Beatrice Loayza

A noirish psychodrama simmering with ambiguities, the film cleverly toys with our perception by loosening our heroine’s grip on reality.

In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.

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

The guarded Julia certainly intrigues, but too often the film sinks into the clichés of a rugged character study — no wonder she prefers to accelerate.

Lentzou, with her first feature no less, gets at something much knottier about what it feels like to get older and perceive your parents as full people, in all their flaws and vulnerabilities; the pains and pleasures of adulthood, contrary to expectation, yield just as much, if not more, unpredictability than in youth.

Despite its gleeful showcasing of beautiful clothes and vibrant midcentury Parisian sights, the film is caught between its fantasies and its principles, landing somewhere more annoyingly clueless — and dull — than it ought to be.

The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.

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.

Written and directed by John Swab, Candy Land is standard grindhouse fare — more serious and less conceptually adventurous than its recent counterparts, Ti West’s “X” and “Pearl” — though not without its fair share of pleasurable nastiness.

Symbolism overshadows characterization, or any sense of motive for that matter, nevertheless Roh succeeds as a spine-tingling baffler, hitting at nerves we can’t quite articulate but feel all the same.

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.

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.

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.

Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.

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

The movie, more often than not, has the look and feel of an edgy music video, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t also oddly boring.

Should you be willing to overlook certain intrinsic difficulties, Held for Ransom is a surprisingly thoughtful hostage drama given the blunt meatheadedness of its title.

It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.

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.

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.

Ada’s psychological tumult is captured in intimate close-ups and fluttering camera movements, while the absence of a score complements the film’s uneasy mood of pent-up rage and stifling despair.

Lindon stages an intentional anticlimax that feels confusingly abrupt and unconvincing. Yet her point is well taken: that the desires of young people are as fickle and ephemeral as flowers in full bloom.

Predictably, their relationship softens up, but the film nevertheless maintains some of its prickly charm, in no small part because of the feisty Rampling, whose ice-queen persona here straddles bone-dry humor and withering tragedy.

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.

It would be easier to be less cynical if No Time to Die convincingly delivered on its commitments to Bond’s humanity, rather than nudging it into a handful of scattered scenes, around a lumbering, half-baked drama spiked with explosions and car chases.

Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.

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.

Bao’s lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth. The film sticks to the action-comedy basics, which is just fine.

Though dressed in shock-value clothing, Medusa is also a straightforward character study, tackling issues like the scourge of Western beauty standards and the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship along the way

A psychological thriller with frustratingly little to say about the trenches of the human mind, Run nevertheless satisfies as a taut and titillating get-out movie that lands somewhere between HBO’s "Sharp Objects" and "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?"

Though far from the gold standard of “brief encounter” dramas like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” Sublet nevertheless wins you over with its subtle charm and its mellow depiction of two men forging an unexpected connection.

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

This startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism.

The result is a clichéd maelstrom of psychological turmoil and empty outpourings of feeling. The film is uninterested in the inner world it claims to investigate; it also cheapens a woman’s trauma by rendering her pain into a confused dramatic spectacle.

Muritiba understands that any portrait of masculinity that fixates too intensely on the cruelties and self-denials of machista culture are futile. Instead, he finds grace in stolen moments of tenderness.

This straightforward romp focuses its attention on its cunning and no-nonsense scream queen. And what Fox lacks in dramatic prowess, she makes up for in pure, wicked magnetism.

It ultimately stumbles in this balancing act and loses sight of its emotional core, but its efforts remain compelling and delightfully bizarre.

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.

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

The takeaway is the difficulty of collaboration in the face of entrenched beliefs and ways of navigating the world that, ultimately, must be questioned — if not entirely dismantled — if any one of us expects to stick around.

Its terse David and Goliath conflict doesn’t yield satisfyingly punchy results.

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.

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.

“Barb and Star” offers a mixed bag of laughs, often feeling like a Frankenstein assembly of various sketches. Still, I can’t help but admire its commitment to the act, and its gloriously unhinged absurdity.

Writer/director Kate Tsang cleverly straddles childhood fantasy with the baser impulses of adolescence, drawing an angsty portrait of teenage girlhood in transition. But even as a movie geared towards young adults, Marvelous and the Black Hole feels innocent to a fault.

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

The documentary is a cookie-cutter presentation intent on showing viewers how leaders of the anti-abortion movement have managed to advance their goals and consolidate power by mobilizing an evangelical minority.

Fassbinder’s work finds a kind of truth in the artifice of emotionally plumped-up dramas, but Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits such a stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.

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.

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.

Kitchen Brigade is a white-savior story par excellence, though at least it’s not difficult to swallow — the young people are lovely, and so is the food.

I Want You Back isn’t particularly clever or emotionally stirring, but it does briskly deliver on the corny promises of the genre, navigating relatable relationship issues by the least relatable means.

At points, the contrast between Irene’s joy and the encroaching horrors is jarring and eerie, but A Radiant Girl seldom hits these notes — the rest is deflating and awkward.

With her square-jawed beauty and exacting gaze, Wright brings intelligence and dignity to her character’s self-imposed martyrdom. It’s a weighty performance from the routinely strong actor. Maybe too weighty: Even in her blunders, Edee is solemn and deliberate.

Hadzihalilovic is an expert conjurer of other worlds, and “Earwig” unearths a startlingly seductive array of visual and sonic textures that don’t quite add up to much more than a powerful mood.

The centering of Abigail Disney’s voice — we also see her tweets calling out the outrageous salaries of Disney executives — makes the documentary a kind of personal reckoning and an attempt to get through to other wealthy individuals, though one wonders how a film that doubles as a “Capitalism for Dummies” video would make an impact. Instead, the documentary wants, above all, to make sure we know how one particular Disney feels.

The film is at its strongest when it focuses, in its more understated scenes, on a distressing human tendency: to create distance between ourselves and those who know us best.

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.

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.

The Columnist doesn’t seem to care about making a cogent statement about feminist revenge or online culture. Perhaps it just needed an excuse to carry out its bloody high jinks, which are decent fun in their own right.

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.

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.

Better late than never, the film’s spiritual thrust becomes clear by the third act. The stark symmetry of the shelved merchandise and the eerily dissonant score assumes an otherworldly, ritualistic power when our subjects begin musing on faith and the nature of existence.

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.

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

Superior falls short of inhabiting the period within which it purports to exist.

Limited to a mere pointing out of which kinds of images are empowering to women and which aren’t, the documentary ultimately does a disservice to the art form, feminist or otherwise.

Unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, Four Samosas feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.

A simple yet engaging melodrama.

Perhaps Colombian audiences don’t need the history lesson, but skimping on the context in this case also makes the film’s mawkish impulses more glaring and grating, especially as Trueba shifts his observant domestic drama into something of a political rallying cry — a tepid one, at that.

In short, it too efficiently glosses over multiple plotlines to have much of an emotional impact. What remains are mostly generic beats. Still, the formula is engrossing enough, and its midcentury vintage appeal — the pillbox hats, headscarves and swanky soirees — is particularly seductive.

Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.

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

One can imagine how the particularities of the Romanian bush might yield novel dynamics. Instead, Dogs underplays these elements and commits to the beats of the slow burn thriller in mostly generic form.

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

No Exit drops an arsenal of twists and rug-pulls at a machine gun’s pace, though Power, the director, doesn’t quite know how to milk the tension, and the perfunctory script (written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari) tries and fails to give the events a greater resonance.

Shifting between stagy sincerity and startling realism (the labor scene is particularly colorful), The Road Dance is a vividly rendered, if ultimately schematic portrait of feminine resilience.

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

Despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.

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

There are no particularly moving insights, and it falls short of a proper character study, but “Playlist” does intrigue with its droll individual parts — if not the sum of them.

Despite her minor rebellions, Mona remains a frustratingly opaque character; a stereotypically troubled woman whose eventual awakening merits a shrug at most.

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

Less kooky and gratingly precious than “Jojo Rabbit” or “Life Is Beautiful,” the film nevertheless also taps history with a movie-magic wand.

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

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.

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.

As it stands, the glue uniting these women of different ethnicities and backgrounds reads like a failed attempt to carve a more ambitious meaning out of individual stories already brimming with possibility.

One can’t help but wonder if Eiffel is merely a lame fantasy or a particularly spineless form of mythmaking, whittling down as it does one nation’s politically loaded event to the equivalent of an Eiffel Tower key chain with an inscription reading “city of love.”

Stewing in the film’s carefully crafted atmosphere of hypocrisy is, however, essential; values and attitudes deconstruct when they’re oversoaked. But make no mistake, the ride will be demanding.

[A] thoroughly generic and often monotonous romance.

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.

Everton and Call are charming enough, and Everton is a particularly magnetic physical performer, but their high jinks . . . are hit-and-miss. But mostly miss.

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.

Guiraudie is after something much different here: creating a palpable sense of the connection between fear and desire, which, sure, aren’t the most rational of our human impulses — but neither are love, marriage or jihadist crusading.

It’s perfectly formulaic.

With its saucer-eyed, bobblehead-like characters, it’s a version barely distinguishable from the majority of animated children’s movies these days — more like Spirit domesticated.

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.