Jeannette Catsoulis

Despite a plot (by Ben Hopkins) bursting with double- and triple- crosses, the movie feels programmatic, its characters bland cogs in a Rube Goldberg machine.

Normal — which heralds, according to the press notes, the birth of yet another franchise — navigates its cartoonish excesses with expected competence. As for Odenkirk, he’s golden; as mythology nerds will recall, Ulysses was also known as the Master of Cunning.

Bunnylovr, the first feature from Katarina Zhu, touches on various themes, none of which feels fully realized. Yet there is such a sweet symbiosis between Zhu’s intimate, easy directing style and her unselfconscious performance in the lead role — beautifully illuminated by Daisy Zhou’s gentle cinematography — that the movie’s aimlessness rarely grates.

Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful.

Softer and gentler than either of its forbears, "Alpha" hums with a dreamlike unease, a movie less concerned with sensation than with genuine feeling.

In its quest to give us a little bit of everything, it finally delivers not nearly enough of anything.

Infused with the D.N.A. of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Heel is an uneasy study of subjugation and transformation. Rock-solid performances from Boon and Graham maintain its precarious balance between anxiety and absurdity.

Dreams might feel distant and frosty, but it has a lot to say about inequality and the prerogatives of privilege.

While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.

With immense sensitivity, the screenwriter and director Harry Lighton, making his feature debut, stages sequences that deepen the characters and expand our understanding of their lives.

Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.

A depressing, downbeat thriller that hustles from one violent act to the next with only the flimsiest of narrative throughlines, the latest from the French Canadian director Maxime Giroux is an unfortunate misfire.

This dazzling first feature from the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke uses the frame of a sad-sweet sex comedy to weave together political allegory, supernatural mystery and more than one tender love story. And he does this with such skill and bravado that you never see the seams.

Occasionally cute and almost instantly forgettable, “People,” tidily directed by Brett Haley, offers less-than-witty dialogue.

The couple’s earnestness sounds mockable, but it’s not: They are too sincere, too joyful and too grateful to be doing the only thing that either of them ever wanted to do. And right now all I want to do is dust off my vinyl copy of “Hot August Night.”

If “Is This Thing On?” is sometimes too careful for its own good, it is also deeply trusting of its leads, whose faces, under the scrutiny of Matthew Libatique’s merciless close-ups, reveal the hurt the couple is unable to verbalize.

Imogen Poots’s fantastically expressive performance as the adult Lidia transforms this movie (the feature directing debut of Kristen Stewart) from punishing to mesmerizing.

This is a movie that wants to have it both way.

Sappy and silly, Eternity made me thank heaven for Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as the quick-witted coordinators tasked with guiding our threesome to perpetual bliss. They’re a comic delight, and they aerate a movie that’s most touching when it’s least frantic.

A movie that’s at once disappointingly superficial and utterly charming.

If some of the cabin’s lore is on the silly side, Maslany sells Liz’s terror so convincingly that the urge to giggle is dampened. Her lock on the film’s tone is absolute.

The result is a charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic.

Love + War chooses to go wide rather than deep, resulting in a movie that, while pleasingly dynamic, offers less psychological insight than the photographs she has gambled everything to take. And perhaps that’s as it should be.

A derivative and dogged horror movie that reverts to rote with wearying regularity.

Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.

The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.

With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.

The director, Simon Curtis, deftly choreographs what feels like a series’ worth of brief interactions into a mostly satisfying whole.