Manohla Dargis

Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.

More than anything, Mr. Jones is an argument for witnessing and remembrance.

The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.

The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.

No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.

The “Trip” movies have always been self-aware about their own weightlessness, wringing laughs by needling the men and their vanity. That’s as smart as it is convenient; this time, though, it also feels like a cop-out.

It’s always nice to see characters break free, but you need to care whether they do. One insurmountable problem with this story is that Iris just isn’t interesting enough and certainly not developed enough either as a character or in terms of the performance.

In “Never Rarely,” the hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation.

There are different ways to describe Garbus’s telling of this mystery: it’s serious, respectful, gravely melancholic. Yet anger best describes the movie’s atmosphere, its overall mood and its authorial tone.

In this sensational genre whatsit, a town finds itself fighting for its very existence. (Good thing Sônia Braga lives there.)

For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, The Banker spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.

Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism.

Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.

Austen’s story and words, it turns out, prove unsurprisingly durable and impervious to decorative tweaking. And so, after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive.

The sparks fly fast and persuasively — Rae and Stanfield make sense right away — and you’re soon cozying up with the couple while they share stories and increasingly heated looks in a dimly lit restaurant. The writer-director Stella Meghie understands that you want to see these two beautiful people get together, and she smoothly delivers on your own romantic (and romance genre) longings.

In I Was at Home, but…, the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world.

This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.

In effect, with I Wish I Knew, Jia is building not just a portrait of a city, but of a fragmented people — one story and memory at a time. He is finding meaning in collective remembrance and revealing a world, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “under the gaze of the melancholy man.”

The point is cleverness and looking cool, though, mostly the movie is about Ritchie’s own conspicuous pleasure directing famous actors having a lark, trading insults, making mischief. There’s not much else, which depending on your mood and the laxity of your ethical qualms, might be enough.

The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.

The charm of this fantasy has always been dubious and will presumably fade as the natural world continues to disappear and more and more species become extinct.

Actors make lousy choices all the time and if Like a Boss makes money no one will care that it’s formulaic, unfunny, choppy, insults women and seems to be missing much of its middle.

Woodard’s performance gathers its astonishing force incrementally, in subtle choices and inflections that you might not even register as actorly decisions.

A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

Generally, Hooper pulls away from loony-tunes excess, tries for sexy rather than freaky, and plucks at heartstrings, a reflex that pulls the story into mawkishness, particularly when he cuts to Victoria.

Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close-ups.

Part of what works in the movie is that it does a good job of presenting the ordinary assaults that women, even those with great privilege, can endure simply to get through a day, including dehumanizing “compliments.”

Johnson’s own sleight of hand is estimable, even if his effort to add politics into the crowded mix rings hollow. The machine is what matters here, and he has clearly had such a good time engineering it that it’s hard not to feel bad when you don’t laugh along with him.