What makes The Old Guard special is that, for all its canny action tropes, the film really does deal with the prevalence of evil in the world, and the limits of doing good. It’s a lot to squeeze into a smaller screen.

This isn’t a great film, but it’s a work of great subtlety with artfully smudged boundaries — “Rashomon” in modern dress and watercolors.

How does it play? With the same verbal and musical fireworks as the stage version, and with the same emotional kick, which is rooted in the casting.

A treat that becomes a chilling enthrallment, one of those closely observed dramas you love — for its intimacy, calm authority and mystery — even before you begin to get what it’s really about.

The film, streaming on demand, brings old news that can’t hold a flickering candle to the events of our flabbergasting moment, and a clever twist doesn’t redeem long passages of gratingly broad and awkward humor.

What the film does sustain, and quite remarkably, considering its serious theme, is a delicately comic tone. That’s due in large measure to the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

The level of artistry here is out of all proportion to the smallish scale of this Australian coming-of-age drama, which was directed by Shannon Murphy from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais. Everything seems freshly discovered. Lives connect spontaneously, explosively. Love bursts forth inappropriately, yet unquenchably. Moments come along, not just a few but many, that stop your heart, leave you grinning with delight or watching breathlessly.

Anyone expecting some kind of righteously indignant, stentorian rant from Ms. Meeropol will be disappointed. In fact, she does something far more surgical: She makes Cohn ridiculous. She makes him close to an object of pity. He would have hated nothing more. Call it revenge by pathos.

The content can be raw, sometimes startling, but before and after everything else the film is hilarious, and constitutes a cockeyed pantheon of comic performances. On top of that it is beautiful. The more you laugh, the more deeply you’re moved by its portrait of a lost manchild trying to find himself in a present that’s missing a precious piece of his past.

A drama crossed with a polemic that’s enriched by a black-history lesson, the film is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing.

There is often a pulsating musical score buoying the action, such as it is; family snapshots appear, the histories of the individual kids are told, their approaches to competitive spelling are explained, and there are interviews with mothers and fathers who, someone warns, should not be stereotyped as “tiger parents.”

Mr. Miranda may be the drawing card of We Are Freestyle Love Supreme, but director Andrew Fried has made a documentary about friends, rhythm and, in every sense, time.

For all its verbal combat, and marital strife that’s echoed and amplified by a younger academic couple in the manner of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the story works best when the dialogue tides subside. In those fleeting moments Ms. Moss is able to convey, eloquently and almost wordlessly, a tormented soul.

Should you choose to watch Judy & Punch, the best way to do it is with the sound turned low or off. The downside is missing part of Ms. Wasikowska’s performance; she plays Judy with impressive ferocity. The advantage lies in losing the repetitive bombast of Punch’s drunken posturings while enjoying the genuine prettiness of Stefan Duscio’s cinematography and Josephine Ford’s production design.

The oddity of the crime lay in the value of the art — relatively low, except to the artist, a young Czech woman who was neither famous nor rich. The beauty of the film lies in the bond she forges with one of the thieves after they’re found by police and sentenced to 75 days in prison. Questions of identity haunt both the victim and the perp — not their names or addresses, but who they are in the farthest reaches of their psyches, and who they may become.

Sure, the formula has worn thin; this installment is, in fact, the end of the road. But what was great at the outset — supersmart banter coupled with sensational celebrity impressions — is still pretty darned good, and the meander takes an unexpected turn.

Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.

A harrowing but enthralling documentary.

Verve! Lilt! They are precious qualities in movies. As soon as you encounter them you know that liftoff is likely. Saint Frances, newly available on demand, has them in an abundance.

Mr. Dujardin won a best actor Oscar in 2012 for his buoyantly funny performance in “The Artist” as George Valentin, a silent-film star on the way down. Here he’s Georges with an “s” but without the buoyancy or the fun, a man descending into murderous delusion. Quentin Dupieux’s glum absurdist fable gives absurdism a bad name. It’s a facile notion inflated to feature proportions — just barely, since the running time is only 77 minutes.

For all its imperfections, this docudrama with an agitprop heart finds a surprising way into the subject of undocumented immigrants languishing in detention centers.

It’s a delicate and memorable performance by Mr. Jackman. Ms. Janney does the whole Long Island thing as well as anyone ever has. The most resonant character, though, might be Rachel, whom Ms. Viswanathan imbues with the indignation of youth—something the rest of the characters have long outgrown, but which the story was always going to need.

People can indeed live at war with themselves and not know it. Here’s a case of great things happening once peace is declared.

Still, the two main performances count for a lot. Ms. Hayward, who was so endearing as Suzy, the tween lover in “Moonrise Kingdom,” is touchingly winsome as Iris, though she’s sometimes allowed or encouraged by her director to be busier than an actor need be. Ms. Liberato has the best of both worlds, and makes them better; a natural at comedy, she’s adept at serious drama.

Abe is played by Noah Schnapp, from “Stranger Things,” and he’s irresistibly charming. Abe the movie is charming too.

The film is funny and astute on the boundless self-seriousness of adolescence, and a formidable start for Ms. Poe’s career. Here’s looking to her for the next one.

Sergio, a Netflix docudrama directed by Greg Barker from a banal screenplay by Craig Borten, catches flashes of his brilliance from time to time but scatters and dims them through a mosaic structure that’s ultimately no structure at all.

Mr. Yang’s story unfolds with decreasing velocity; in the latter stretches patience is required, though amply rewarded.