Amy Nicholson

The camera is more athletic than anyone on-screen, muscling between bullets and smashing through walls. Heyvaert shoots action so well that you forgive how little physical action there actually is.

The film is heavy on the dread, light on the narrative. It’s all about the tension in the gym where the adults are just as melodramatic as the girls.

The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

This is a film that spells out its intentions for an audience still learning its ABCs, a film where Michael Giacchino’s misty violins never stop insisting how to feel, where Krasinski’s goofy dad literally wears a heart on his chest.

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

The jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy.

The cast does its best with the material, especially supporting player Perry Mattfeld, who makes a meal out of her small role as the mistress who broke up Solène and David’s marriage.

Are we looking for the human in the Sasquatch? Or for the Sasquatch in us? The movie works either way, but in its refusal to hew to a familiar plot trajectory, it holds up a mirror to our own narcissism.

It’s a simple, gentle tale that’s told beautifully but feels hollow — like a eulogy for an acquaintance.

Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap.

It lacks the control of Guadagnino’s earlier work — or rather, I should say, it takes subtlety and restraint and thwacks them over the fence and into the bushes.

A delirious, pulpy mishmash of knockoffs, The Scargiver isn’t good, but it sure is something.

It’s hard to fault Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners” for being chaotic and miserable. That’s the mood he’s after — and he captures it with such assurance that the film is a tough watch.

It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

Música, Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will.

Between the hammering misanthropy, the herky-jerky editing and almost defiantly crummy sound mix, this exasperating film keeps you enjoyably off-balance.

This is a pressure-cooker film, an exercise in small-budget simplicity that leans on one set and one goal: Keep ’em watching.

“Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.

French Girl is a love triangle farce that’s mostly set in Quebec City but takes place on Planet Rom-com where bipedal characters act out in ways that rarely resemble human behavior.

Though the pair whisper the word “love” in bed and even seem to think they mean it, this is not a movie about two people healing each other. It’s about two broken souls mashing their jagged edges together, hurting each other and those around them. And it’s fun to watch the blood splatter.

While the high jinks are too haphazard to give him a credible — or heck, even coherent — character arc, Cena is here and there able to seize moments to show us the fissures in his layered personas, a fragile construction of confidence, ego, vulnerability and need.

Problemista, which Torres wrote, directed and stars in, reveals a new willingness to tell a relatable story with a riveting sketch of an honest-to-goodness person.

This political context is vital to appreciate the rebellion underneath Sarnet’s romp; otherwise, it’s easy to dismiss it as merely a goofy riff on the Shaw Brothers Studios’ landmark Hong Kong hit “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” which likewise followed a novice’s hard-earned spiritual and gymnastic growth. Of course, it is that, too.

The film, a debut feature from director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell, falls sway to the clickbait tropes it intends to send up: red herrings, a tone of suffocating gloom and a desperation to keep the audience on the hook.