This clearly qualifies as a heist film, and a hugely entertaining one, notwithstanding a few plot perforations and a running time of two hours plus that might have been trimmed a bit.

The production’s shrill insistence on scandal-mongering as the poison of our political process is trivializing, too. Given the profound currents and countercurrents that have transformed — and menaced — the news media in the last few years, this story plays like quaintly ancient history.

The stars were misaligned from the start for this frantic, turgid thriller. That’s no knock on Ms. Foy, who might have surprised us if she’d had a different director working from a different script under a different set of studio imperatives that didn’t involve extracting blood from a very cold stone.

The whole film feels magical in the way it gets at intangible, invisible, ineffable things without naming them, and tells a gripping story of obsession at a poet’s pace, without need of conventional explanations.

The most compelling reason to see A Private War is Rosamund Pike’s stunning performance as Marie Colvin, the American war correspondent who died in a bombardment while covering the Syrian government’s 2012 siege of Homs.

The film is all the more powerful for its grounding in fact. How powerful? Sufficiently, during most of its length, and extremely during several eruptions of searing drama.

The good news is twofold. Ms. Foy, an accomplished performer, is appealing throughout. And Keira Knightley, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, gives the film several desperately needed jolts of edgy energy.

The whole thing devolves into such highfalutin silliness that it’s impossible to care what happens to whom. In Mr. Guadagnino’s previous film, “Call Me By Your Name,” the tone was romantic, and sustained to the very end. In Suspiria, style stomps fun into submission.

Border may not be everyone’s idea of a fun night out, but it takes you to places you won’t forget, and that’s nothing to sniff at.

In the realm of documentary films, as in the news media, polemicists are ascendant, but Frederick Wiseman isn’t one of them. For the past half-century, since his first film, “Titicut Follies,” he’s been an observationist. Not an observer, which carries a passive connotation, but a filmmaker who’s made a distinguished career of observing in a particular way — closely, calmly, shrewdly and systematically, with an eye to the institutions and social structures that shape and reveal people’s lives.

It’s full of music that makes the case for its subject’s pre-eminence—he played with the intensity of a highest-category hurricane—and has an interesting slant on the issue of cultural appropriation; Butterfield was white, and the blues he played were, and remain, indelibly black.

The film is not only not unpleasant but a genuine, authentic and honest-to-goodness pleasure.

An affecting coming-of-age drama based on a superb book and directed by an exceptional actor in his directorial debut.

This fine debut feature by Elizabeth Chomko dramatizes well-worn themes — degenerative illness, family dysfunction, anguishing choices to be made in the face of implacable decline. Yet the cast is exceptional, the performances are extraordinary, the writing and direction are heartfelt, and the film is, consequently, stirring, frequently funny and consistently affecting.

The root problem is repetitiveness, the seemingly endless cycle of progress and relapse that causes heartbreak in real life and induces déjà vu in audiences — even dejà déjà vu, since there’s repetition within the already familiar pattern. The mosaic structure is simply, though not successfully, an attempt to hold our attention.

However inward the hero may be, the movie around him is thrillingly outward, not to mention poundingly onward and relentlessly upward.

What Sadie brings most importantly to Private Life is the lovely, sometimes loopy and always infectious joy she takes in living. She’s a bright, welcome presence in a film that can be startlingly dark, even polemic, and she represents another side of Ms. Jenkins, whose previous films, “Slums of Beverly Hills” and “The Savages,” were overflowing with life.

The simplest thing to say about A Star Is Born is that it’s all right. Not all right as in OK with a shrug, but thrillingly, almost miraculously right in all respects.

Free Solo would be an exceptional piece of filmmaking if it confined itself to the physical poetry of Mr. Honnold’s achievements. But it gets at his inner life too, and goes a long way toward answering the unspoken question of what makes — or allows — him to do what he does.

In a word, The Old Man & the Gun is enjoyable; that’s all it means to be and that’s what it is.

It’s hard to overstate the pleasures of this film or, more precisely, this encounter with its subject.

A two-hour documentary that feels like three, it certainly has a worthy subject, and a charismatic one; it commits a trove of valuable cultural lore to posterity. But it also commits a sin in never finding its rhythm, or a through-line on which to hang one of the great stories of American popular music.

Colette is not really a coming-of-age story, except as regards France itself. It’s a liberation story, one witty enough to be worthy of its subject.

Almost the entire movie is lifted from other sources, and then edited in a way that makes his enemies (do they know they’re his enemies?) look as foolish as possible. The punditry is trite. The snark is boring.

Museo is in part a caper film, a heist film, and while it leans on such classics as “Topkapi” and “Rififi” the robbery has its own signature and is done in a visual style that’s hypnotic.

The most serious flaw, and one that will irk a lot of Bel Canto enthusiasts, is the too-obvious lip-syncing of Ms. Moore to Ms. Fleming’s glorious singing. They simply don’t match up, and the music takes place at points in the film when viewers really don’t want to be thrown off. But thrown off they will be.

That the circuitous international influence of the western should manifest itself in South Africa is no surprise. Neither is the fact that someone as charismatic as Mr. Dabula should be the star of such a story, which is ripe with indignation, injustice, righteous violence and, ultimately, a shootout of cosmic resonance.

Making his film debut, Richie Merritt plays Rick as a sullen, evidently stupid and certainly uncharismatic schemer in possession of a modicum of animal cunning and perhaps a hint of personal insight. But there’s no life in his eyes. And little life in his acting. Which is too bad for Matthew McConaughey, who gives yet another terrific performance.