Beatrice Loayza

The movie never manages to hit above a dim emotional pitch, and a final-act awakening lands with a shrug.

Cookie-cutter though it is, The Janes does have something going for it: its interview subjects, the former Janes, who all speak about their beliefs and shared past with striking clarity.

"Maika” stands out for its moments of weird eccentricity. Bad guys get slapped by gobs of kimchi and Hung and Maika float around in a bubble, zooming past airplanes. Sure, it’s all very loud and cartoonish, but at least we’re not stuck in the suburbs.

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.”

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.

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

True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny. But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.

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.

Though Winograd questions the film’s gender biases in the conclusion, he does so unconvincingly. At a quick 95 minutes, at least the whole thing zips by, however brainlessly.

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.

We somehow feel connected to these animals — not by their precious, humanlike relatability — but by the cyclically banal and thorough means with which they are exploited, milked and bred on aggressive schedules that break their bodies down prematurely.

Gagarine is more interesting conceptually than it is in execution, but at least the filmmakers know to exalt the setting’s spectral qualities, adding dreamy, hypnotic touches to their phantom portrait of a place that is no longer of this world.

With a kind of dissociative, jet lag-induced delirium, the film transitions — somehow fluidly — from the lush woodlands and desolate churches of southern Germany to the flickering lights and modernist textures of Hong Kong in the throes of mass demonstrations.

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.

It’s perfectly formulaic.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Perez is a flimsy leading man, and the film around him — a modest production that doesn’t exactly hide its budgetary shortcomings — is at best a borderline campy B-movie with bursts of bloody action. At worst, it’s a completely self-serious slog.

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

Though attentive to calls for police accountability, and the media’s role in reducing complex issues into simple narratives, Long’s schematic script ramps up theatrics at the expense of more challenging insights.

Adapted by Lafitte from a 2013 play by Sébastien Thiery, Dear Mother is the kind of screwball comedy whose absurd premise and speedy pacing very nearly allow you to overlook the fact that it’s not exceedingly bright or witty.

So many things can and do go wrong, but this production diary’s most intriguing element is the way it considers the value of art at a time when the country seems to be on fire.

The film runs through plot points in appropriately spectacular, if mechanical, fashion. A shoddy script and an overwhelming reliance on clichés, however, make this would-be blockbuster feel incredibly cheap.

The main issue is the film’s trite commentary on America’s political and racial divides (see also: last year’s “The Hunt”), which is neither funny, frightening, nor provocative. Just numbing.

This Is Not a War Story, which Lugacy also directed, is a naturalistic, chat-heavy narrative that captures the difficulties wrought by the unimaginable trauma individuals face as they attempt to forge connections and find peace after war.