Beatrice Loayza

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.