Beatrice Loayza

Though moderately compelling to bear witness to one individual’s objections in real time, The Viewing Booth touches on gloomy truths about spectatorship in the digital era that might have felt novel a decade ago.

[Emma Dante] imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations with metaphysical grace and hints of fantasy, straying from the plot-reliant mold of most human dramas toward something more haunting and powerful.

Brimming with postmodern flourishes, Fauna calls attention to the slippery nature of performance and identity, lodging a complex, yet highly engrossing critique of narco culture’s influence on Mexican storytelling — and it does so without a drop of that pesky didacticism.

Utgoff is irresistibly compelling, instilling in his character a silent yet singular presence worthy of the “superhero” status that he ultimately acquires.

Mandibles is sweet, simple, and oh-so-very stupid — a stupidity that’s oddly liberating, like making up ridiculous scenarios with a pal over bong hits.

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.

It’s a shame that it’s all so wincingly contrived. The film tries so hard to be slick, but its efforts are both unoriginal and painfully amateurish.

Though Jacquot throws into question our presumptions about figures like Casanova, as well as vilified women like La Charpillon, he leaves it at that, leaving us wondering what exactly it was all for.

The documentary combines interviews with original company members and archival footage with vérité-style training scenes from a college dance troupe’s reinterpretation of the piece. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an artist that simultaneously taps into the personal and political dimensions that inform the creation of art.

The film is, at the very least, never boring. It’s also, despite a potentially compelling conceit, pretty ridiculous.

Ameen prioritizes symbolism teeming with sensory spirit over plot-based narrative, which ultimately renders her attempt at making a political statement too opaque and disjointed to have much of an impact.

Court — whose languorous pacing heightens the film’s brief, bewildering moments of action — summons an unsettling experience from relatively restrained gestures.

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.

The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.

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.

Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.

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

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.

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.

The film’s palpably-rendered environment, with stiflingly dense foliage and vivid natural soundscapes, heightens the dizzying nature of the war without resorting to titillation or idealized images that might glorify pain and suffering.

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.

In the end, Jensen opts for feel-good fantasy over hardened truths, but his dizzyingly chaotic methods amount to a dynamic, unexpectedly touching ode to the difficulties of baring your vulnerabilities to genuinely overcome them.

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.

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.

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.

Wei Lun comes off as one-dimensional in his brash, immature pursuit of Ling, yet their illicit relationship is portrayed in an anti-sensationalist light, blurring the lines between maternal and romantic love.

The director Samad Zarmadili cobbles together this underdog story like a slapdash sitcom episode.

The human dimension is painfully cliché, and Oie’s clunky orchestration of intersecting individual stories flattens the film’s overall momentum. It does, however, manage to eke out moments of genuine suspense and harrowing claustrophobia with its straightforward premise and contained, small-scale action.

An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.

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

The unity rhetoric feels awfully trite, but it also teaches forgiveness: a worthy lesson for the kids.

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.

Lacôte’s got a lot on his mind, and despite a few missteps, his ambition pays off.

“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.

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.

Through the use of symbolic peepholes, eavesdropping and dark rooms that provide cover for whispered assurances of devotion, Two of Us succeeds as a stealthy depiction of lesbian erotics, one that mirrors the inhibitions of a generation.

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

It’s a blatantly didactic film, yet its focus on advocacy feels justified given the misconceptions that continue to dominate society’s understanding of the autism community.

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.

Minari is that rare slice-of-life drama that contains multitudes without needing to look beyond the borders of its highly specific story.

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?"

Yet in striving to carve out a distinctly feminine experience within the male-dominated profession, the filmmaker loses sight of the person inside the space suit, falling back on the family/career dilemma in a way that feels archaic and, for the most part, less than insightful.

Wheatley plays it safe, and throws star power and sumptuous imagery our way as reason enough for his pale, uninventive iteration of the classic gothic horror. It goes down easy enough thanks to Lily James and the already-delicious plot, but Wheatley’s imitation fumbles when it matters most.

Yet without dumbing down its message, Marcello’s sweeping Künstlerroman has all the pleasurable characteristics of a simmering romance and a poignant tragedy, too.

Foregoing the knotty male-female relationships (and soju bottles) of recent work, Hong examines instead the textures of female relationships and what independence might look and feel like for women entering a new, more mature stage of life—and how a short trip out of one’s comfort zone might generate bounties of food for thought.

There’s no room for introspection or difficult questions here. Antebellum therefore reads like the corporate spawn of “Black horror,” pieced together from Twitter anti-racist soundbites and crafted for maximum clout.

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.