Beatrice Loayza

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.

As it stands, the glue uniting these women of different ethnicities and backgrounds reads like a failed attempt to carve a more ambitious meaning out of individual stories already brimming with possibility.

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.

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

Parthenope, like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Despite its gleeful showcasing of beautiful clothes and vibrant midcentury Parisian sights, the film is caught between its fantasies and its principles, landing somewhere more annoyingly clueless — and dull — than it ought to be.

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.

A critique about the hypocrisies of the righteous upper middle class unfolds halfheartedly, leaving us with performances that might’ve worked better in a sketch comedy scene.

The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.

Rudd does his lovable simpleton shtick and manic Black carries on, as per usual, like a scruffy Don Quixote, but the film around them doesn’t quite keep pace with their go-for-broke absurdity.

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.

A sweeping biopic that presents her as something like an American Girl doll for the “I’m not like other girls” set.

The performers hold their ground even if the script simply goes through the motions — the car-as-prison may at first come off like a new jam, and yet you’ve definitely seen it all before.

If only these intriguing elements were attached to a more exciting film: We may live among our ghosts, but it’s only fun if they’re actually scaring us.

The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.

“Speer” is an intriguing document, highlighting the ease with which the most reprehensible figures are able to whitewash their legacies. But once you settle into its wavelength, the documentary begins to feel simplistic, like a one-track excuse to roll out rare film clips and testimony.

Less, here, would have really frightened more.

Fassbinder’s work finds a kind of truth in the artifice of emotionally plumped-up dramas, but Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits such a stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.

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.

The Frenchwomen twist on the supersquad action movie has its charms, but it’s not enough to eclipse the script’s uninspired angles.

However generic (just this year, “Raya and the Last Dragon” depicted a similar treasure hunt geared toward bringing together diverse groups), the film’s messaging about unity and the need for a new generation to band together against misinformation and rabble rousing isn’t the worst thing.

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.

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.