Beatrice Loayza

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.

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 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.

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.

Unfolding like a David Fincheresque procedural and doused in gloomy grays and blues, the film, by the writer and director Fernando Guzzoni, may seem provocative to some in the context of #MeToo and its popular mantra to “believe women.”

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.

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

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

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

Cryptozoo stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score.

Though the dialogue is often hit-or-miss, this young adult drama doesn’t simply put a fresh spin on old tropes: It takes seriously the messiness of growing up, the hardest parts of which involve accepting life’s ambiguities.

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

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

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.

[Somai’s] exquisite visual compositions (of lonely bedrooms, concrete piers, and nocturnal courtyards) infuse even the film’s racy images with a somber sense of longing and introspection, finding beauty and humanity in the midst of the macabre.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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