Jeannette Catsoulis

Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance.

The swings from goofy to gory and jokey to tragic cancel one another out, and Mr. Diliberto’s near-constant voice-over is irksome. As is the pivotal romance.

Though at times too determined to avoid dramatic highs and lows, Little Girl strikes gold in the casting of the 2-year-old Asia Crippa.

A jubilant documentary about a place where power chords and empowerment go hand in hand.

As with last year’s “Lights Out,” [Sandberg] proves a master of the flash-scare, a nifty choreographer of precipitous timing and striptease visuals. But he’s also adroit with more leisurely horrors.

Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.

Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me.

This disordered portrait seems heavily influenced by its equally jumbled setting.

The escalating hysteria and grisly set pieces of Bug may strain credulity, but Ms. Judd has never been more believable as a woman condemned to attract the wrong kind of man.

If Mr. Haney sometimes struggles to find focus, he has no trouble locating heroes, including the doggedly energetic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a slew of stalwart locals and fearless outsiders. And the black heart of coal country - and, as the film shows, our national energy debate - has never seemed so in need of white knights.

Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.

Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.

Featuring one of the most dissatisfying, anticlimactic endings in genre memory, this paranoid thriller (the directing debut of Dave Franco) turns an isolated seaside villa into a slaughterhouse.

All this gives “Cuckoo” a strange, lusty vigor that’s hugely entertaining.

What could have been a very funny short film about self-control and befriending your id instead becomes a rambling commentary on father-son dysfunction and the limits of proctology.

Driven less by civic duty than by the need to escape his dreary life, Zebraman is a tragic, touching figure too often obscured by Kankurou Kudo’s hyperactive screenplay and a special-effects team drunk on alien slime.

By rights, Never Goin’ Back should be a chore to sit through. The jokes are dated, the behavior tasteless and the setups tired. Yet the movie has a ramshackle charm that’s due entirely to its vivacious leads, whose mutual devotion and easy, unlabeled sexuality feels endearingly innocent.

A surpassingly silly monster movie with a side helping of satire, Trollhunter beckons mainly for its stunning Norwegian scenery and slyly effective government-bashing.

According to the press notes, pandorum means “Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome”; whatever that is, by the end of the movie I was convinced I had caught it.

An animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life.

Information leaks into the film via the radio and a few flashbacks, but Wrecked is mostly free of dialogue - and, unfortunately, suspense.

Lion Ark, a spunky account of a perilous rescue mission, has a ragtag rhythm that befits the mercurial behavior of its hulking furry stars.

This collection of eight mini-sermons falls flat.

Gloomy and vague, Run Rabbit Run is a moody, noncommittal tease replete with the usual spectral signifiers: clammy dreams, scary drawings, unsettling masks. Snook does everything but rend her garments in a performance that only emphasizes the busy vapidity of Hannah Kent’s script.

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

Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England.

This film belongs to its star.

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.”

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

If the film’s spare re-enactments are a little awkward, they also smartly repurpose Dahmer’s studied reserve into a meditation on perversion as hypnotic as it is repulsive.

The mood is meditative, the camera patient; yet the film is too dramatically shy and narratively slight to stir.

Directed by Hilla Medalia with exactly the right balance of musical theater and personal drama, After the Storm presents a touching affirmation of the healing power of right-brain stimulation.

Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.

Discrimination against nomadic populations is hardly restricted to Romania, but the integration of that country's largest ethnic minority seems particularly pressing. If only that view were shared by the Romanian adults on screen, most of whom display a shocking degree of prejudice.

Wisely deciding to refrain from rapping our knuckles with greenhouse gas statistics and Al Gore-style pie charts, the filmmakers fashion a portrait of a conscience spurred to action by an unexpected opportunity.

Cool It finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore's meticulously graphed assertions are systematically - and persuasively - refuted.

The movie is sharp, charismatic and so light on its feet we never know which way it will turn.

Mr. Fox may be a romantic, but he understands that love is rarely all you need.

The story’s conventional beats (the get-back-in-shape montage, the bad news delivered at a critical moment) cohere into a wholesome journey of long-delayed healing. The inclusion of the wonderful Mykelti Williamson, as Joe’s longtime friend and rodeo partner, injects a buddy-movie vibe that anchors the action in riding bouts that are smoothly thrilling without being punishing.

An effervescent comedy coasting on the charisma of its stars.

Blessed with shivery setups and freaky effects — here, skin-crawling is literal — The Wretched transforms common familial anxieties into flesh, albeit crepey and creeping.

Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, John and the Hole patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth.

Small and strange, Meanwhile on Earth seduces with its soft, barren beauty (the chilled cinematography is by Robrecht Heyvaert) and Dan Levy’s surreal score.

These confrontational comedians — however serious the message, it’s always imparted with liberal dollops of humor — are experts at merging shock and showmanship.

Simultaneously rowdy and slick, Buffaloed is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance.

Harnessing the twin virtues of drollness and economy, Mr. Tully keeps scenes brief and melodrama on the margins.

Unfolding like a medieval horror movie, Delta is sometimes laughable but often admirable.

The result is a good-looking but overstuffed genre pileup that confuses as often as it compels.

Crowding the screen with jarring sounds and disturbing visuals, Bateman experiments with so many cinematic frills and fancies that Munn’s touching work is too often obscured.

Mixes method and madness to chart the evolution of a counterculture phenomenon.

A documentary that presents the sexual exploitation of young women as a systemic cancer that feeds on public misconception as much as male appetites.

Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, Zeros and Ones lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.

Like its namesake, Jon S. Baird’s Tetris is clever, crafty and shockingly entertaining.

More than anything, FrackNation underscores the sheer complexity of a process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers.

Eisenberg has already proven himself a smart wordsmith and a knowing performer of emotional unease, but this “World” is a disappointingly shallow tale of narcissism and negligence.

As an ambitious allegory for the chaos and torment of addiction, Hellraiser works mainly because of A’zion, who gives her scattered character a deeply human desperation.

Though occasionally inflammatory -- one interviewee talks about being "slingshotted into slavery" -- American Blackout isn’t a conspiracy rant. It's a methodical compilation of questions and irregularities that deserves a wider audience.

A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.

As the camera circles swirling skirts and sweeps through elegant cafes, the director, Alexis Michalik, whisks up a whirlwind of soapy declarations and backstage chaos. For many viewers, that will be enough, with enjoyment in direct proportion to tolerance for theatrical farce and hyper-romantic dialogue — and a lead character who is less engaging than either.

However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone.

The songs are unmemorable and the choreography less than twinkle-toed, but the lyrics are a delight.

A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.

Swerving from bland to brutal, endearingly coy to shockingly explicit, the Canadian import Good Neighbors finds pitch-black comedy among white-bread lives.

Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.

What We Become is a very pretty movie with a very dark heart. The payoff is brutal, but earned.

Tobias Lindholm’s screenplay sacrifices credibility for quirkiness.

Hearing from these survivors is vitally important. But by smushing together two distinct styles of narrative, The Invisibles risks draining the power from both.

Trouble makes a whole lot of noise without saying very much. The direction is wooden and the cinematography dull, leaving the solid cast (including Julia Stiles as a daffy clerk and Jim Parrack as her knuckle-dragging boyfriend) to shoulder the weight.

The movie’s boldness and horrifying logic get under your skin.

Good Ol’ Freda celebrates an intensely private witness to four of the most public lives in pop-culture history.

Julian P. Hobbs directs by getting out of the way of his star's soulful eyes and considerable talent, allowing Mr. Mays to feed on the tension between the rationality of his character's courtroom argument and the utter lunacy of his beliefs.

What’s left is a touching and tragic portrait of a vulnerable work in progress, one that for now might only be visible through a clouded lens.

For a tale spiked with so much torment, Fugitive Pieces feels remarkably soothing.

Everybody loves a do-over, but this could become tedious were it not for the undeniable chemistry of the two leads, whose dialogue crackles like cellophane.

At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, Medusa Deluxe is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting.

Throttled by a corrosive self-awareness, the latest Scream is a slasher movie with resting smug face, so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else.

Despite smatterings of wit and a stable of skilled performers, C.O.G. struggles to find a consistent tone, its episodic structure veering from farcical to poignant to dangerously raw.

Thoroughly good-natured and with a handful of decent jokes (like Kate McKinnon as a vulpine suburban mom), Family would be more interesting if, instead of trying to rewire Kate, it just admitted that her harsh honesty and benign neglect were more beneficial to Maddie than her mother’s anxious hovering.

A smoothly efficient popcorn picture...Though Scodelario is spunky and game in what must have been an extremely uncomfortable shoot, the script (by the brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) is airless and repetitive.

In prioritizing Crowhurst’s psychological frailty over his physical challenges (both conveyed more evocatively in the excellent 2007 documentary “Deep Water”), Firth and his director find something quietly touching, even soulful, in the character’s wretchedness. In this somber tragedy, the real demons are never anywhere but right inside that boat.

This exploration of suppressed homoerotic longing would be infinitely more moving if the pair had even a smidgen of sexual chemistry.

A deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.

This spare first feature from the Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy (drawing on his own experiences) has an atavistic pulse, evoking a decaying society where elevators fail and bus drivers cower behind mesh grills.

Though clearly aimed at teenagers, this unashamedly heartstruck movie is neither obsessed with sex nor driven to humiliate its characters. Compared to those of the average American teen movie, its ambitions are so innocent they’re almost childlike.

Buffed to an expensive-looking gloss and dressed in period-perfect finery, Max Manus has an old-fashioned sincerity that entertains without engaging.

Smart, wordy and sweetly sympathetic to lives lived online, Sidewalls coasts on Martín and Mariana's twin voice-overs, alternate musings on themselves and their city.

What begins as an amusing fluff piece ("Daddy's messed up," mumbles one woozy subject after dropping his gurgling infant) slowly emerges as a compelling and often touching peek at punk paternity.

Whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration — or education, or any number of issues — it backs off or bogs down. It’s so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.

Maintaining a sunny, scrubbed-clean tone, Ms. Hencken allows no possibility of dazed groupies or drunken meltdowns — and only the briefest whiff of cocaine — to darken her portrait.

Gorgeous and goofy, fanciful and unrepentantly old-fashioned, this Victorian adventure (it’s set in 1862) delights much more when its head is in the clouds than when its feet are on the ground.

The mantle of social relevance can be a heavy one, but Trust, a smooth drama about a girl's seduction and rape by a middle-aged Internet predator, is neither preachy nor hysterically overreaching.

A noncommittal, occasionally surreal portrait of hardscrabble lives and omnipresent risk.

Since his debut in 1987 with "Red Sorghum" Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that's more fun. With Curse of the Golden Flower he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.

Moving, humane and unfailingly polite, This Changes Everything presents a Panglossian view of approaching disaster that (according to the film’s publicity notes) seeks to empower rather than to scare. But we should be scared.

The movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits.

Corfield is fine in a role that gives her little opportunity to do more than run and fight, but a woman this empowered removes the question mark from her survival — and the tension from the movie.

This is screenwriting by numbers. Unlike, say, Ken Loach’s marvelous “Bread and Roses,” Under the Same Moon is too busy sanctifying its protagonists and prodding our tear ducts to say anything remotely novel about immigration policies or their helpless victims.

Rare enough to make NoBody’s Perfect an exemplar of fresh-air filmmaking that addresses the devastating legacy of the drug thalidomide with acidic wit and grumpy honesty.

A little wan but a lot likable, Gustavo Ron’s Ways to Live Forever is a forthright and surprisingly buoyant drama about facing death before you have really lived.

Whether psychological drama or sexual farce — and, really, there’s no way to tell — Sibyl is a soapy mess.

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

Stylistically stunning and completely nuts, Ping Pong is nevertheless perceptive about male social hierarchies and the benefits of knowing your place.

As guileless and eager as the most avid fan, Gunnin’ is neither cautionary nor analytical, allowing its insights to occur organically and without fancy camera moves.

Choosing not to delve too deeply into the mind of either man — or to question Mr. Talese’s journalistic ethics and less-than-scrupulous fact-checking — the directors are content to mostly watch as each vies for control of the movie, and his legacy. It’s an entertainingly desperate joust, playing out beneath defiantly unattractive lighting.

This uninvolving thriller is as lacking in tension as credibility.

Despite leaden direction and a story crammed with pseudoscientific flotsam -- including palm reading, levitation, time travel and telepathy -- The Last Mimzy is a wholesome, eager entertainment that doesn't talk down.

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.

With its achingly slow build and understated performances, The Clovehitch Killer strains to surmount its lack of urgency.

Slowly uncovering the prejudices that calamity can unleash, Michael Richter’s screenplay lays bare the damage wrought by Sept. 11 while deftly dodging hysteria, wondering how we differentiate between innocent teenage behaviors and dangerous red flags.

Mr. Arcady’s reliance on heavy-handed melodrama, on screaming women and on worried-looking men, winds everything so tightly that the anguish plateaus and the characters begin to seem like chess pieces in an argument.

Sarah Silverman burns through the indie drama “I Smile Back” without making the slightest move to gain our sympathy.

In My Mother's Arms takes a distressing snapshot of an ongoing struggle.

While All Is True might not brim with excitement, it’s beautifully acted, richly photographed (by Zac Nicholson) and blessedly free of histrionics. Between them, Branagh and Elton have concocted a respectful story of loss, regret and wistful genius.

Though the developing bond between the two men — one of whom is virtually nonverbal — is credible and even touching, the storytelling is too oblique to reel you in.

What’s left is a baroque pantomime, a heavy-handed satire of intolerance whose fun fades faster than the livid bruises on Judy’s face.

A glossy lesson in how to pour nontraditional content into a traditional rom-com mold, Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? shapes competing notions of happily-ever-after into comfort food.

Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.

Purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it’s a bludgeoning rant against a single state — New Jersey — which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers’ unions and corrupt school boards.

Harnessing a range of appropriately spooky-oddball narrators and striking visual styles — including graphic novels, early photography and Expressionist painting — the Spanish director and animator Raul Garcia simultaneously honors and reimagines.

Lizzie isn’t perfect — the pacing can flag, and the lovely Kim Dickens, as Lizzie’s older sister, barely registers — but Ms. Sevigny’s intelligence and formidable control keep the melodrama grounded. Her empathy for Borden, whose fragile constitution belies a searing will, is palpable, as is the sense of inescapable peril surrounding the two female leads.

Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents.

Frothy, frantic and inescapably unromantic - the two leads have less chemistry than an American high-school curriculum - Heartbreaker marks the uneven feature debut of television director Pascal Chaumeil.

Alison Chernick's film skims the surface of a strange and celebrated career. After a meager 72 minutes, the man who once stretched an obsession with testicles into a five-film cycle remains as unknowable as ever.

The animation is uninspired (with so much ice, the creatures need to be twice as good-looking), and the story is humdrum. (The saber-toothed tiger learns to swim!)

If the movie’s hilariously cruel treatment of the halt and the lame upsets you, you can enjoy the crisp cinematography, operatically repulsive effects and frequently witty dialogue.

Plays less like a documentary than an E! exposé of lowlife skulduggery.

That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown.

Comprising small, near-perfect scenes played out largely at dinner tables and on couches, The Lie wonders if it's possible to rewrite lives and remake choices.

Distracted by Confederate flags and twerking women, the directors, Andrei Bowden Schwartz and Sam Jones, make only a halfhearted attempt to illuminate a disappearing subculture.

Glinting white vistas and endless light blanket On the Ice, a frigid drama that's tough to warm up to.

Unfolding in a decrepit, present-day Moscow, Day Watch dazzles and confuses with equal determination.

Directed, with workmanlike efficiency, by Len Wiseman, “Ballerina” is at once insultingly facile and infuriatingly obtuse, its unmodulated tumult leaving little room for nuance or personality.

A balloon of cuteness that makes you yearn for a pin, What If is Saturday night comfort food for those who need to believe that even the most curdled among us can find a mate.

The Trotsky runs 20 minutes too long and several rungs above the head of its target audience. And though Mr. Baruchel can be very funny in small doses -- a slacker sidekick in “Knocked Up,” a gung-ho kid in “Tropic Thunder” -- here he swiftly becomes insufferable, a neurotic nudnik in funeral director attire and John Turturro hairdo.

Spectacularly uninteresting...this dreary Antipodean curiosity is a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing, all of it bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk. And I haven’t even mentioned the hairy buttocks.

Empathetic and nosy, Ms. Ben-Ari is no unequivocal cheerleader for breast over bottle: If anything, her subjects’ time-consuming struggles and evident exhaustion could put a damper on the natural-feeding plans of the most sanguine new parent. Yet the film isn’t a downer.

More psychodrama than postapocalyptic adventure, the movie parcels out its scares in small, effective jolts, delivering just enough menace to remind us of the stakes.

New World is both less bloody and more thoughtful than most of its genre, the shifting-alliances plot becoming more engrossing as it progresses.

James Cameron upstages the ocean in Deepsea Challenge 3D, a shallow vanity project that invites us to join him in marveling at his own daring.

Where Soldiers Come From is, more than anything, a commentary on class. In its compassionate, modest gaze, the real cost of distant political decisions is softly illuminated, as well as the shame of a country with little to offer its less fortunate young people than a ticket to a battlefield.

Fueled by neither anger nor religious extremism - the director, Thierry Binisti, remains rigidly nonpartisan - "Bottle" is a gentle pairing of youthful idealism and tenacious hope.

Belle and Sebastian fans will be fully sated; everyone else might feel as if they’d consumed a meal consisting entirely of meringue.

Written and directed by Sean Mullin, a comedian and onetime Army officer (he plays a comic in the film), Amira & Sam is more successful as a portrait of veteran alienation than as a romance.

Brian Banks isn’t a great movie, but it is a worthwhile one. And if it’s indicative of a new direction for its director, you won’t hear any complaints from me.

The soullessness of the enterprise is staggering. Making clichéd, cynical gestures toward romance, Mr. Harris (whose last feature was almost a decade ago) tortured me for a full 96 minutes.

Despite its sense of dead-end desperation, Stray Dolls is made worthwhile by the richness of Shane Sigler’s nighttime cinematography and the consistent empathy of its tone. Sinha, herself a first-generation immigrant, isn’t about to judge anyone for reaching.

Ten years in the making, Hats Off is a documentary tribute to the 93-year-old actress Mimi Weddell, one of those people for whom the word “individual” seems especially apt.

Lads & Jockeys conveys first-race terrors and last-place humiliation with indulgent thoroughness.

Washed in an unappetizing sludge of grayish green, the movie aims for serious and settles on bilious. The real McLaughlin was a fascinating, pioneering newshound; you’re unlikely to find her here.

High on revolutionary spirit, Freaky Tales is a frisky, frantic pastiche that doesn’t always make sense. . . Yet the visuals are meaty, and the filmmakers (whose last feature collaboration was on “Captain Marvel” in 2019) show considerable affection for their movie’s setting.

For all its hints at imminent catastrophe, Nerve feels surprisingly tame.

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.

Proudly crass and amiably dumb, Nicholas Stoller’s gag-crammed sequel essentially takes the bones of the 2014 original and gives them a gender flip.

Pitching uncertainly between cute and creepy, engaging and weird, this farcical story draws energy from a wickedly eccentric Ann-Margret, having a high old time as Ben's doting mother.

Working from Peter Bognanni’s 2010 novel, the writer and director, Peter Livolsi, has created a painfully quirky tale that’s so contrived you can almost hear the gears of the plot grinding.

With a little more shading and originality, 13 Minutes might have pushed beyond its familiar Nazi tropes to shape something more immediate and infinitely more potent: an ominous portrait of radicalization.

Concocted with heaps of style but only a smattering of substance, Benjamin Dickinson’s sophomore feature, Creative Control, is as brittle and unwelcoming as its characters’ surroundings.

Spackling over any copycat cracks with strong acting and fleet editing, Lights Out delivers minimalist frights in old-school ways.

The Cleanse” embarks on an allegorical journey with only the vaguest notion of a destination. As a result, the movie feels frustratingly repetitive — a single joke repeated ad nauseam.

A blistering story of rage and redemption that never fully illuminates the journey from one to the other.

Niftily paced and tight as a chokehold, the script (by the comic-book writer Scott Lobdell) delivers just enough variation to hold our interest.

The High Note is pleasant enough but disappointingly timid and thoroughly implausible.

This Lithuanian love story from Kristina Buozyte offers a discomfiting blend of visual ecstasy and narrative sterility.

Giannopoulos might be inexperienced, but he’s canny with mood and unafraid to experiment with the rhythms of violence. I, for one, am keen to see what he does next.

Razooli wants us to see the fantastical narratives children conjure to manage real-world uncertainties, but his vision lacks focus.

Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction.

This witty first feature is a flawed but diverting meditation on finding inspiration while losing your soul.

The narrative may flag, but the doomsday atmosphere and George Liddle’s production design remain vivid until the final, blood-splattered reel.

The movie imprisons its talented cast (including Alia Shawkat as Danny’s overlooked soul mate and Brandon Hardesty as his worldly best friend) in roles that leave little room for anything but caricature.

Structured around a countdown to the ultimate prize, the story is a soapy slog of sabotage and betrayal. Sex and drugs are as prevalent as pliés, the absence of a likable character as irksome as the constant conniving.

A dreary pileup of hard-luck monologues and run-down locations, Mark Webber’s Flesh and Blood straddles the line between fact and fiction with exhausting earnestness and a fatal dearth of narrative.

This lifeless adaptation only proves that making entertaining movies out of hard-to-swallow ideas is as challenging as you might think.

Sluggish, stylized and frequently washed in a bilious green tint, The Missing Person is yet oddly irresistible.

After setting up a potentially powerful study of damage and delusion, Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” signaled an unusual talent) remains torn between science fiction and psychological fact.

It's tough to care about characters who spend most of their lives obsessing over the violent deaths of others.

With its sticky pacing and divinely unsubtle soundtrack (though The Cranberries’ “Zombie” is always excusable), Army of the Dead is an ungainly, yet weirdly mesmeric lump of splatter-pop filmmaking.

As sun-dappled infatuation abruptly crashes into post-apocalyptic survival, Mr. Macdonald struggles to balance a nebulous narrative on tentpole moments of rich emotional resonance.

To experience Chimpanzee, the latest piece of gorgeously shot pablum from Disneynature, is to endure an orgy of cuteness pasted over some of the most asinine narration ever to ruin a wildlife movie.

Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.

As a trippy, trifling memorial to a time before its eponymous club was a mini-mall and rave culture a woozy memory, Limelight delivers the messed-up goods.

Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.

Charts a sentimental struggle toward manhood with period-appropriate charm.

Immersed in the alien beauty of the Kazakh steppe, "The Gift to Stalin" moves slowly but engages thoroughly.

That said, this deliciously nutty love story - sample dialogue: "Let me eat this heart, then we can pick azaleas together" - is blindingly gorgeous to look at and exceptionally well acted, at least by the women.

Falling back repeatedly on in-your-face symbolism — especially with regard to the specter of decline — Mr. Salvadori seems content to idle in neutral.

Subdued and temperate, Skyman refuses to lean into the mystery of Carl’s claims or wind us up for a final resolution. Those elements might be present, but they’re never allowed to obscure what is essentially an empathetic, textured portrait of loneliness and loss.

McQueen, who attended one of these schools, uses this small, hopeful story to illustrate how one generation, by means of an ingenious workaround to bigotry, fought to secure the future of the next.

This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.

A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior's Revenant toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs.

Horror without suspense is like sex without love: you can appreciate the technicalities, but ultimately there’s no reason to care.

Kim Chapiron, proves an excellent choreographer of brutality...But without a strong political point (unlike its source material), Dog Pound feels hollow and hopeless.

The vein-popping mood is ultimately more exhausting than exciting.

You may not believe it's possible to bore people to death with a film about risking your life, but The Wildest Dream comes shockingly close.

Finch is sweet, yet disappointingly uneventful.

Despite frequent flashbacks and Bobby Bukowski’s richly dimensional photography, the movie has a static, stagy look that amplifies the oppressiveness of its increasingly unpleasant exchanges.

While at times fascinating, this trudge through statistics, graphs and grainy film of cholesterol bubbles and arterial plaque may challenge even the most determined viewer.

We learn so little about these characters or the forces that shaped them that we’re never drawn into their drearily blinkered world.

Employing scaled-down sets and low-budget audacity, Mr. Parker, an intelligent and boundary-testing filmmaker, proves less concerned with logic than with how far he can push his characters.

Though the themes of Burden feel uncomfortably current, their execution is leaden and dismayingly artless.

I went to school in Aberdeen and know the region well. It's a place of unforgiving winds and magnificent sunsets, harsh farmland and deserted beaches. The people are hardy, hardworking and fiercely self-sufficient, asking little of their government except the will to do the right thing. They weren't Trumped; they were betrayed.

There’s precious little to laugh at in The Sasquatch Gang, a sad attempt to board the loser-nerd comedy bandwagon.

This direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material.

A warning to parents everywhere about the dangers of indulging irrational behavior, Opal Dream is a sickly sweet tale of deep dysfunction masquerading as family solidarity.

Though at times tasteless and barely coherent, the story is oddly affecting, the very strangeness of Nyholm’s folkloric vision and its unnerving execution pulling you in.

Like a fresh ripple in the near-stagnant high school movie pool, Chris Nelson’s Date and Switch balances formula with winning performers, genuine humor and a generosity of spirit that this genre too often lacks.

Shapes a standard prison-break drama into a metaphysical study of freedom and reparation.

While intellectually laudable, Mr. Kelly’s determined objectivity is so distancing that it takes an inherently intriguing story (based on a 2011 article in The New York Times Magazine) and sucks the life out of it.

Drifting and sweet, 7 Chinese Brothers (like Mr. Byington’s gentle 2009 love story, “Harmony and Me”) leaves a melancholy but hopeful aftertaste.

Like many relationships, Breaking Upwards starts in bed and ends on the street. The journey in between, however, feels as new as anything a tiny budget and a boatload of talent could produce.

A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.

This stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.

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

Nick might usurp most of the screen time, but it’s Mr. Del Toro, face flickering from benevolent to vicious and body heaving with literal and symbolic weight, who seizes the film.

Nonnas serves up ethnic comedy on a platter of ham and cheese.

With frothing energy and unfettered vulgarity, Us and Them lances the boil of working-class grievance and watches as the infection spreads to everyone in its path.

It’s all a bit precious and predictable.

The humor is delicate, and the performances sweet and sure; the script (by the director, Max Mayer) is not entirely predictable, and the Manhattan locations (lovingly photographed by Seamus Tierney) have a starry-eyed glaze.

Collated for momentum, the film’s many interviews, wide-ranging archival footage and montage of modern ecological disasters form a blunt but carefully positioned instrument. And despite a bit of Michael Moore-style nonsense at the end the tightly edited narrative displays a reach (nine countries) and clarity of composition that hold the attention.

Well-intentioned but philosophically timid, For My Father wants to meditate on the moral reshuffling that can accompany imminent death. But the director, Dror Zahavi, is ill served by a screenplay (by Ido Dror and Jonatan Dror) too attracted to coincidence and too repelled by the existential brink.

A slick and absorbing drama.

Sensitive without being unrealistically utopian (this isn't a fairy tale), Me, Too movingly represents the frustration of the high-functioning yet falling-short individual.

Drawing on a fascination with cults and utopian communities, the director and co-writer, David Marmor, has created a mildly entertaining survival story whose depiction of psychological indoctrination far outstrips its generic dips into torture.

Sentimental and a little corny in parts, “Percy” is protected from bathos by Walken’s proudly minimalist performance as an intensely private man reluctantly drawn into an uncomfortably public fight.

None of Mr. del Toro's classy fiddling, however, can improve on the original's marvelously economical scares. But if you've always wondered what the tooth fairies want with all those teeth - or if you just need proof that a terrified Katie Holmes looks not that different from the everyday version - this is the movie for you.

Borne along on the whine of insects and a lead performance of surpassing strangeness, “Mosquito State” is a disquieting merger of body horror and social commentary.

Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue.

Strongly acted and beautifully photographed (by Virgil Mirano), Spoken Word is a quietly resonant family drama about the tug of old habits and the difficulties of escaping the past.

Though cinematographer Flavio Labiano turns the city into an alien maze of steel and glass, his chilling work is undercut by a script with more logical craters than Martin's.

Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, Return to Space, a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The performances are desultory, the musical score bullying and the drama — aside from the game-changing placement of inconvenient shrubbery — as predictable as Tom senior’s steadily sprouting beard.

Relaxed performances and pillow-soft photography compensate somewhat for the story's narrow ambitions, but they're not enough to invigorate a movie that clearly would rather charm than challenge.

The film’s derivativeness — residents literally fight darkness with light — is countered by strong acting from the two leads and a director who just might be having the time of his life. That apparent delight seeps into almost every frame, giving the film a guileless warmth that drew my good will.

Filming over four years and tracking several cases, the Brazilian director Jorge W. Atalla favors a fevered shooting style that's repetitious and disorienting but also effortlessly dramatic.

The film’s questionable continuity, bargain-basement effects and overload of gay clichés may not be to everyone’s taste, but its queer-eye-for-the-undead-guy exuberance and warmth of spirit are irresistible.

A coming-of-age tale so treacly it doesn’t just tug your heartstrings, it attempts to glue them to your ribs.

Continuing his fascination with tormented manhood, Cooper, in this third collaboration with Bale after “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and “Hostiles” (2017), works with a solemnity that stifles the fun.

Maybe it’s the hell we’re all living through right now, but Tyler Cornack’s orificial fantasy struck me as a hilariously bawdy, intermittently inspired act of vivacious vulgarity.

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

A thumb to suck in troubled times, Summerland offers a digit of nostalgia that many viewers will latch onto with something approaching relief.

Barbaric, elegant, primitive, erotic, revolting, thrilling: the movie, like bullfighting itself, is all of these.

Embracing a structure that implicitly acknowledges the complexity of the issue, Ms. Marson nevertheless contributes to the film’s general fuzziness by failing to clarify the legal and moral guidelines that govern these kinds of prescriptions.

What’s really missing here is a story of artistic regeneration: by the time we encounter a dazzling excerpt from the studio’s post-trip film, “Aquarela do Brasil,” we are only reminded of what might have been.

The result is a talky, predictable, less-audacious-than-it-thinks romantic comedy.

Alien invasion is just an excuse for romantic farce in Extraterrestrial, a tiresome roundelay of lies, lust and leaping paranoia.

At times the groan and scream of collapsing metal sounds so authentic you might mistake Jackson’s heavy breathing for your own.

It’s a sometimes rocky road cinematically, slipping from enchanting to trite, magical to indulgent with some regularity.

Robert Schwartzman’s direction is blah, his story labored and the supporting characters one-note.

Despite a wonderfully eerie atmosphere, this moody examination of guilt and mourning is too generic to scare and too predictable to surprise.

The gently nostalgic mood and sleepy pacing effectively erase the movie’s necessary edge.

Somewhere deep inside Driven — Nick Hamm’s based-on-real-life crime caper — lies a fascinating movie.

As the film picks up speed it also accrues a socially progressive agenda. If only this were half as well developed as the female leads.

No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.

If your sole image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is that of a lanky, silk-jammied sybarite strolling the grounds of his mansion with a jiggling blond on either arm, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel will knock your socks off.

This nostalgic nod to the Chinese magic-and-martial arts genre known as wuxia mixes love story and clan war with equal amounts of silliness and heart.

The Boogeyman, extrapolated from a minor 1970s short story by Stephen King, might conceivably make sense to viewers with no access to proper lighting or functioning windows. For the rest of us, though, this near-indecipherable movie — as murky in plot and payoff as in setting — demands such a total suspension of rationality that its few scary moments struggle to land.

In place of emotional stakes, we get gleaming, stylized, occasionally slow-motion violence, filmed in such extreme close-ups and cramped spaces that it's impossible to differentiate gunman and victim.

Writer and director Kat Candler struggles to shape an undercooked story into compelling drama.

Sweet but ho-hum adaptation of Wendy Orr’s novel, a comedy-adventure that never quite finds its tone.

Much like its subject: affable, quotable and emotionally guarded in the extreme.

Much of this is funny and even perceptive about the nooks and crannies of adult sexual relationships. It’s also very well acted.... But something feels off.

Though the film eventually caves to sentiment and stereotype, its alert performances and muted rhythms offer much to enjoy in the interim.

Sometimes dreamy but mostly dissatisfying, “Walk With Me” offers no clarity for the curious. We can enjoy the meditative mood, but understanding its underpinnings would require more than this idyll of silence and stillness provides.

The film, fluidly shot by James Adolphus, remains deeply sensitive to the complexities of a culture whose attachment to monarchy contravenes its best interests. This dilemma is gradually becoming clear to Princess Sikhanyiso, the oldest of the king's 22 children and a student in California. Intelligent, articulate, caring and strong-willed, she could be her country's best hope.

This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.

Despite the generally humorous vibe, Bingo Hell quietly accumulates an unignorable pathos.

This crude, rowdy movie is also unexpectedly touching in its embrace of surfing as an escape from the stigma of poverty and broken homes. Escape from Russell Crowe’s droning narration, however, is impossible.

A modern-day noir weighed down by redundant narration and a forced plot, The Girl Is in Trouble feels like a tug of war between the actors, who understand the need for lightness, and dialogue that emerges in expository clots.

Palely photographed and anchored by a quiet, rather weary performance from Ms. Keener, Little Pink House is a peculiarly enervated affair. The structure is choppy, and there are odd moments of tonal dissonance.

As she did in her gentler but equally original “Good Dick” in 2008, Ms. Palka carves a black and biting niche between a man and a woman, a space where chaos and psychological unease demand to be reckoned with.

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.

An oddly sterile documentary inspired by a particularly fecund imagination, American: The Bill Hicks Story recounts a bright-burning life while leaving us mostly in the dark.

The result is so out there that you can imagine Mr. Smith and his collaborators rolling in the aisles at their own preposterousness. If you can find your inner 16-year-old, you might just join them.

Part rockumentary, part howl of outrage, Screamers would have benefited from less concert film and more historical background.

Like most films of this type, Room 314 demands a great deal from its performers, not all of whom withstand the intense scrutiny. Fortunately, the action is bookended by four of the best.

Does little but raise an alarm, then leave it jangling.

A mood board of mashing, slashing, snapping and splintering, this feature, directed by Xavier Gens, is revenge-movie cliché ground down to the studs.

Unfolding in awkward diner conversations and uncomfortable bedroom scenes, Gut has a cold, flat look that gives even a child's stuffed toy a sinister sheen.

A strangely bifurcated film, Gun Hill Road comes to life only when focused on Michael, and Ms. Santana (who was just beginning her own gender transition when she won the role) holds the screen like a pro.

Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.

Ambulant corpses may be tramping all over our movie and television screens these days, but Wyrmwood has enough novelty — and more than enough energy — to best its minuscule budget.

This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.

If you like your torture movies tight, twisty and decently executed, then Pledge is for you.

A low-budget horror anthology with segments both ghastly and moronic.

Notable at least in part for its fumbled potential, this health-care-industry melodrama possesses all the right ingredients: an idealistic young lawyer, a corrupt corporate villain and a sympathetic victim. It just fails to assemble them into a compelling whole.

Though based on a remarkable true story, this clichéd tear-jerker is barely interested in Marguerite’s revolutionary teaching methods, focusing instead on the intensity of her connection to Marie.

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 battle scenes are as lacking in heat and coherence as the central love story.

I Am Woman, a pleasant, yet disappointingly trite biopic of the singer Helen Reddy, has a flatness that’s difficult to ascribe to any one element.

A movie that, for all its operatic allusions and actorly expertise, feels dismayingly passionless.

Erratically paced and with a pitch-black heart, the movie manipulates at every turn.

The film strains to inject even a modicum of drama.

Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.