Devika Girish

In Toofaan, the Bollywood director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra attempts — with some success — to deepen the standard-issue sports drama with sociopolitical strife ripped from Indian headlines.

Though comprehensive and often stirring, the accounts lack new insight or analytical heft.

The result is a bittersweet family portrait that, though relatable, lacks the specificity that makes for truly universal cinema.

Asia and Vika struggle to emerge as full-fleshed characters from the movie’s dull, blue-grey frames, while the script rushes through provocative plot turns in its bleak procession toward a wrenching conclusion.

The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.

Mokri constructs his film like a control experiment, tweaking each of its variables — time, space, narrative — as if to see what he might catalyze.

The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast.

Majid Majidi’s latest feature doesn’t lack in style or charm, using a child’s perspective — a staple in Iranian cinema — to locate beauty and hope in a cynical world. As is often the case with the director’s work, however, precious visuals come at the cost of narrative complexity.

It’s a tonal wild ride with eccentric characters, neon-lit settings and elaborately absurd detours. Unfortunately, the ripped-from-the-headlines meat of Dead Pigs gets lost in these affectations.

Alice (rightfully) regards the choices of its heroine with respect and empathy. But its picture of sex work as an easy out, devoid of any real danger, feels like a simplistic fantasy.

The setting is rife with metaphoric potential, and it is here that Chen falters as a director.

A theme running through the interviews is that for the U.S. government, sending a Black astronaut to space was more a matter of propaganda than racial justice.

These are familiar, even hackneyed themes, which make the film’s relentless theatrics feel gratuitous and somewhat exhausting. Style overpowers substance, though Poe’s fantastic eye for composition and Clemons’s vivacious screen presence are undeniable.

It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.

Too sentimental in its final act, “The Donut King” doesn’t quite manage to connect the dots between Ngoy’s financial troubles and the voracious capitalism that enabled his rise. The result is a cheery portrait of immigrant entrepreneurship that lacks political punch.

The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.

Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.

The elaborate ruses of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm left me neither entertained nor enraged, but simply resigned.

Understated almost to a fault, the film pitches its tone somewhere among the looming sorrow, gentle comedy and bureaucratic tedium that death, especially when planned, can entail. If the result is bracingly unsentimental, it’s also a touch inert — a little too poised to compel emotionally.

If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film.

The movie is funny and touching, with a star-making performance by Min and a script full of lovely, self-aware little touches . . . But it’s shot like a sitcom — flat, shiny, perfunctory — and structured like one, too, with quip-heavy vignettes that resolve in pat conclusions.

Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.

This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of Users, though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images.

Richard Dewey’s staid, by-the-book documentary can hardly match the flair with which Wolfe lived and wrote.

The message — that science cannot succeed without a politics of solidarity — is important, but the film ends on a note of uncertainty that feels defeatist rather than urgent.

Goulet’s sleek, lo-fi world-building — decrepit gray cityscapes; fields covered with smoke-spewing factories — is more compelling than her storytelling, which grows increasingly predictable as Niska and the vigilantes plan a raid on Waseese’s academy. Yet the film’s use of clichés can also be thrillingly subversive at times.

The critical edge of the film feels blunted by platitudes (“Opportunities are born from crises,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization), not to mention the exhaustion viewers will likely feel in reliving early memories of the still-ongoing pandemic for nearly two hours.

It’s all very resonant stuff, performed by an earnest and committed cast. But Sea Fever speeds through these turns of plot as if to check them off a list, with characters dropping dead before they’ve had a chance to earn our sympathy.

Twists of fate lose their magic when they’re obvious as clumsy script contrivances.

Contrivances are par for the course in this genre, but Nocturne lacks the stylistic flair to make them fun.

King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.

Less a mob thriller than a ruminative drama about a life built around orders and betrayals, the movie takes an unusual perspective on a familiar genre but is weighed down by its dull, uneven pace.

Although the camera’s attention to faces and gazes, coupled with an eerie soundtrack, conjures a vague mood of suspense and seduction, the plot fizzles out quickly without any real provocations.

Star power is a logic unto itself, and Lou has ensured a limitless supply by casting Gong as an actress-spy. She conveys depths of pain and longing even when the script offers none, seducing us as effortlessly as Jean seduces her enemies.

In jazzing up the tale for the screen, Rogers sands down the somberness — Baltese is all fuzzy blues and pinks, with nary a trace of postwar grit — while turning up the silliness for gimmicky thrills.

It’s all a bit uneventful, but it works as an endearing portrait of average life: sometimes up, sometimes down, but moving steadily along.

The film is so enamored with Ghafari’s status as an exceptional symbol — a powerful woman in a man’s world — that her actual work as a politician gets short shrift.

Rather than offer insight into the difficult choices facing disabled people, Gigi & Nate opts for mawkish wish fulfillment, undercutting the film’s powerful emotional core.

Hot people pretending to be homely is par for the course in makeover movies; the real thrill lies in watching opposites attract. But the catfights, confessions, and dance-offs in He’s All That lack the sting of real romantic conflict, and there’s nary a spark between Rae and Buchanan.

The documentary maintains an uncritical and even hagiographic view of the program’s stated premise, barely interrogating its ethics or on-the-ground efficacy.

Zaree makes an eloquent and arresting protagonist, though her documentary is a bit too tidy for its own good.

Racial injustice, economic inequities, police corruption, media ethics and foreign-policy scandals are all crammed — a bit too cursorily — into Stanley Nelson’s brisk primer on the 1980s crack epidemic.

The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption.

Postema’s interlocutors respond with candid critiques, but the director’s self-flagellation feels increasingly empty — less a reckoning with neocolonialism than a toothless display of white guilt. His critical insights are thin, too.

White squanders the opportunity for true satire, speeding past the many topical issues kicked up by the script — police corruption, mental health, gun crime — into a feel-good conclusion that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

There’s much to unpack here, from the preponderance of Latino agents in ICE to the mental health effects of immigration, evident in Luis’s panic attacks. But the film, frustratingly, stays on the surface, settling for easy emotional moments.

It’s a story that spans past and present, arts and politics, and kin and country — and the movie, with its haphazard editing, struggles to contain it all.

Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, Anthem ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.