Dramatically relentless and emotionally shattering, it brings news from a turbulent past that casts a baleful light on America’s troubled present.

If the plot turns out to be a convenience, the pleasure lies in what the co-stars bring to it.

Seldom has such a glittering wagon been hitched to such dull stars.

In Dunkirk, an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic.

Whether the truth sets anyone free is unknowable at this point, but the city that was being slaughtered silently has been heard, and its suffering has been seen.

This improbably magnificent film and Michael Giacchino’s majestic score are a perfect match.

There are mysteries here, not the least of them being how such a modest little movie can evoke such profound feelings.

Genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age.

Beguiling, meditative and elegantly photographed documentary.

Sensationally entertaining.

Ms. Dorfman, bless her open heart, has been captivated by the surfaces of the people she shoots, of how they seem. “I am totally not interested in capturing their souls.”

The strength of her film transcends the soldier’s power to seduce. We’re beguiled, as an audience, by seeing this male animal as he is seen, and for better and worse experienced, by a diverse and dynamic group of females. And by seeing, in the end, how The Beguiled gives new and memorable meaning to the notion of a finishing school.

It’s hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

The story has the hollow ring of artifice, even though Ms. Hawkins shrinks quite remarkably into the physical aspects of the role and opens up its spiritual dimensions.

Lost in Paris is nonsensical by design, a comedy of the absurd that’s always entertaining and occasionally pure.

The first film wasn’t bad, though it had its lapses. “Cars 2,” an aberration, was readily forgotten. This one feels like the series, at the end of the road, is running on fumes of nostalgia for its earliest self.

Taut, smart, intense and genuinely scary, Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night fulfills the promise, and then some, of the filmmaker’s 2015 debut feature, “Krisha.”

Here, it is saying in effect, are old-fashioned conventions that still have life in them, but to appreciate them we need to approach them playfully. That worked for me, from the understated start to the overwrought finish.

A movie that goes beyond defying comprehension to being truly incomprehensible.

Audacity can’t carry a drama that’s unequal to its subject in almost every respect. ( Brian Cox does what he can, sometimes admirably, to breathe life into the title role.)

Caught up in the coils of Princess Diana’s hot lasso, I am bound to tell the truth: Wonder Woman is wonderful, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment. She is also learned, charmingly funny and, for a goddess, touchingly human.

War Machine, with a screenplay and direction by David Michod (of 2010’s ferocious “Animal Kingdom”), is a comedy because, as per the old Angela Carter line, it’s tragedy happening to other people. But it’s also a highly accessible examination of why the Afghanistan war couldn’t be won the way we—in the person of Gen. McChrystal—were fighting it.

The movie is a minor crime, a meandering misdemeanor that’s neither soft-core nor hardcore but no core, with no consistent style and minimal content.

This movie is truly unhinged — not crazed, which might be interesting, but devoid of the usual hinges that connect one sequence with another.

This Danish-language film about a Copenhagen commune in the mid-1970s pulses with screwy energy and antic confusion.

This new “Alien” prequel is mostly a gore fest, which may be great news for gluttons of the genre.

The soul of Ms. Burshtein’s film lives in its lovely off-center encounters, since the men Michal meets turn out to be consistently interesting.

This latest retelling of the ancient Arthurian myth is a stinker for the ages.