If the story’s psychodynamics are familiar, Mr. Eggers makes them seem newly discovered. The intensity of his writing and direction, as well as the eerie austerity of Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography, Craig Lathrop’s production design and Mark Korven’s music, all conspire to create a film of exceptional originality.

For all the luster of its subject, though, this earnest biopic lacks the spark of life.

One of the hallmarks of contemporary Danish filmmaking is a seemingly effortless naturalism that springs from superb acting and skillful direction.

Where to Invade Next is documentary filmmaking gone wrong, a churlish polemic that uses the tools of propaganda to construct its world view. The film itself is an invasive presence, wreaking havoc in the realm of truth.

Some movies keep you in a state of suspense. Zoolander 2, a dud glitter-bomb of a sequel, eventually leaves you in a state of suspended animation, with eyes glazed over and brain in sleep mode.

The psychology of The Club is warped and gnarled, the thinking of its members less-than-jesuitical.

Few viewers anywhere will be immune to the movie’s charms, or the performances, notably that of Mr. Sigurjonsson, who makes Gummi a slightly mournful, enormously lovable and quixotically heroic figure.

A dispiritingly vitriolic, only sporadically funny satire of ’50s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar! verifies a suspicion long held here, that the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, really hate the movies.

It’s a strange piece of work, full of paradox — sharply analytical about the ways of love, yet sometimes plodding to the point of self-parody; intentionally distanced, yet offputtingly so, despite an exquisite performance by one of the stars, Clotilde Courau.

In Hollywood’s franchise game, sequels are seldom the best they can be. This one isn’t, but it’s pretty, perfectly pleasant and good enough.

The drama is almost stillborn, thanks to a slow, deadly dull romantic preface, and it’s subverted by incessant switching between spectacular struggles on the Atlantic and generic anxieties on shore.

The film is far from perfect, but it’s certainly ambitious, often entertaining and, compared to the feeble competition from new American films of the moment, a singing, dancing, stomping and chomping “Citizen Kane.”

The film almost suffocates on overripe dialogue (“We are messing with the primal forces of nature here”) and finally loses its way in the logical contradictions — or the nonlogical implications — of time travel.

Like the high desert that provides its main setting, William Monahan’s Mojave is dry, often windy and full of hot air.

This wonderful little film, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa and set “somewhere in the Balkans” in 1996, is extremely witty and light on its feet, yet it manages to be thoughtful, even philosophical, in an absurdist way, about the roots of human conflict.

The movie is a relentlessly intense, grotesquely overblown and numbingly long account of extraordinary heroism on the part of six American security operators in the midst of horrific chaos.

In a truly weird way Anomalisa provides an immersive experience that is no less compelling, though lots more authentic, than the one you get in a megahorror show like “The Revenant.” Once you’re in that puppet’s head it’s hard to get out.

The great strength of Concussion is its star’s performance.

The Hateful Eight wears out its welcome well before the halfway point, leaving the equivalent of a whole other movie to sit — and suffer — through.

Joy is at its annoying worst when it’s clamoring to be antic, and at its brilliantly funny best when Joy and her adversaries — including one played by Bradley Cooper — are deadly serious about business as mortal combat.

I came out of this would-be epic feeling physically exhausted, psychically mauled and none the better for wear.

Less is not only more in 45 Years, Andrew Haigh’s study of marriage and memory, it is eloquently and anguishingly more, and what’s unspoken is almost deafening.

The whole movie is a sinkhole — not because it’s smutty or raw, but because it’s lazy, and demeaning to the talented people at its center.

Good movies summon up worlds. Son of Saul, a great movie and a debut feature by László Nemes, summons up a world we may think we know from a visual perspective we’ve never encountered — the willed tunnel vision of a Jewish worker in a Nazi death camp.

Rarely have age and shining youth been juxtaposed more affectingly, but that’s only one of many moments of grace in a movie that mines its resonant mythology while moving its story ever forward.

The script, by Charles Leavitt, is dead in the water, and the drama is too, despite billowing sails and pods of whales. Instead of “Jaws” it’s a turgid “Tails.”

Only in America, though, could filmmakers illuminate such a dire subject, and the financial debacle that ensued, with the sort of scathing wit, joyous irreverence and brilliant boisterousness that make The Big Short an improbable triumph.

From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.