The film is poetic in its turn, as well as deliciously funny, and pretty much perfect except for a slightly didactic coda. But that’s a minor flaw in a major achievement. To err, even slightly, is you know what.

The film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scaled production in all of its live-theater iterations has become a ponderous movie that turns earnest into maudlin, lyrical into lugubrious.

Jessica Chastain is the only reason, though a good one, to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a shrill biopic of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.

It’s a slow-release dose of sincere feelings.

With his Maasai-influenced braids or canopy of Jheri curls and his use of sex and misogyny to sell himself, James is a kind of dinosaur. But he’s also one whom Mr. Jenkins—one of our better cultural critics who happen to make films—pursues to enlightening effect.

The Gateway is a bit like the movie’s drug robbery—they know how to get in, but don’t know how to get out. It’s Mr. Whigham who keeps you watching.

Acting may be a collaborative art form, but Mr. Ahmed also flies solo with considerable grace.

Social media is not an inherently cinematic subject, but Ms. Binoche is, and in the hands of director Nebbou and cinematographer Gilles Porte the story of Claire becomes, both visually and psychologically, a bridge between worlds, ethereal, tragic and more than a little scary.

There’s always a point in any Marvel extravaganza where somebody exclaims “Holy s—!” just to remind us how awe-struck we’re supposed to have been all along. When Awkwafina does it, it’s funny. She is good for Mr. Liu, who carries the action while she carries the humanity. They leave no doubt at the end of “Shang-Chi” that they will be back and they will be welcome.

What begins as a chamber piece, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin from a screenplay by Dennis Kelly, becomes a full-fledged movie with a pair of marvelous performances at its claustrophobic center.

The filmmakers find a way to expand their slashifications into provocative reflections on the white world’s fear of ostensibly menacing Black men, and, secondarily but importantly, art’s power to shape our understanding of the world around us.

It’s an unwieldy subject Ms. Tragos has taken on, and the results are somewhat scattershot.

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father. But the characters don’t add up. The complexities and nuances that might have brought them fully to life never made it to the screen.

Almost every sequence contains references to other films. Spotting them is a pleasant distraction from figuring out the plot, an absurdly rococo structure that rivals the most flagrant befuddlements of “Inception” or, for that matter, the latter stretches of “Westworld.”

This ambitious and mutedly angry film also assumes an ironic tone in examining the Hitler phenomenon from angles political, sociological, psychological and, very intriguingly, cinematic.

Where the Ruby-teacher relationship falters is not the fault of the actors, but the writer. Mr. V is meant to be slightly unreasonable, a hard-liner about Ruby being both serious and on time. But the script takes the very common and dubious tack of not letting the characters simply explain their situations to each other.

In its way, it pokes at the very delicate membrane between horror and comedy.

Occasionally, he allows his gift for creating poetically beautiful and architecturally elevated cinema to spill out across the screen. The thing that eludes Mr. Carax—as Annette so amply and painfully demonstrates—is balance.

Mr. Reynolds can do goofily perplexed as well as anyone and is quite charming as Guy, who doesn’t know what’s going on, except that as “Blue Shirt Guy” he’s rocked the worldview of online gamers everywhere.

Matt Damon, in the central role, confers a somber grace on a man who always thought he had none.

The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them.

What gives the film its distinction is the grace and intimacy with which it depicts the cousins’ girlhoods, and the quality of the performances—superb throughout, remarkably well-matched at every stage of each character’s life, and, in the case of a homeless wanderer who was once a lovely, ardent child, nothing less than extraordinary.

The Boy Behind the Door is an underwritten movie and an underpopulated one, though missing people are less of a handicap to the narrative than missing information.

This one’s pretty entertaining, although increasingly noisy and ultimately ridiculous.

Playing With Sharks has its visual thrills but also tells one good story after another, not only about making movies and flirting with death but about the nature of the fish and the steely character of the movie’s human subject.

The Blues Chase the Blues Away is almost alarming in its departure from convention—much like Mr. Guy, as it happens.

[Ms. Huppert] is fascinating again, but in a wonderfully nimble way that could be considered campy if her style weren’t so assured and her performance weren’t so witty and precise.

The result is a documentary that keeps drawing you in, even when you think it’s keeping you at a certain distance, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who, through good times and dreadful ones, has remained devoted to his art.