Beatrice Loayza

Uninterested in world building or creating any sense of stakes, Red Notice is merely an expensive brandishing of star power — only the stars haven’t got it in them.

“Return” cranks the chaos factor up several gears. Maybe that’s a logical shift for a franchise about a creepy New England town that jostles its visitors around multiple planes of reality. Though, here, it’s not as fun as that sounds.

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.

With its jacked-up production budget, “Freddy’s 2,” at the very least, delivers more intricate set pieces that allow for a spatter of solid kill scenes — the rest is as tame and creaky as its signature animatronic teddies.

It’s a shame that it’s all so wincingly contrived. The film tries so hard to be slick, but its efforts are both unoriginal and painfully amateurish.

An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.

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

The film’s palpably-rendered environment, with stiflingly dense foliage and vivid natural soundscapes, heightens the dizzying nature of the war without resorting to titillation or idealized images that might glorify pain and suffering.

The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.

Though moderately compelling to bear witness to one individual’s objections in real time, The Viewing Booth touches on gloomy truths about spectatorship in the digital era that might have felt novel a decade ago.

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

Brimming with postmodern flourishes, Fauna calls attention to the slippery nature of performance and identity, lodging a complex, yet highly engrossing critique of narco culture’s influence on Mexican storytelling — and it does so without a drop of that pesky didacticism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Edwards’s generic approach — heavy on talking heads and explanatory title cards — often yields fuzzy results, with a haphazard rush of information overwhelming the rare moments the documentary settles into a more defined and compelling point of view.

We tend to look at the sex lives of sex workers as endlessly fascinating, but in Bliss the line of work is instead part of a larger take on the hurdles of modern romance.

The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.

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.

Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa.

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.