Golden Arm could be interpreted as having a profound feminist message and liberating agenda. Mostly, it’s just goofy fun. An antic romp. A briskly paced gag fest. A lot of wrist, no relaxation.

Lucy the Human Chimp is a creative assemblage of sundry parts: The archival footage, of which there is a wealth; the news coverage given Lucy when she was a celebrity; and extensive restagings and re-enactments, a device that in many documentaries is either stiff or profoundly unreal but under Alex Parkinson’s direction—and with Lorna Nickson Brown in the role of Janis Carter—rings true.

There is a bit of gore toward the end of Things Heard & Seen that seems gratuitous, like a bone thrown to the genre audience. But it also points out how smart the film has been for so long, and so allergic to clichés, while still being satisfyingly scary.

Sweet, funny, a little melancholy and a little obvious.

That the film is online because of the Covid-19 pandemic might be considered a silver lining: Not only will more people be able to see it, but they can, and should, experience it through headphones. A big screen would be nice, too, given Ms. Rovner’s hallucinogenic way with pictures. But the sound, as she would probably agree, is paramount.

All in all, Mr. Papadimitropoulos maintains a delicate balance between the wryly hilarious and the heartbreaking, and sometimes the high wire trembles. But danger is intoxicating, and Chloe and Mickey—along with their audience—spend much of “Monday” delightfully drunk.

Mayhem is the point. And on that, at least, the movie certainly delivers.

Joy may not be sweeping the nation portrayed in Our Towns, exactly. But a certain amount of happiness abounds.

The filmmaking is strong and confident throughout, while Mr. Brummer’s performance is a constant revelation.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

Concrete Cowboy is far from perfect, but it’s vividly alive. If the choice must be between that and careful craftsmanship, life carries the day.

It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.

The otherworldliness of “Tina,” which exists for many minutes in a kind of vacuum created between the various silent images and the distanced voiceover, is transporting; the ambient score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans helps transform what might have been a series of mere tawdry recollections into a kind of prison memoir.

The good news here is Mr. Odenkirk’s performance, not to mention his endurance in strenuous action sequences that must have taken a real-life toll on his physique; he certainly doesn’t look computer-generated.

There’s an old Broadway joke about a musical being so bad that you walk out humming the scenery. Six Minutes to Midnight is a spy thriller, not a musical, and it isn’t bad at all; the factual history it was based on is fascinating. Still, the scenery was what stayed with me most vividly.

There are degrees of villainy in “Operation Varsity Blues,” but it’s hard to peg the privileged, bribe-paying parents as the worst of a bad lot. Besides, they have to live not just with their criminal convictions but with those wiretapped conversations, in which they reveal what they really think of their own children.

The film gives no reason for optimism in the urban warfare it portrays, but its heart, head and sharp eye are in exactly the right place.

It is not a good sign when a film keeps evoking superior examples of its genre. And a worse sign still when the genre itself seems more remote from current concerns than it deserves to be. Such is the case with The Courier.

The world may be divided into “developed,” “developing” and “under-developed,” but the young people here seem to pay no attention to such differences. They may be thinking locally, but they’re aspiring globally.

It’s ingenious and intriguing, right up to the silly finale, which should be forgiven if not ignored.

Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.

If there’s anything more you need to know before deciding whether to watch this, I should tell you that it’s nothing like “Eighth Grade,” “Booksmart,” “Clueless” or “Election,” all astute studies of the high-school scene. The calculations of this screenplay, adapted by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer from a young-adult novel by Jennifer Mathieu, are naked enough to qualify as nude scenes.

It’s rare that a film mixes joy and melancholy with such ease, and to such lovely effect.

Anyone expecting “Biggie” to be some version of “Unsolved Mysteries” will be disappointed. But it’s unquestionably an affectionate, entertaining and even enlightening portrait.

The film fails most importantly, almost inexplicably, at telling its story of governmental abuse and personal suffering in a coherent fashion. And the disorganization of Ms. Parks’s script is enhanced by a succession of montages that must have been put together to camouflage narrative gaps.

What might have been predictable or sentimental in other hands becomes startling in the film’s approach, as well as beguiling, unsparing, terribly moving and occasionally very funny.

The result is a raw look at not just celebrity, but also what it is to parent and grow up in the 21st century.

Shook has the requisite twists to make it much more than a straightforward horror-shocker, and the sharp turns are sufficient to have viewers profoundly dizzy about where it’s all going to go.