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.

It’s an emotional investment with rich returns. Pedro Costa’s hypnotic drama, shot superbly by Leonardo Simões, follows its heroine through a dark night of the soul into the light of a new life in a new land.

The film, newly streaming on Netflix, pulls together disparate strands of an untold saga into something thrillingly new.

The Hunt occupies a special place in the chockablock landscape of movie junk. This gleeful, gross-out gorefest looks as tacky and violent as its trackdown plot would suggest, and lives up to certain parts of its bad reputation. It is also funny, genuinely topical, extremely shrewd and, heaven help us, slyly wise. I liked it quite a lot.

This tough-minded, forthright and exquisitely tender film transcends polemics. It’s the odyssey of a lost child in poorly charted territory.

Onward, the latest feature from Pixar Animation Studios via Disney, is insistently unspecial. It’s enjoyable enough if you don’t mind machine-made entertainment, but so desperate to please that it wears out its welcome long before the closing credits.

Taken on its own terms, the film is beautifully crafted, a sequence of events, many of them stirring, along a road to redemption that intersects with a winning group of high-school kids on a losing basketball team.

First Cow is vividly alive on arrival and grows into pure enchantment, although it starts at a saunter and its physical scale is small.

The film isn’t funny at all. It’s so didactic and dislikable that it took me a while to realize humor wasn’t its main goal.

The tutoring sessions progress from whimsical to intriguing to captivating, even though Cristi and his confederates don’t really do very much with their secret code. Good stories thrive on details. The specifics here are abundant, and so charmingly preposterous — or maybe not, who knows? — that they command your rapt attention.

The scariness quotient remains high to the end, the plot is sufficiently twisty, and it’s stirring to watch Cecilia prevail against monstrosity without becoming a monster herself. As to how it all works out, let’s just say that the right person gets the last slash.

What’s missing is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s performance, like others in the film, is wittier than what’s actually on screen); connective tissue (the story is semicoherent at best, a jumble of characters rushing to and fro); and depth of feeling.

Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.

The film’s strength lies in the performances — two fine actors elevating their roles from the touchingly mundane to the suddenly momentous.

The film is an improbably thrilling work of art by virtue of its physical beauty and its relentless intensity of feeling about people — not only Iya and Masha — who would prefer in their heart of shattered hearts to feel nothing.

No one in her world can explain her lack of self-regard, her increasingly strange behavior, all symptoms that lead to scenes of riveting tension, much of it due to the subtlety Ms. Brie brings to the role of Sarah—notwithstanding a deluge of schlock involving paranormal visitations.

The most horrible thing about The Lodge, a horror flick set mostly in a snowbound vacation house, is that it’s no fun.

Much of this R-rated movie is chaotic, yet it’s a richly hued, madly inventive, gleefully violent and happily slapdash contraption with a formidable female at its center.

Still, human doesn’t leap to mind, even though Ms. Lively works hard to inject blood in the veins of her feminist avenger. The Rhythm Section isn’t a human movie. It’s as cold as the waters of that loch, and nowhere near as lucid.

Ms. Garner transcends the inherent limits of her role to convey ineffable tenderness and wordless ferocity in a movie that’s bigger than it seems.