Ben Croll

The director’s comfort with the more placid rhythms of arthouse animation results in some appealing detours whenever the frenetic narrative stops to feel the breeze.

You get the sense that Hamaguchi is playing with the idea of prologues, of elements that sit just beyond a narrative arc that shades everything that follows. It’s a wonderful impulse that works beautifully in the film — perhaps a little too beautifully, however, because the prologue outshines everything that comes next.

It’s a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly forgettable nostalgi-comedy that will be taken to task for not being anything more.

There’s a great movie buried somewhere in American Honey — heck, there might be two of them. But at its current length, it resembles nothing so much as fine spirit overly diluted with water. The care and quality is all there, but in this iteration they ain’t coming through.

Amirpour takes on the Big Easy, mixing a heady cocktail of EDM beats, Hollywood treacle and southern sleaze and sipping down Bourbon Street.

The film studiously avoids melodrama or theatrics of any sort, enfolding instead as a kind of melancholic tone poem.

If the narrative can sometimes wane, the film’s enveloping atmospherics remain tight throughout.

[A] sci-fi head trip ... If the film can be somewhat unsubtle in its thematic questions, it matches that with an equally loud color palette – and you know what, that’s perfectly fine.

It’s a bit of a mess, no doubt about that, but a fascinating one.

An easy-going film that coolly ambles forward as a series of short sketches and vignettes, while maintaining a fairly detached tone.

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.