Beatrice Loayza

The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.

Here, heroism is presented less as a feat of preternatural bravery than a series of choices made by someone who simply refused to give up his humanity.

The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma.

Thornton, who briefly attended a Christian boarding school when he was a child, brings a textured perspective to this story of cultural violence and white guilt.

There’s not much more a “Final Destination” fan could ask for, but “Bloodlines” — which at times feel more like a dark satire than a straightforward horror movie — reminds us we’re powerless against the world’s morbid whims. Best we can do is laugh about it.

With a cringey inspirational tone, the movie weaves in Ledbetter’s advocacy work and court case with moments from her personal life.

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.

While Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.

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.

If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.

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.

Naturalistic performances and quiet scenes of summertime idling bring to mind Luca Guadagnino’s drama “Call Me By Your Name,” though Young Hearts is a more wholesome, and ultimately more cliché, endeavor.

There’s Still Tomorrow is set in Rome after World War I, but it unfolds with timeless verve and romanticism.

If anything, the onslaught of weirdness is hypnotizing. As a visibly small-scale and local undertaking, the film feels genuinely connected to a vision of working-class Texas and its various characters.

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

The film may be sticking to a familiar template, in which a regular Joe gets sucked into an underworld, but Blanchard’s snappy direction and the great mileage he gets out of the city’s nooks and crannies bumps it up the crime-action totem pole.

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.

Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study.

In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.

If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.

Peterson’s script is frustratingly single-note and occasionally bends toward unearned sentimentality. Still, The Graduates feels true to its milieu; its emotional clarity impressive given the loaded subject matter and the film’s subdued style.

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

Smile 2, directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium

Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.

Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen.

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

The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance.

There’s not much in terms of social commentary beyond the obvious. Still, the tension between the two women comes across, at times rivetingly, because of Harris and Dormer.