Elisabeth Vincentelli

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.

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

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

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

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.

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).

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.

The movie feels shaggily shapeless, as if Rabins and Rose were unsure what, exactly, they were trying to say, or how to get to the mourning prayer that gives their movie its title — and does, eventually, provide an emotional coda.

It’s unclear what Mandico is trying to say, if anything, and the film overstays its welcome — even the wildest visuals lose their power to stun after a while — but “After Blue” certainly is sui generis.

The pace is slacker than it should be, but still, “Fire Island” fits neatly alongside Kristen Stewart’s lesbian Christmas movie “Happiest Season” on Hulu’s rom-com shelf.

This amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.

Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus. This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling.

Roy grows as a killer over the course of the movie, which involves an increasingly tedious amount of repetitive violence played for laughs — he’s like Wile E. Coyote, brushing himself off after falling off a cliff or being blown up.

Shook is done in by its final reveal, which manages to be simultaneously improbable and conventional. For engagement, we’ll have to look somewhere else.

Violent, law-defying cops would be a tough sell at any time, but “Rogue City” is oblivious to the changed context surrounding their stories. They don’t hold much romantic allure nowadays.

After a dillydallying slow start, Brown ratchets up the tension efficiently, summoning a mix of gross-out body invasion, eco-mutation and large-scale cosmic dread on a small budget.

Unfortunately, the film emulates many of its genre brethren’s inability to convert a promising start into a solid second act. . . . though a haunting finale almost redeems the flabby midsection.

A pulsating rage at the way society neglects women in particular, its weakest members in general, courses through the movie. More than the displays of flayed flesh, it’s what sticks.

The movie is middle-of-the-road rather than bad — hard to hate and harder to love.