Beatrice Loayza

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.

The stately Foïs carries the film as it devolves into a restrained drama about familial loyalty and womanly fortitude, its change of gears not entirely clicking into place.

Final Cut puts its predecessor’s ingredients through an unflattering Instagram filter. The shoot’s intentional shoddiness — authentically kitschy in the original — rings false, with Hazanavicius spelling out the crew’s missteps in such a way that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.

Amanda is absurd and abrasive, but also sympathetic thanks to Porcaroli’s performance. She’s a flaming narcissist with a gooey core of vulnerability, a being forged by the fear of making herself known.

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.

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

Death and desire swirl around the film’s charged atmosphere, though Le Bon has trouble meaningfully bringing out these elements in the narrative itself, hastily throwing in ambiguities in the last act to create a weightier sense of drama. The effect falls flat.

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.

The forced profundity of the “Butterfly” script undermines the film’s enthralling sense of atmosphere, which drips with melancholy, menace and wonder.

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.

McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star . . . Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.

In The End of Sex, parenthood appears to turn adults into babbling adolescents who blush and freeze up in the face of sexual opportunity. This dynamic is supposed to be cringe-funny, but over the course of an hour and a half, this staid farce proves otherwise.