The most efficient review of Minari would be something along the lines of “It’s wonderful. See it. You’ll love it.” But you need to know more than that about Lee Isaac Chung’s partly autobiographical drama.

Ms. Newton is the kind of performer who seizes one’s attention immediately; Mr. Allen is, by nature of the story, relegated to more of a supporting role as the narrative progresses, but he’s an amiable presence.

This debut film by Filippo Meneghetti, streaming on major digital platforms, is elevated by the beauty of its performances, and by its masterly technique, which would suggest a filmmaker at the height of his career, not someone directing his first feature.

The result is better than smart, it’s stirring.

This remake isn’t terrible, just tentative and too long by at least 40 minutes.

Ideas being realized on screen? It’s something Mr. Cahill’s characters accomplish far more effectively than does the director himself.

I’m glad it got made—not a sure thing at all in a relentlessly commercial market—and made with such intelligence and respect for the factual details of the discovery by people who obviously loved what they were doing; glad it’s available to a wide audience on Netflix; and glad to have gained from it a heightened, and lengthened, sense of human history that the filmmakers convey in a style that’s the antithesis of grandiose.

I owned a deep sense of discomfort (which the movie means us to feel) that gave way to increasing boredom until the search led to an appliance repair store in a seamy area of the San Fernando Valley, and to one of its employees, Albert Sparma, the suspect played by Mr. Leto.

Mr. Timberlake has displayed his many gifts in multiple formats, but nothing quite like “Palmer,” not in his character’s complexities or in the way he navigates Palmer through the social circumstances explored by Ms. Guerriero’s canny script. Young Ryder Allen is also something to see: He makes Sam’s matter-of-fact self-acceptance funny, yes, but inspiring as well.

The depths of the characterizations are commensurate with the complexities of the men, making Malcolm the most resounding. Mr. Ben-Adir does him justice.

Penguin Bloom is alternately despairing and inspiring—more of the former than the latter, I found, simply because of the production’s honesty, and the lifetime of difficulty the Blooms’ story suggests.

Every moment strengthens the essence of the drama—the bond of love between two people who came out of their mother’s womb within seconds of one another.

Movies are seldom flawless and don’t have to be. This one speaks more eloquently to how a spell can be woven rather than broken.

Mr. Vasyanovych’s approach is literally and figuratively visionary.

The intimacy of Ms. Johnson’s performance is extraordinary. She is the least assertive of movie stars, yet the courage, despair and fury she finds in Nicole will lift you up and spin you around.

It’s surely the most spellbinding documentary ever made about the mediation process.

While Mr. Bahrani’s film shares certain themes with Danny Boyle’s international hit, it’s a great entertainment in its own right, a zestful epic blessed with rapier wit, casually dazzling dialogue, gorgeous cinematography (by Paolo Carnera ) and, at the center of it all, a sensational star turn by an actor, singer and songwriter named Adarsh Gourav.

Herself has a largeness of spirit that finds room for its passionate, funny and fiercely desperate heroine and everyone who rallies around her.

The concept is inspired, and inspiring—kids with a misorchestration of neurons, if that’s what it is, escaping from solitary confinement. More than that, the film is beautiful—the cinematography, by Ruben Woodin Dechamps, combines objective views of the subjects and their parents or teachers with startling visual analogues of the ways people with autism perceive the world they inhabit. And “The Reason I Jump” is deeply informative.

Instead of creating the kind of texture and narrative flow that allows characters to reveal themselves gradually and fully, the film devotes increasing attention and lots of clumsy plotting to the question of litigation—can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?

One of the great strengths of Farewell Amor is its intimacy, the sense it conveys of three people close together yet emotionally distant in Walter’s small, narrow Brooklyn apartment.

Both performances are appealing, but Mr. Ashe’s screenplay is not well served by the laggard pace and low energy of his direction.

What makes the film very much worth seeing—in addition to Mr. Hanks dispensing his special quality of integrity from what seems to be an inexhaustible source—is Kidd’s steadfast effort to cross the divide of mistrust between him and the girl, and her opening up after unimaginable years of shutdown.

I think Soul will become a classic, but we must be patient too, because this stretch of the film is mostly illustrated notions, heavier on explanation than action. It’s very pretty—Klee-like figures and lots of pastel translucency—but not, perhaps inevitably, all that lively.

The sensibility of the earlier production has been transformed, despite Ms. Gadot’s continuing authority. Wit has been replaced by feverish caricature, feeling by sentimentality, and Wonder Woman is left with almost nothing to do for long stretches of a very long and disjointed story.

If there’s any fault to be found with Ammonite, it’s in the film’s deliberateness.

This is a movie about the joys of friendship, among many other things, and the possibility of change—for the better, not only for the worse, and not only through blood-alcohol adjustment.

The stars are obviously having great fun in their roles, and we’re up for sharing it: Who doesn’t want to see a cast like this succeed? Yet the characters and situations are oversold from the opening scenes, and it’s not a problem of technique—these virtuosos can do anything that’s asked of them—but of directorial choice in a movie that still has one foot on a theater stage.