For the handful of breathless, electrified minutes Elsa Lanchester occupies the screen in James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein , she hisses, recoils, and refuses. She does not speak. She does not need to. The tragedy and the joke is perfectly formed. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!  (yes, the exclamation point is doing real labor here) arrives some ninety years later determined to answer the question: what was she thinking? It’s a bold provocation. It’s also one that proves far less...

More than half a century after The Beatles’ breakup, the band remains less a closed chapter than an ongoing excavation. Every few years, another corner of the mosaic gets dusted off and reframed. With Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, director Morgan Neville doesn’t attempt to solve the whole 10,000-piece puzzle. Instead, he zeroes in on one crucial, often misunderstood stretch: the years immediately following the split, when McCartney was forced to answer a question no one had ever asked him...

On paper, How to Make a Killing  sounds like a sure thing. A remake of the deliciously cruel Kind Hearts and Coronets . Glen Powell on death row, narrating his ascent up (and through) a gilded family tree. Ed Harris glowering as the patriarchal final boss. A24’s stamp of approval. A jaunty, eat-the-rich premise that promises gallows humor with a side of social commentary. Execution, however, is everything. And John Patton Ford’s film, so meticulous in recreating the bones of its 1949...