Elisabeth Vincentelli

A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity.

Is a cliché turned on its head still a cliché? “O’Dessa” will keep you wondering, and that counts for something.

Whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb.

Almost a quarter of a century in, the Bridget Jones movies are coalescing into an evocative portrayal of a character coming to terms with both her imperfections and her strengths in real time.

The minimal plot purports to endorse spartan storytelling, but after a promising start the movie detours into an overlong flashback. This may be to give Franck emotional weight, but it only creates belly fat.

[A] fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.

Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome.

This scenario’s predictability could be forgiven were the movie effective on any level, but it just isn’t, from Cho and Waterston’s wooden performances to jump scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo.

The great production designer Danilo Donati’s contributions alone are worth the trip.

It is at its very best whenever Nyong’o’s face fills the screen, like the postapocalyptic heroine of a silent movie. What she can do with relatively little is simply astonishing, and you absolutely believe in both Samira’s despair and her determination. Nyong’o has created a woman whose life force can never be fully extinguished.

The film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.

Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.

The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media.

Dupieux’s fans will be happy to know that his surreal humor is gloriously intact, while newcomers might find in this movie a gateway into one of contemporary cinema’s most idiosyncratic universes.

Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow.

This is Bareilles’s show in every way. While she doesn’t quite match the emotional subtlety of Jessie Mueller, who originated Jenna, she has grown in leaps and bounds as an actress and provides a warm anchor for the movie.

Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers.

Rotting in the Sun is sharpest when exploring the two men’s love-loathe connection because Silva threads a provocatively fuzzy line between fascination for and irritation with Jordan and, by extension, Firstman himself.

For most of its tight running time, Bottoms hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.

It’s not so much that Gray Matter is formula, but that it is clumsily made formula. Except, that is, for Isaac’s performance.

Joy Ride processes all of its familiar ingredients into a sustained, sometimes near-berserk, barrage of jokes, interspersed with epic set pieces.

We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.

Good thing Union steers The Perfect Find with such sunny warmth and relatable poise, too, because the director, Numa Perrier, and screenwriter, Leigh Davenport (adapting Tia Williams’s 2016 novel of the same title), are not as assured.

Admittedly, the film is more dutiful than artful, ticking one box after another, a tendency that is especially obvious when it ventures to the dark side of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on employees and customers, the lack of diversity among the catalog models).

Stupefyingly sluggish.

It’s hard to begrudge Unfinished Business for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.

You Can Live Forever sticks to a fairly common coming-of-age trajectory.

Clock is a psychological thriller, or perhaps even a satire, in horror clothing, tantalizing us with thought-provoking ideas, only to abandon them: nature versus nurture, the influence of the wellness-industrial complex over minds and bodies, the oppressive expectations placed on women — including by themselves.