Beatrice Loayza

The overlap of the two households, which offers an exciting narrative possibility, peters out with predictable cynicisms, while the climax is borderline comedic in its forced symbolism about family bonds.

In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality.

The supernatural elements — angry ghosts and sunken places — feel like forced metaphors next to Hana’s real-life horrors, and, worse, they diminish the film’s compelling specificity.

The series’ fourth season is still being rolled out through the summer, making “Azure Sea” play like a long-weekend getaway as opposed to a true feature-length fable. The fans are sure to clock in for its extra nuggets of lore, but there are few reasons for a non-Slimehead to take the plunge.

Intentionally juvenile humor can have a way of breaking down even the stoniest viewer with the right levels of sincerity and self-awareness, but the film (a remake of the Norwegian thriller “The Trip”) is too slick and giddy about its own crudity to nurture these elements.

To sell its brand of wish fulfillment, the film relies almost entirely on the charisma of its leads.

There’s more to love in the details than in this overloaded sprint through history, which the film frames from the perspective of an aging Pagnol as he talks to a phantom version of his younger self and attempts to begin writing his memoirs.

Benesch’s beautifully controlled performance — a balancing act of anxious, fidgety physicality and poker-faced concentration — shows us the difficulty of honoring each patient’s humanity when workplace conditions demand efficiency over empathy. Still, this message runs thin as the story progresses, a bit too evenly, through its various cases, giving the film a languid, repetitious quality.

While the final twist adds some depth to its madcap revenge plot, it’s Jovovich who keeps the film’s moodiness from unintentionally playing for laughs.

The lumbersome conspiracy-building in the front half, paired with flashy visuals and some performances fitting for a crude stoner comedy, make this a bleary experience overall.

Rudd does his lovable simpleton shtick and manic Black carries on, as per usual, like a scruffy Don Quixote, but the film around them doesn’t quite keep pace with their go-for-broke absurdity.

With its jacked-up production budget, “Freddy’s 2,” at the very least, delivers more intricate set pieces that allow for a spatter of solid kill scenes — the rest is as tame and creaky as its signature animatronic teddies.

Frankly, this hunt isn’t particularly thrilling, despite the premise’s potential to create intriguing parallels between Nghe’s erasure and the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by U.S. forces during the war.

Less, here, would have really frightened more.

For too long, we’re like players stuck in a dark stadium tunnel, retreading the same concepts and fending off opaque threats, when all we wanted was some action.

The film is a disappointing send-off; more an eccentric family drama than a real chiller.

Cooke and Coen’s winding narrative feels muted and underdeveloped, making the film’s offscreen deaths and treacherous reveals feel less like cosmic twists of fate than speed bumps that yield small chuckles and sighs.

With its twists and rug-pulls, The Knife makes for an absorbing drama, but it’s also deeply exasperating in that it feels less like a social commentary grounded in reality than an edgy play on emotions.

We’re wondering why these accomplished women could be so uniformly stunted by their delusions of paternal grandeur — which could maybe make for a funny setup. In this overly mannered, weirdly flat dramedy, it’s not.

It’s clever in concept and kind of silly in execution, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if it knew how to commit to its goofiness.

If only these intriguing elements were attached to a more exciting film: We may live among our ghosts, but it’s only fun if they’re actually scaring us.

A critique about the hypocrisies of the righteous upper middle class unfolds halfheartedly, leaving us with performances that might’ve worked better in a sketch comedy scene.

While Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.

Intensions aside, G20 plays well as a silly action movie. I certainly cackled throughout, making it easy to shrug off the incoherence of the conspiracy plot and the obligatory supermom additions.

If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.

The performers hold their ground even if the script simply goes through the motions — the car-as-prison may at first come off like a new jam, and yet you’ve definitely seen it all before.

Naturalistic performances and quiet scenes of summertime idling bring to mind Luca Guadagnino’s drama “Call Me By Your Name,” though Young Hearts is a more wholesome, and ultimately more cliché, endeavor.

If anything, the onslaught of weirdness is hypnotizing. As a visibly small-scale and local undertaking, the film feels genuinely connected to a vision of working-class Texas and its various characters.