Once the two rovers landed, three weeks apart, problems that had never been confronted before in the history of humanity started to become routine occurrences. So did solving them, and the documentary is a warm and well-earned tribute to the brilliant scientists and engineers who did so.

As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasionally succeeds in making the audience feel his sorrow, regret and alienation. More often, his flights of fancy are merely exasperating.

An undercooked serving of political skulduggery that nevertheless provides a showcase for the magnetic Jodie Turner-Smith. Like most of the cast, she’s better than the material.

There is less artistry to the film than there is sloganeering. Call Jane would be more effective if it stuck to human drama rather than having its characters make sweeping assertions that sound like stump speeches given at political rallies.

If Armageddon isn’t quite what happened economically to the U.S. in the 1980s, Armageddon Time is nevertheless a sincere effort to wring meaning out of memory.

The film may not take quite as many chances with the documentary form as Armstrong took with the opening cadenza of “West End Blues” (recorded by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five in 1928) but it is a daring work, a worthy and affectionate statement about the most important single figure in American popular music, 20th Century Division.

Isolated brilliance is precisely what helps The Good Nurse shine, and it could hardly be otherwise given the story.

Fully understanding the war—who does?—may not be necessary in appreciating the disturbing, moving and sometimes too-beautiful production. But that production certainly puts a Teutonic tweak on history, sometimes to outrageous effect.

God Forbid may be seen as a seamy peek into a couple’s private life, an exposé about the religious right, or both. But what gives it substance is the history recounted.

As it is, Ticket to Paradise is tolerable, but to make it a true pleasure would probably require some priming with a few glasses of arak.

Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff.

Wounded but funny, quiet but resonant and resistant to anything like a Hollywood formula, The Banshees of Inisherin is a strangely profound little comedy. It’s one of the few true originals among movies this year.

Granted, the mayhem is inflicted mostly on zombies and other Halloween decorations that have come to life courtesy of the ancient curse unleashed by Sydney. But the casual decapitations and dismemberments transition from vaguely entertaining to annoying, mostly because there’s a lot less story than there are special effects.

Being more ambitious than most films in the horror genre, Halloween Ends also perhaps falls on the wrong side of the divide between being scary in a fun way and being distressingly plausible.

As Mamie Till, the previously little-known actress Danielle Deadwyler gives an astonishing performance, shimmering first with tenderness and later with the kind of agony no mother should ever have to contemplate, much less bear.

To describe “Amsterdam” as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery. As an allegory for our times it is vapid and irrelevant.

The movie is as loaded with fun as it is with social implications. Its broad comedy about the modeling world plays like a deadpan version of “Zoolander,” and its third act has more primal drama than a season’s worth of “Survivor.”

Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.

Knowing the score in advance is no obstacle to reveling in The Redeem Team, a documentary about motion, emotion, motives and a mission.

Stephen King fans will respond immediately to the atmosphere writer-director John Lee Hancock creates at the outset of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone—a world of perpetual autumn and incipient unease, a white-clapboard Maine where the chill gets into the bones and the soul.

The story that directors Sami Khan and Michael Gassert tell so intimately is certainly about skirting the law. But it’s also about baseball, in which there aren’t always fairy-tale endings.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is far too interested in having a good time to get too heavy about a bygone American argument, but there are truths to be found in the film, by peering through its various fogs of war.

A case can be made that it’s gutsy and honest for Mr. Apatow, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Eichner to place such an obnoxious (and recognizable) figure as Bobby at the center of a rom-com, but as we saw in “The King of Staten Island,” comedies about jerks work only if they’re funny, and Bros isn’t.

The dystopian sci-fi drama Vesper is a gallery of astounding images set in a weirdly enticing future. The new world it depicts is both primitive and advanced, full of richly detailed flora and fauna representing strange new species that came about after mankind experimented heavily with genetic engineering as society crumbled to dust.

At two hours and 47 minutes, Andrew Dominik’s pseudo-biography is one long slog into sadness and more-than-predictable tragedy, despite a touching portrayal by Ana de Armas and the deliberately artful and often startling filmmaking of Mr. Dominik.

It’s a fast-paced whodunit, despite the answers to its central mystery being either memorable, or Google-able, but the reasons why may amount to spoilers. So reader beware.

Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet

Sometimes you just want a crazy action movie to kill an evening, and “Lou” fits that bill. Just don’t expect to be thinking about it tomorrow.