Ben Croll

If the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness.

Genuinely frightening in stretches and with the creep-o-meter jacked up to 1,000 all the way through, “Bones and All” is somehow more and less than a simple horror flick, and not quite a rambling romance.

Does it all work? Not quite, but you can’t fault a film for its ambition, least of all one that does manage to bring it all together for a deeply moving home stretch.

Viewed under the right conditions — that is to say, late at night, in a certain headspace and surrounded by an audience of fellow travelers ready to take the ride – “Cuckoo” will offer an awful lot of big-screen fun. Only those external factors are nearly necessary to meet an overeager film with only one note to play.

For all of his self-imposed restraints, Ozon remains a terrific actors’ director, with both Marceau and especially Dussollier giving lively performances that afford the film its limited spark.

At once a darkly comic social satire, a pitch-black moral thriller and an earnest plea to recognize mental illness, The Dinner is a seven-layer dip overflowing with compelling individual ingredients that, when mixed together, make the finished dish awfully difficult to digest.

Between Two Worlds is highly self-aware, at some points simply playing up the odd dissonance of seeing as glamorous a figure as Juliette Binoche scrubbing toilets, and at other points making more caustic commentary on the impossible task the book and adaptation set out to accomplish.

We take frequent and foolish pleasure watching the four charismatic leads brush up against one another while bristling against their assigned roles, with the film giving performer time to shine.

By no means a failed film, this two-hander about toxic-codependency from Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer is best in small-moments and insightful asides, but does a disservice to the relationship at its heart by honing in on one single thought and hammering it home again and again and again.

Like that abyss, the film offers a substantial degree of exploration for those willing to do the work and take the dive.

More frustrating than a misfire, “Jeanne du Barry” suffers instead from near total myopia, roaring to life with wit and ingenuity when the constellations align and the lead’s star can shine, and dwindling before the risk of any possible eclipse. The film burns hot and bright — and quickly flames out.

Afire doesn’t have that much story to tell or cards to turn over. When it does run out of reveals, we’re left with a character too thick to catch up and an approach that begins to double itself.

No matter how outwardly anodyne, nearly every frame is a product of rigorous blocking and choreography, stamping each shot with a kind of Good Filmmaking Seal of Approval that makes the chasm between the film’s deliberateness and opacity all the more vast.

Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s film is not so much the story of a fighter as it is a story that wants to fight you.

Like a steady hand holding a straight razor, Argento cuts through the story with clean swipes. Dark Glasses has little room for twists and turns; it holds nothing up its sleeve and asks little more of the viewer than to sit still and enjoy the ride.

In his 2014 Palme d’Or winner, Ceylan unpacked thorny issues of ethics and morality with a surgeon’s steady patience; he employs a similar approach here, only the territory is much less fertile.

An autobiographical portrait that somehow leaves you knowing less about the subject at hand, and a study of actors, warts and all, that offers little insight into the artistic process.

Though the film is not more than sum of its parts, well, those parts are pretty great. You just wish they belonged to a slightly deeper film.

Downsizing is rife with witty visual touches and inspired comic premises but never quite comes together as fully successful whole.

The always-understated director never mines the domestic situation for excessive melodrama, instead opting to step back and wryly examine the three leads’ contradictory impulses.

“Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” is an amiable and easy watch that doesn’t explore too many of the singer’s more unseemly aspects and, by design, cannot.

Doing away with any pretense of docu-realism, Spencer is neither a film about specifics nor any of conventional biopic; it is instead a sort of haunted house chamber piece that doesn’t try to locate the real woman behind the legend — as the title might suggest — as it does to reimagine her within a wholly different pop lexicon.

For all the great action and idiosyncratic antagonists (Erika Toda, as a brutally efficient warrior who can’t stomach violence is a particular standout) Blade of the Immortal is altogether too much.

It has a couple of nice reversals, two or three good laugh lines, and a caustic but not too acid skewering of cultural institutions. It goes down easy, it’s relatively unmemorable and it’s fine. Close, on the other hand, is exquisite.

Call it scenery in search of a film. Call it a film in search of a purpose. Call me when Guiraudie releases his next one, because, damn, the guy’s got talent.

If Dogman has very little to say, it coasts on style amiably enough, showcasing another gonzo turn from Caleb Landry Jones, and presaging Luc Besson’s return. For good or ill, this old mutt still has some bite.

Like the hundred pounds of latex cast over Fraser’s body, the film itself requires its performers to act through an overbearing pall. But for the most part, it has room for only one voice.

Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s neorealist indictment of police corruption looks unlike any other film playing in Cannes’ Official Competition. It’s just that what sets the film apart is its visual ugliness.

The ultimate success of 7 Days in Entebbe varies from scene to scene, and even more from actor to actor.

Dead for a Dollar is a proud heir to a longstanding lineage of low-budget westerns. Consider that a feature and a bug.

Co-directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn would rather offer viewers a no-concept, light and breezy big-screen hangout, betting that audiences will turn out to watch a pair of beloved celebs cut loose, and that the actors’ megawatt charisma will be enough to carry the show. At least for a certain amount of time, the bet pays off.

Once more, the filmmaker’s level of formal control is exemplary and precise, and his lead actress game for whatever comes her way. Only one can’t shake the feeling that all of it runs against the film’s ostensible message, that is another case of Monroe’s agency taken from her.

The self-contained “Treasure” ambles along on the strength of a fine, self-contained script and two winning performers, without ever reflecting or commenting on the historical weight it sets out to explore.

Take your seat and bask in the presence of the coolest characters actors working today, but don’t ask for more than a few chuckles. Don’t call it fan service – call it coolness oblige.

Though he finds little room for subtlety and even less interest in complex moral shadings, director Edoardo De Angelis can still ably wring tension from this brave, if foolhardy, mission, spinning his camera around ever-cramped quarters as the two crews, enemies-turned-shipmates, navigate uncharted terrain.

You’re grateful for the time spent with a genuine epic of ideas and rueful that such heady themes weren’t more fully explored in a better film.

Ghost in the Shall is a technical knockout, a here-and-now valentine to what design wizardry Hollywood can pull off in 2017. At the same time, it does so in service of a tired tale full of repurposed visual tricks, storytelling clichés and big-studio concessions.

Without much by way of variance, the film spins on and spins out, jumping from austere interiors in Mexico City to San Francisco and back again, putting forward a cogent political read that does little to flatter those looking for anything more.

If this bloody entr’acte, whose title addition works as both noun and verb, has little to offer but a jacked up body count on a bed of fan service, it serves both with panache, charging forward as an almost elemental slasher outing unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is hardly a disappointment, but it does, in places, feel like a missed opportunity.

An undeniably entertaining watch, Suburbicon stumbles when it tries to recycle effective old ingredients into something new.

You can only linger so long with such a parade of oddities making ever stranger choices before your eyes grow weary of gawking at a pageant of hideous beauty, and you start checking the clock.

The film isn’t a total wash. Seydoux finds ways to move and emote through her Noh mask, and Dumont finds interesting avenues to explore, tracking the uneasy dance between compassion and commodification when dealing with hot-button stories. Only it’s all too much, too long, too repetitive, too one-note, too contemptuous of the very idea of cinematic pleasure to really land.

Deception, as a novel and as a film, offers a curio for obsessives, a postcard for archivists, and a not-too-interesting bump in the road for everyone else.

Like pouring yourself a warm glass of milk or slipping into a hot bath, the languid and visually sumptuous romance lulls you into a sleepy sense of calm, never asking for more than gentle aesthetic appreciation for its impeccable craft.

Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.

If, when printed and sent off for posterity, a snapshot like “Coma” offers a small degree of archival value — while answering the question Bonello poses at the start — it might also arrive as a postcard from a time all-too-thankfully gone by.

Brother and Sister seems more like a retread (and a retreat) than anything that’s come prior, marking a new step forward for the lauded director by taking a disappointing step back.

Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.

For all its stodgy touches, the film itself is like a cast-in-amber relic of the not-so-distant past.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be.

Those with buy-in might find themselves won over, as, on its own terms, Marcello Mio offers a heartfelt and even occasionally moving show of artistic trust and collaboration, playing as an unambiguous love note from a filmmaker to his favorite star.

A blood-soaked, bone-crunching hymn to religious devotion and faith, Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t hum Mel Gibson’s favorite themes; it shouts them.

Feeling simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium tries to ring a warning bell about, well, a lot of things. In the end, though, it works best as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of filmmakers biting off more than they can chew.

Victoria & Abdul is an otherwise benignly toothless, pleasantly glossy affair, but it does force us to confront one tricky question: When treating a subject as fraught as British imperial rule, when does a film’s benign inoffensiveness become offensive in and of itself?

This material could make for a powerful work, but Viceroy’s House is certainly not it.

Ultimately, “Golda” holds three firm beliefs: That Meir is a leader to admire, that Mirren is an actress to adore, and that all interactions must be reverse engineered to fit this limited scope. It makes for a superficial biopic and blinkered bit of history, but does give the venerable performer a new accent to chew on and the chance to blow some smoke.

“Mektoub, My Love” is never about anything more than its own style.

A spectacularly misjudged mix of humanitarian intentions and gonzo-terrible execution.

Wim Wenders’ 3D snoozefest The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez is not a good movie. It’s not a good movie, and at the same time, it doesn’t fail so spectacularly so to provide a compelling secondary reading.

There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.