Devika Girish

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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