Beatrice Loayza

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 Akin’s credit, the film isn’t tastelessly sentimental (see “Jojo Rabbit”), and it depicts Nanning’s awakening with the kind of subtlety and restraint that suggests his moral education will continue evolving after the end of the movie.

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

The film tracks about a year in Chuang’s life in a sober, sociological style of long takes and smooth pans. The story feels loose, intentionally directionless, at first, but as it winds toward the cooler months, its collection of small details builds up to big-picture revelations about the imminent rise of China as a global superpower.

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.

“Return” cranks the chaos factor up several gears. Maybe that’s a logical shift for a franchise about a creepy New England town that jostles its visitors around multiple planes of reality. Though, here, it’s not as fun as that sounds.

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.

There’s something smarter between the lines about the way technology warps our (self-) perception, but maybe that’s giving too much credit to a film so giddy about its warping. That’s not totally bad: Some films are like dreams whose meanings never materialize.

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.

Nelson may be throwing too much at the wall, but he does manage to make you feel something beyond just gross-out thrills.

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.

Like a cross between a Studio Ghibli joint and “Interstellar,” Arco, by the French comic-book artist turned filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu, strikes a lovely balance between fantastical kid-friendly wholesomeness and real-world bleakness.

The film weaves a surprising amount of history into a procedural framework. It’s eye-opening, even though it’s hitting the same old beats.

The film’s intriguing symbolism diminishes over time, but remaining is an elegant portrait of solidarity; a vision of workers enmeshed in the land that sustains them.

Less, here, would have really frightened more.

Urchin doesn’t break the mold, but it’s a confident, quietly affecting drama that strikes above the standard character study.

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.

Coming-of-age works are about discovery, but Dreams reminds us that this process can be fluid and fanciful. Our fantasies shape who we are because they invite us to clear out the mist — and find firmer ground on the other side.

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

The payoff feels somewhat slight, but the foreplay — the will-they-or-won’t-they and the will-he-find-out — builds up with energy and flare. Maybe climaxes are overrated, anyway.

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.

Il Dono manages to strike a balance between damnation and idolatry of its medieval setting. We’re sucked in, enraptured, even as we feel its lives fading away.

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.

In the end, Familiar Touch reveals itself to be less about the agonies of change than in the concessions we make to feel closer to our loved ones and ourselves.

The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.

Here, heroism is presented less as a feat of preternatural bravery than a series of choices made by someone who simply refused to give up his humanity.

The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma.

Thornton, who briefly attended a Christian boarding school when he was a child, brings a textured perspective to this story of cultural violence and white guilt.

There’s not much more a “Final Destination” fan could ask for, but “Bloodlines” — which at times feel more like a dark satire than a straightforward horror movie — reminds us we’re powerless against the world’s morbid whims. Best we can do is laugh about it.

With a cringey inspirational tone, the movie weaves in Ledbetter’s advocacy work and court case with moments from her personal life.

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.

There’s Still Tomorrow is set in Rome after World War I, but it unfolds with timeless verve and romanticism.

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.

Parthenope, like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive.

The film may be sticking to a familiar template, in which a regular Joe gets sucked into an underworld, but Blanchard’s snappy direction and the great mileage he gets out of the city’s nooks and crannies bumps it up the crime-action totem pole.

None of these potentially intriguing avenues play out with much thought, diminishing the emotional effect of a tragedy that winds up seeming like an exercise in style.

Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study.

In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.

If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.

Peterson’s script is frustratingly single-note and occasionally bends toward unearned sentimentality. Still, The Graduates feels true to its milieu; its emotional clarity impressive given the loaded subject matter and the film’s subdued style.

The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.

Smile 2, directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium

Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.

Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen.

A sweeping biopic that presents her as something like an American Girl doll for the “I’m not like other girls” set.

The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance.

There’s not much in terms of social commentary beyond the obvious. Still, the tension between the two women comes across, at times rivetingly, because of Harris and Dormer.

There’s an implication that repressed emotions are simmering beneath the mundane, but that doesn’t always come across.

The film, as a result, feels wildly uneven, though it cruises on the strength of its underdog narrative and its weird, sordid touches.

Ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.

Touch rekindles a treacly genre that I didn’t realize I missed. Its tender performances and gut-punch reveals are classic tear-jerker ingredients. Add to this a natural, inordinately sensitive approach to intercultural love — mercifully, without a sense of righteousness or obligation.

The superior second half, in which Rita’s reality is upended, eases into a realm of fantasy that is admirable — and more effective — because of its uncanny, inventive minimalism.

Hope was never something that I associated with Schanelec’s typically dour films, yet here, from the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.

The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and Fiala bring out this reality’s latent horrors through a series of suspense-building strategies.

Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.

Coma pushes the boundaries of the so-called lockdown movie with its thrilling, chaotic form.

That passion could bloom in such spontaneous and unexpected forms is part of this enigmatic film’s potency.

Grineviciute and Cicenas, however, give depth to a story that becomes stuck on the sorrows of the couple’s discrepancies.

The film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.

This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.

That Philibert doesn’t stick to a “main character,” or impose a phony narrative arc, vibes well with the facility’s free-spirited methods, even if the documentary lacks the drama of a more structured production.

The film avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too.

Wahlberg and company manage to hold your attention, and not just because there’s a cute dog in the frame.

Becoming King exhibits the kind of self-importance that ultimately diminishes the subject, be it Dr. King or Oyelowo.

It’s a film for those who don’t know the outcome, playing upon the viewers’ thirst for answers as it chips away at a clearer portrait of the man.

It’s more of a fever dream than an actual story, offering a queer counternarrative to the macho vision of the legendary warrior that is as hypnotic as it is gnarly.

Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa.

It’s a heart-warmer about respecting your elders.

The Crime is Mine is the epitome of a comfort film, decked out in old-Hollywood nostalgia and unfolding at an auctioneer’s clip. Its fun and games are deceptively smart — all the more because the women know their angles so triumphantly well.

A simple yet engaging melodrama.

Maybe it’s low hanging fruit that the white supremacist character is the best comic fodder, but the film’s trolling is stranger and more esoterically inclined than its selection of political punching bags would seem to warrant.

Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.

It’s like “Peeping Tom” meets one of Dario Argento’s giallo joints, but slathered in a coat of melancholic malaise.

Crude and sensationalizing, Manodrome is like an amalgam of all the headlines you’ve read about the kinds of men who succumb to warped ideologies.

The Frenchwomen twist on the supersquad action movie has its charms, but it’s not enough to eclipse the script’s uninspired angles.

The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.

Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.

The traps are disgusting; the plot, so self-serious its absurd (and knowingly so). And unlike the sundry sequels before it (by the third “Saw,” any pretense of ingenuity had been hacked off), this one manages to make you feel something beyond gross-out adrenaline — assuming you have affection for the franchise’s mainstays.

Grémillon supplements the bleak fatalism and noirish intrigue with bursts of quivering melodrama that enrich and expand the story beyond its ostensible fatal-attraction framework.

Abounding with nasty women, The Origin of Evil could have easily been flattened by the weight of a feminist objective. Untethered from such neat messaging, this decadent murder-movie takes the online credo, “be gay, do crimes,” and runs with it — to delicious results.

At best, this drama picks apart the Islamic State’s nefarious recruitment tactics, taking on the fresh perspective of a Muslim family in Europe. These dynamics are rich, and the consequences agonizing — so it’s too bad the filmmakers seem to think that the bigger the spectacle, the more powerfully communicated this whirlwind of politics and emotions. The opposite is the case.

Directed by Stig Björkman and narrated by Laura Dern, this documentary is so fixated on enshrining Oates within the canon of American literary giants that it skirts around the peculiarity and provocation of her ideas.

Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, but Wali Zada conveys what matters.

In the assured hands of the writer-director Ellie Foumbi, Marie’s unraveling yields not only an absorbing psychological thriller, but a profound meditation on the ethics of immigration.

Despite Efira’s efforts, Judith’s inevitable breakdown never hits a satisfyingly deranged register. Her motivations turn out to be less spicy, and more blandly sympathetic than one had hoped from this pressure cooker of a film.

Carrère — known primarily in Europe as a writer of nonfiction books with a literary twist — applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries. . . Less compelling is the sentimental crisis that plays out because of Marianne’s deception.