not as they seemed the first time. The many puzzles and secrets and fakeouts keep things mostly amusing for two hours, and as with the first “Knives Out,” the cast is strong.

Ms. Barkley comes across as a kid rather than a studio creation. Mr. Momoa gives the kind of unhinged performance of which few would have thought him capable. His prancing about at moments of joy are, in fact, joyous.

The performers—not just the miraculous Ms. Pugh but Ms. Cassidy; her mother, Elaine Cassidy (who plays Anna’s mother); and Tom Burke, as the journalist-love interest Will Byrne—give memorably complex portrayals in a tale where elements theological, maternal, political and pictorial are transformed alchemically into narrative gold.

Master of Light is a film not just about art and redemption but a character sorting out his life, and what he truly believes about art.

Understanding that a knockout finish is the most important element, Mr. Spielberg delivers spectacularly in a scene drawn from a real-life meeting. He puts a mischievous twist on his well-earned reputation for sentimental endings by dramatizing an encounter with one of the gods of celluloid.

Fans of Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reynolds have likely never seen them in anything this earnest and tacky before, and are liable to feel somewhere between betrayed and stunned.

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.

In a film of grand acting, flamboyant color, vaulting ambition and global conflict, the more slippery gestures contain much meaning.