Beatrice Loayza

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.

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

Nelson may be throwing too much at the wall, but he does manage to make you feel something beyond just gross-out thrills.

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

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

Intensions aside, G20 plays well as a silly action movie. I certainly cackled throughout, making it easy to shrug off the incoherence of the conspiracy plot and the obligatory supermom additions.

Intentionally juvenile humor can have a way of breaking down even the stoniest viewer with the right levels of sincerity and self-awareness, but the film (a remake of the Norwegian thriller “The Trip”) is too slick and giddy about its own crudity to nurture these elements.

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.

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.”

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.

[A] thoroughly generic and often monotonous romance.

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.

Everton and Call are charming enough, and Everton is a particularly magnetic physical performer, but their high jinks . . . are hit-and-miss. But mostly miss.

We’re wondering why these accomplished women could be so uniformly stunted by their delusions of paternal grandeur — which could maybe make for a funny setup. In this overly mannered, weirdly flat dramedy, it’s not.

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.

It’s perfectly formulaic.

With its saucer-eyed, bobblehead-like characters, it’s a version barely distinguishable from the majority of animated children’s movies these days — more like Spirit domesticated.

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 human dimension is painfully cliché, and Oie’s clunky orchestration of intersecting individual stories flattens the film’s overall momentum. It does, however, manage to eke out moments of genuine suspense and harrowing claustrophobia with its straightforward premise and contained, small-scale action.

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.

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.

There’s no room for introspection or difficult questions here. Antebellum therefore reads like the corporate spawn of “Black horror,” pieced together from Twitter anti-racist soundbites and crafted for maximum clout.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While the final twist adds some depth to its madcap revenge plot, it’s Jovovich who keeps the film’s moodiness from unintentionally playing for laughs.

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.