Beatrice Loayza

The director Samad Zarmadili cobbles together this underdog story like a slapdash sitcom episode.

Perhaps Colombian audiences don’t need the history lesson, but skimping on the context in this case also makes the film’s mawkish impulses more glaring and grating, especially as Trueba shifts his observant domestic drama into something of a political rallying cry — a tepid one, at that.

For too long, we’re like players stuck in a dark stadium tunnel, retreading the same concepts and fending off opaque threats, when all we wanted was some action.

Frankly, this hunt isn’t particularly thrilling, despite the premise’s potential to create intriguing parallels between Nghe’s erasure and the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by U.S. forces during the war.

At points, the contrast between Irene’s joy and the encroaching horrors is jarring and eerie, but A Radiant Girl seldom hits these notes — the rest is deflating and awkward.

The film is, at the very least, never boring. It’s also, despite a potentially compelling conceit, pretty ridiculous.

Limited to a mere pointing out of which kinds of images are empowering to women and which aren’t, the documentary ultimately does a disservice to the art form, feminist or otherwise.

It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.

[A] thoroughly generic and often monotonous romance.

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.

The details may be novel — even eye-opening for some — but this story of white guilt and brutality feels mighty old.

It’s perfectly formulaic.

None of these potentially intriguing avenues play out with much thought, diminishing the emotional effect of a tragedy that winds up seeming like an exercise in style.

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.

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.

As the film builds up to its climax, we realize Young’s understanding of mental illness lacks any real depth or complexity, betraying the artist’s limited worldview. The Blazing World is female trauma in the form of an amusement park funhouse.

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.”

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.

The centering of Abigail Disney’s voice — we also see her tweets calling out the outrageous salaries of Disney executives — makes the documentary a kind of personal reckoning and an attempt to get through to other wealthy individuals, though one wonders how a film that doubles as a “Capitalism for Dummies” video would make an impact. Instead, the documentary wants, above all, to make sure we know how one particular Disney feels.

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.

With little interest in elucidating the conflict at hand, much less in distinguishing between the various Somali parties in play, “Escape” is a wildly inadequate history lesson — it’s a silly blockbuster after all. More offensive is the film’s eagerness to whittle one nation’s traumatic episode into a setting for confectionary escapades.