Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?

The Blue Fairy may have brought life to Pinocchio, but no one here is delivering anything particularly fresh. Or alarming. For that, we wait till Christmas.

The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.

Mr. Bonneville, having a well of viewer good will on which to draw, makes a perversely convincing villain, the extent of whose offenses are progressively appalling.

They can give the film’s characters physics-defying acrobatic skills. But they can’t provide anyone much motivation.

The film, instead of repeating clichés about the supposed heartlessness of the ruling class, could be viewed as either a barbed accusation of managerial hypocrisy from a working-class point of view or as an exasperated testimonial from a manager of how workers make it impossible to run a company like a family.

Films about race too often take the easy way out, which tends to yield schematic characters, grandstanding dialogue and thematic stridency; filmmakers seem more interested in emphasizing that they’re on the side of the angels than in confronting the messiness of reality. Breaking doesn’t patronize the audience with such oversimplifications.

The Innocents features some superb kid-acting, which doesn’t just entertain and convince but embellishes the malevolent intelligence (call it sociopathy) at work in Mr. Vogt’s story.

Though very funny at times, and refreshing in the way it keeps us guessing, Spin Me Round is only partially successful.

Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.

It wants to fly away, though in one sense it does show restraint: There’s enough going on in Rogue Agent to have fueled an eight-week PBS mystery series. Economy, in the world of fictionalized espionage, is quite decidedly a virtue.

Caper movies rely heavily on how well they build plausibility into the doings of professional scam artists, but Emily the Criminal scores poorly on that front.

Those who’d like to take their more mature children to an animated feature with considerably more imaginative richness than, say, “DC League of Super-Pets” will find that the Japanese anime movie “Inu-Oh” fits the bill: How often do you get a chance to take in a medieval rock opera? But an imaginative hook isn’t everything.

Rumpled, hangdog and literally kicked around, Mr. Pitt wears indignities the way Marilyn Monroe sported a potato sack; he’s delighted to make a joke of his appeal. With him as his canvas, Mr. Leitch elevates visual whims into art

If you stick with it through the somewhat plodding first half of this overly long retelling, you’ll be rewarded with a rousing final hour.

While certainly a curiosity, We Met in Virtual Reality—a pandemic-inspired documentary filmed entirely within a social platform called VRChat—is also revelatory, if not entirely ennobling of the human condition.

The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.

Mr. Novak comes up with so much funny dialogue and so many intriguing ideas that I mostly forgive the creakiness of his plotting. The basic mechanics of the whodunit seem to elude him, and he leaves important matters dangling at the end. But questioning the failings and prejudices of his tribe (Mr. Novak grew up in greater Boston, went to Harvard, worked in Hollywood, and has also written for the New Yorker) has provided him with a wealth of material.

Ms. Rice (“Mare of Easttown”) is the main attraction, and a revelation; her direct address of the camera grows less frequent as present-tense time catches up with her schemes, but she remains magnetic throughout.

For all the overkill, The Gray Man is big, loud fun. Mr. Gosling is hip to what’s going on; Mr. Evans (of the Russos’ “Captain America: Civil War,” among others) gets to gobble up the scenery. And even if the elements are hackneyed—Alfre Woodard as the retired agency vet whom Six drags back into the fray; Jessica Henwick as the lone voice of CIA reason trying to rein Carmichael in—they’re not clumsy.

Its plot is simple and direct, albeit enlivened by well-timed surprises. The film isn’t especially funny—droll is more accurate—but its approach to Antoinette’s character adroitly balances sympathy with mockery.

Mr. Peele has loads of ideas and builds up considerable suspense and dread, but he fails to tie everything together with a resounding final act.

For all the gushing about the “transcendent” nature of “American Pie,” Mr. Brooks is the one who actually mentions, and praises, the recording itself, which becomes a fascinating aspect to a show that seems to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying its existence.

It’s stylish and chilling, with a lively feminist undercurrent.

Whatever the charms of the book, they are entirely absent from the dull and listless film.

Updating a classic is one thing; deliberately obscuring or burlesquing its points is another.

For all the disorder and sense of emergency, there’s also a combination of human sweetness and cosmic serenity to be found in Wuhan Wuhan.

Mr. Hunnam is a charismatic center of attention, Ms. Baccarin perhaps more so for some of us, and Mr. Gibson, though doled out sparingly, is deftly funny.