Jeannette Catsoulis

Even the most ardent fan could find its bluntness uncomfortably timely: In our build-that-wall moment, a story about a government-sponsored plan to cull poor minorities feels less like political satire than current-affairs commentary.

Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault’s story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness.

A damp-eyed comedy whose banal title isn’t the only thing needing improvement.

A pensive valentine to literacy programs and childhood idealism left in the ashes of broken families and an economically bifurcated society.

Cheerless and voyeuristic, Clip (which was banned in Russia) seems a sincere attempt to portray a lost and disaffected generation. But the film’s brutally honest parade of callous behavior and casual, almost cruel sex has a depressing prurience that wears you down.

Unfocused and too often unbelievable, Amy Poehler’s Moxie feels like a battle between two competing visions: go-girl crowd-pleaser and serious high-school harassment drama. Neither wins.

A flawed and fascinating film about fame and martyrdom.

The film is a riveting portrait of young men in shock and in mourning as the tragedy stirs feelings that have long lain dormant.

Your enjoyment of Paper Heart will hinge almost entirely on your receptiveness to Ms. Yi and the extreme iteration of social awkwardness she represents.

Written and directed by David Riker, who built his 1998 drama "La Ciudad" around immigrants in New York City, The Girl is stingy with backstory but rich with visual clues.

Though the enjoyable prickliness of the film's early scenes soon dissolves into cozy solutions, a sturdy supporting cast - even Ron Leibman's scenery-chewing turn as Laura's blowhard father is more amusing than annoying - balances the scales.

More than anything, a Tyler Perry movie is an interactive experience, and Why Did I Get Married? is no exception. At the screening I attended, it was often difficult to hear the dialogue between bouts of enthusiastic applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”

Directed with extraordinary empathy by Aaron Katz (who also wrote the story), Dance Party, USA is an admittedly slight movie, but one that is given heft by a yearning tone and a camera fascinated by the emotional shifts and shadows on a young person's face.

Horizons are expanded and exoticism explored in Wah Do Dem, a shaggy road movie about relinquishing your comforts to find your bliss.

Battling downpours and an abundance of nighttime shadows, the cinematographer Benjamin Kracun adds a classy, coppery richness where he can. But “Echo Valley,” directed by Michael Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” mingled equally dissonant themes with far greater dexterity), is ultimately undone by Brad Ingelsby’s distracted script.

The movie offers too little of Crash's justly revered lyricism and too much of his self-mutilation and manufactured chaos.

Documenting the vigorous strategies employed by the Dole Food Company to block the release of his 2009 film "Bananas!" - about a lawsuit brought by Nicaraguan workers who suspected the company's use of dangerous pesticides - the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten gains traction by taking the high road.

Knox Goes Away” is, like its antihero, smart, unconventional and almost obsessively careful. Its unhurried pacing and mood of quiet deliberation won’t be for everyone; but this low-key thriller resolves its shockingly high stakes with a twisty intelligence.

Gamely navigating a script that ushers her from seaside despair to hilltop elation, Watts gives a touching and blessedly understated performance, assisted by Sam Chiplin’s warmly expansive cinematography. As for the bundle of scene-stealing magpies (patiently trained by Paul Mander) who collectively bring Penguin to life, they’re a delight.

This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience.

Good Dick surmounts its indie-movie quirkiness with exceptional acting and a sincere belief in the salvation of its wounded characters.

Frozen camera setups and blurry night-vision images raise goose bumps without the assistance of eerie music or showy effects, though the strain of stretching the gimmick to a second movie is palpable.

Soon becomes tiresome, but it’s emblematic of a film that is dancing as fast as it can to entertain.

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.

The characters are so flimsy, and so wearyingly familiar . . . that Michell is incapable of giving their conflicts life.

The best, perhaps the only reason to see The Artist’s Wife is Lena Olin, an actor incapable of giving a so-so performance.

Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history.

Though at times pleasingly quirky, the story is too slackly written and insipidly photographed to entertain.

This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.

Mr. Khan displays a strong visual sense that makes pivotal scenes pop. The unlikely ending strains credulity, but what this confident debut lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in execution.

If making a decent movie required only good intentions, then Pray for Japan would be off and running. As it is, though, this muddled collage of random impressions and personal histories, emerging from last year's destruction of the Tohoku coastline by the earthquake and tsunami, doesn't document a tragedy so much as repeat a mantra.

Trying to gather too much into his net, Mr. Stewart gets a little lost, but his bottom line could not be clearer: When the oceans die, so do we.

As drifting and dreamy as its searching heroine, My Friend Victoria takes a graceful but unsatisfying stroll through the life and longings of a young black woman in contemporary Paris.

There is nothing objectionable about Michael Bully Herbig’s glossy political thriller, Balloon, but there’s nothing particularly exciting about it, either.

Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices.

The template is familiar, but Quarantine delivers the heebie-jeebies with solid acting and perfectly calibrated shocks.

Burdened neither by fresh ideas nor common sense, Gary Dauberman’s lethargic screenplay (he also directed, an inauspicious debut) takes so long to get moving that Annabelle herself should demand a do-over.

Nine years in the making and timeless in its observations, Highway Courtesans is an intimate look at some of the youngest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.

Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing.

Trapped for the most part in featureless rooms, a stellar cast — including Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — deliver dull speeches and sift through redacted documents, brows furrowed and lips compressed.

Little more than a showcase for Mr. Quint - whose acting is almost as toneless as his playing is sublime - this trite, sunny drama pins lengthy musical interludes onto the flimsiest of narratives and hopes for the best.

Infinitely less than the sum of its parts, Antonino D'Ambrosio's Let Fury Have the Hour crams 50 thoughtful artists into a disappointingly muddled film.

Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness of her mother, Robin Wright. Maybe that’s why Flag Day feels as much a love letter from Penn to his own daughter as the story of someone else’s.

Hysteria, a disappointingly limp ode to the invention of the vibrator, plays like a Merchant Ivory Production of "Portnoy's Complaint."

Imagine spending an afternoon watching a bunch of vagrants putter around on an abandoned city lot, and you've pretty much nailed the viewing experience of Earthwork, a painfully dull account of a year in the life of the Kansas crop artist Stan Herd.

Much better to focus on the tempestuous Mercutio (Hale Appleman, a standout), whose increasing volatility forms the perfect counterpoint to Mr. Doyle's beaming Juliet and Seth Numrich's sensitive Romeo. Punctuated by eerily static shots of empty basketball courts and deserted hallways, Mercutio's blustering menace is as timeless as the romance he seeks to derail.

An ultra-low-budget ghost story with an off-kilter sensibility that initially intrigues but ultimately fizzles.

Watching it demands little effort. Evict your inner cynic and enjoying it should demand even less.

Resistance feels disjointed and dated.

Adam Hootnick’s Unsettled makes the political personal, drawing a scattershot yet intimate picture of a nation divided.

This brisk reimagining of the 1984 slasher "Silent Night, Deadly Night" delivers the seasonal goods with admirable efficiency and not a little wit.

Like Vic’s snails, who must be starved before they can be consumed, Deep Water feels like a movie that’s had everything of interest well and truly sucked out.

The result is a narrow, albeit intriguing window into a technological revolt that deserves a more far-reaching film than this one.

An ingenious black comedy written and directed by James Westby, comes at you like a horror movie before settling down into something quieter but equally skin crawling.

Jig begins light on its feet but soon becomes leaden. Legs pinwheel, and fake ringlets fly, but competitive tension is sacrificed to repetition and an unnecessary focus on complicated numerical scoring.

A disturbing look at reprogramming that masquerades as rehabilitation. Having been forced to drink the Kool-Aid, Mr. Gaglia has produced a work that's as much an act of emesis as of filmmaking.

We’ve seen it before: Faces, substances and locations may change, but the self-destructive behavior and dreary vibe are pretty much constants.

A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.

Packs more sadness than the familiar fairy tale but offers its own fantastical delights. Ye Xian's party dress, made of teardrops, suits her -- and her story -- perfectly.

The special effects are fine, if unremarkable, but the actors are into it and the script manages to be thoughtful without dampening the fun.

Lacking dialogue to deepen the characters or reinforce their motivations, Luther: The Fallen Sun whooshes past in a rush of serial-killer clichés: an underground lair, a torture room, a masked maniac

Despite on-point performances (especially from the hilarious Mr. Wodianka), the story (by Tomasz Thomson, who also directs) is too pitted with holes and loose ends to permit the film a bump from meh to marvelous.

Encouraging sensitive performances that mitigate the film’s sluggish pace and fuzzy narrative, Ms. Szumowska juxtaposes two-person scenes of wordless intimacy with group expressions of casual violence.

Or maybe not: Committing completely to Carl’s wobbly perceptions, the filmmakers mire us in a hackneyed swamp of narrative uncertainty.

This shockingly flabby effort from Mr. Anderson — who, in features like “The Machinist” (2004) and “Session 9” (2001), showed a much surer hand with oppressive atmospheres and troubled psyches — feels as nutty as its characters.

While you don’t require familiarity with the dozen or so earlier titles to enjoy this one, you do require a sense of humor that’s easily triggered and a gag reflex that isn’t.

Though too slight to be memorable, the gay romance Front Cover takes a gentle, thoughtful look at the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality.

Randau’s script, though, is an implacable plod from one bashing to another.

Working ostensibly from the viewpoint of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Liz Kendall (an excellent Lily Collins), [Director] Berlinger never fully commits. Instead, he appears as seduced by Bundy as virtually everyone else in the movie.

Knowing but never jaded, Hollywood Dreams is driven by Ms. Frederick's no-boundaries commitment to her broken character, a performance that's as startling as it is touching. In Mr. Jaglom's maverick hands, the appeal of illusion over reality is both fatal and irresistible.

This scattershot investigation of the effects of Internet pornography on female behavior only ruffles the surface of a complex issue, one that demands a much larger sample than three white, educated women.

A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title.

Best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms. Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence.

The film's kinky energy eventually wanes, the pileup of profanities losing its initial zing.

John Conroy’s cinematography hustles and heaves, straining to inject a vitality that the story too often lacks. Yet whether in the kaleidoscopic warmth of Jamaica or the gray chill of London, Yardie’s sunlight-filled songs will make your toes twitch.

The movie's good intentions are consistently undermined by its simplistic notion of redemption, and its inspirational thrust is diluted by an epilogue that suggests the program still has a ways to go in the life-altering department.

In the lulls between bouts of yammering, however, the director, Johannes Roberts, concentrates on building a solid atmosphere of desperation.

Even when the ghost of a point materializes — that recording ephemera can be a self-soothing behavior — VHYes is too unsophisticated to develop it.

[An] insipid and uninformative portrait of singularity and obsession.

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.

Enjoy it; according to the spectacularly nauseating final moments, a cure for this virus seems unlikely, but “[REC] 3” (a k a “[REC] Apocalypse”) is a virtual certainty.

Political menace stalks youthful idealism in Putin's Kiss, a portentous, rather creepy documentary that masks its lack of historical context with an atmosphere of accumulating threat.

The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.

A familiar underdog story told with unusual sensitivity.

Windfall is dramatically flat and logically wanting.

Spurred by the medical and emotional problems of her own three children, Ms. Abeles embarked on a deeply personal inquiry into the insanely hectic lives of too many of our offspring.

An odd-couple caper of staggering dopeyness that makes you long for the snap and sizzle of the buddy movies of the 1980s.

A hilariously awful collision of soap opera and horror movie, Amelia’s Children teeters so precariously on the cliff top of comedy that one wishes the director, Gabriel Abrantes, had dared to kick it over the edge.

Adapted from Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel (and based on a true story), Alone in Berlin is dour and flavorless.

Whichever side of the aisle you inhabit, you will leave The Iron Lady feeling disgusted; you will also feel cheated - of information, insight or even an identifiable point of view.

As he proved in his 2017 drama, “Harmonium,” Fukada excels at unfurling near-hysterical narratives in restrained, sometimes icily sterile scenes. But while the earlier film pulled us in, this one repels, its cloudy colors and depressing mood making us long for a single moment of joy.

A weird, erratic and occasionally insightful experiment that, unlike its indefatigable star, never quite finds its zing.

Though powerfully acted and dazzlingly shot (by Walter Carvalho) in heavenly black and white, Heleno is a feverish opera that, like its doomed antihero, loses vitality much too soon.

Viewed simply as a horror movie, A Horrible Way to Die is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it's devastating.

Ultimately his story draws more energy from class than from criminality: awash in sludgy browns and rotting greens - the colors of poverty and decomposition - this unpredictable oddity is a little bonkers but a lot original.

This gentle comedy, while entirely unmemorable, releases a genuine warmth that deflects harsh judgment. It doesn’t, however, excuse characters that are little more than props for embarrassing fashion or delivery systems for dated slang.

The script is incapable of penetrating the moral thicket that the actors and the cinematographer, Zachary Galler, have so carefully woven.

Strangled by good intentions and teachable-moment clichés, Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land turns the border between Texas and Mexico into a gateway to racial empathy.

the Australian drama Felony proves only that skilled actors and slick photography can tart up even the most problematic script.

As subtle as its title, Cockneys vs. Zombies is mildly funny and easily likable.

Pitting good against evil with striking intelligence and a near-operatic commitment to extreme suffering, Ms. Gebbe neither mocks nor celebrates Tore’s love for his God. Neither does she give any hint that it’s reciprocated.

Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.

It’s all ridiculously romanticized and self-serving. But the performances are so good (Mr. Greyeyes, in particular, is a miracle of intelligence and dignity) and Michael Eley’s vistas, shimmeringly shot in New Mexico, are so stunning, it feels churlish to resist.

Though leaning too heavily on period tunes and the templates of Mr. Linklater and John Hughes (to whom the film is dedicated), Mr. Burns has a distinctly spacious style that gives female characters room to breathe.

La Soga moves with a crazed energy that denies moral nuance. But the banal narrative (based on events in Mr. Perez's life) is elbowed aside by Josh Crook's eccentric direction and images that the cinematographer, Zeus Morand, brands with near-poetic intensity.

Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin isn't exactly known for slapstick, so Soul Kitchen has the feel of a palate cleanser. After the hard-edged drama of "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," this boisterous comedy milling with scruffy misfits goes down more easily than an oyster on the half shell.

Poking the bear of repression has consequences beyond Mr. Zahedi's immediate artistic goals, as this layered, intermittently fascinating documentary makes abundantly clear.

Offering no hint of the backbreaking drudgery and mental strain of their predicament, this gauzy picture (produced by the couple’s son, Jonathan Cavendish, and directed by his friend, the actor Andy Serkis) is a closed loop of rose-tinted memories.

A vibrantly vulgar comedy that never hangs around to admire its own cleverness.

Though buoyed by Anthony Marinelli’s moody score and Denis Maloney’s gutsy cinematography, Self-Medicated suffers from severe dramatic droop.

Set in the American Southwest in 1879, The Kid feels less like an actual movie than a table-napkin idea for one.

As if all its artistic energy had been gobbled up by the fornication, Love has nothing left with which to build its characters or set them in motion.

A sugary, aggressively anthropomorphized story of one avian interloper and a whole bunch of human obsessives.

By restricting himself to showing how well Mr. Robbins does his job, Mr. Berlinger mainly reveals how narrowly he has done his own.

Everyone's Hero enters multiplexes already shadowed by tragedy. And while that may not be the best start for a kiddie feature, the movie's sentimental provenance could earn it a critical pass it doesn't deserve.

The subsequent slaughters are inventive, the pacing lively and the cat-and-mouse structure entertaining; but the rodents themselves are — aside from their suave leader, played by Seann William Scott — such misogynistic morons that Becky’s predominance is never in doubt.

If you drink every time you’re reminded of Monty Python’s 1979 Judean jaunt, “Life of Brian,” you might just make it through to the end.

The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.

A forest of talking heads and pointing fingers, The Empire in Africa is a noble but failed attempt to explicate the tragedy of the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone.

Narratively and emotionally, this weirdly becalmed trifle by Maria Sole Tognazzi ends up almost exactly where it started.

The plot favors simplicity over rationality with a cheerful insouciance that’s hard to dislike.

With its fusty air and glumly earnest performances, this unnecessary reminder of Steven Spielberg’s soppy 2011 staging of another of Mr. Morpurgo’s novels, “War Horse,” is about as entertaining as trench mouth.

A strange synergy of old and new, My Bloody Valentine 3D blends cutting-edge technology and old-school prosthetics to produce something both familiar and alien: gore you can believe in.

Adopting an appealingly low-key approach to a high-stakes subject, this gently observant drama from Geoff Marslett takes its sweet time introducing the girl to the gun, but when it does, we’re all but guaranteed to care.

Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, Absolution paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through.

There’s a riveting story lurking inside Holly, a documentary-fiction hybrid about sex trafficking in Cambodia. It’s just not the one the filmmakers want to tell.

By anyone's reckoning, Predators is a middling 1980s B movie; too bad this is 2010.

Like the disastrously overpopulated "Amazing Race: Family Edition," Morning Light never finds a way to make us care who wins.

At heart a repulsive slash-and-bash with philosophical pretensions, Killers is classed up considerably by strong acting, a multi-strand plot and a tone that’s both nihilistic and mournful.

This is Ms. Cattrall's movie all the way. Photographed more cruelly than a tabloid victim, she gives Monica a grubby dignity that her "Sex and the City" alter ego, Samantha Jones, would wholeheartedly applaud.

None of this is especially scary, but, if you’re patient, Wan delivers the kind of hilariously sick climax that only a sadist would spoil. Or envisage.

Jamie Foxx might have top billing, but right there beside him are the professional contortionists whose eye-popping moves are more commonly seen in Las Vegas showrooms than on movie screens.

Spraying what seems like several thousand rounds of ammunition, this sturdy thriller (the big-screen feature debut of the director Brian Kirk) has no patience for nuance. It’s a big, blunt, battering ram of a movie, but it’s not dumb.

Methodically violent and more than a little silly, “Lou” delivers a kick in the head to ageism.

Though thematically vague, thinly plotted and without a reliably sympathetic soul to cling to, the movie has a mutinous energy and an absurd, knockabout charm.

A highly respectable piece of genre entertainment, one with a little more class than most.

In one sense, Wolf Man is a generic, and not especially scary, cabin-in-the-woods frightener that leans too often on tenebrous lighting and ear-shredding sound effects. . . Yet the extreme pathos of Blake’s plight is palpable, and Whannell is determined to make us feel it.

An extravagantly corny ode to the collapse of the Cleveland mafia in the 1970s.

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

Dog Sweat (the title is slang for alcohol) is surprisingly polished, the young actors warmly believable despite being restricted by the film's narrow focus.

This painfully awkward product fails on almost every level.

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

Heartfelt but enervated, Song One noodles around the Brooklyn music scene without stirring up magic.

Jay Alaimo’s sour tale of suburban greed and marital disappointment, can’t even deliver a temporary high; mired in the blahs, the blues and the midlife crazies, this poor man’s “American Beauty” slowly sucks your will to live.

The movie’s setup has underdog appeal in spades. But it’s all for naught in a screenplay, by Elissa Matsueda (working from Joshua Davis’s 2005 article in Wired magazine), that plays down intellect in favor of corn and cliché.

A Whale of a Tale is a rambling blend of complaint, tourism and straw-men arguments. What it’s not is persuasive.

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

Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy.

Almost holding things together is the marvelous Ms. Elsner: there’s more depth in her weary gaze and disappointed mouth than in any line of dialogue. Not since Bette Davis lit and flicked has smoking been so evocative, or so heartbreaking.

Written and directed by Jeff Baena, this first feature feels sloppily plotted and uncertain of its destination. Seasoned actors are left to yell pointlessly at one another, while Beth and the zombie angle slowly decompose.

It takes an especially robust sense of self to so openly invite ridicule, rendering the film’s title somewhat less than credible.

A movie that reveals its toxic intentions only gradually. Until it does, there is much to enjoy in the prickly odd-couple relationship of Henry (Billy Crudup) and Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), successful writing partners and longtime friends.

A muddled supernatural thriller that fails to capitalize on either its horrific prologue or eerie location.

Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.

If you can resist the urge to run for the exit, you may leave the theater feeling a lot more hopeful than when you went in.

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.

More tribute than parody, this over-egged farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a kitschy, spaced-out oddity. The energy peaks and droops, pogoes and flatlines, with Sandy Powell’s kooky costumes doing much of the visual heavy lifting.

The two leads are sensational, but the movie, drained of its life force and stuffed with confusing plot complications — like a shoehorned-in undercover agent and some mysterious Albanians — never recovers.

Jungle Cruise is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.

Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."

This sweetly nostalgic look at lost boys and lonely girls feels like it comes straight from the heart.

The cannibals, coconuts and landlocked locations have been replaced by the high-seas high jinks that made the first film so enjoyable.

Self-satisfied and too slick by half, Boundaries projects a sheen of artifice that deflects any genuine engagement with the story.

What should be a volcano of betrayal and acrimony never fully erupts; even Moore’s brief meltdown feels staged, and Isabel is so irritatingly tranquil that Williams has no room to breathe in the role.

A “Decalogue” for special-ed students, The Ten leans too often toward the bizarre and the bewildering. And though rough sex is a recurring motif, the movie’s overall tone is less blasphemous than raunchy.

Poised unwaveringly between gentle comedy and delicate drama, Maya Kenig's Off White Lies keeps a lot to itself. But this narrative withholding, while infuriating at times, presents no real barrier to our engagement with the film's unconventional look at the growing connection between a shy teenage girl and her shiftless father.

Muted almost to the point of effacement, this limp adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, only affirms that what might work on the page doesn’t always pop on the screen.

A creaky, sometimes forced drama that burrows under your skin if you let it, Welcome to the Rileys lurches along like Lois' car as she tries to exit her garage for the first time in years.

Generating suspense without blowing the special-effects budget, Mr. Sanchez paints an intimate portrait of a tormented personality. Though horrors are eventually unveiled, the film is more chilling in its slower, quieter moments.

Strange, challenging and boundlessly confident, this tripped-out noir from the Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (best known for his 2009 horror movie, “Pontypool”) is part lucid dream, part drugged-out nightmare.

Probes class consciousness with rather more sensitivity than originality.

Self-consciously edgy and romantically limp.

Despite [Fanning's] commitment to the role — and the generally fine supporting performances — this timorous tale sidesteps uncomfortable realities in favor of soothing whimsy and preordained uplift.

Helena From the Wedding has a little more to offer than many films of its type.

A laudable if lightweight argument for broader minds and thicker skins.

Only the efforts of Ewan McGregor and, especially, Ethan Hawke, as the estranged half brothers of the title, save this doleful drama from sinking entirely into bathos.

This debut feature from Matthijs van Heijningen is as stiff as the Antarctic tundra. Where the earlier film pulsed with precisely calibrated paranoia and distinctly drawn characters, this inarticulate replay unfolds as mechanistically as a video game.

Unless you're among those who still drop acid as a midnight-movie apéritif, your enjoyment of this retro oddity remains far from guaranteed.

However thoughtful and well-intentioned, this debut feature is too airless and long-winded to excite.

Its characters may be stressed out, but its rhythms are leisurely, the skill of the actors mostly countering the weaknesses in the script.

A dreary, interminable drama written and directed by Eva Aridjis, is exactly one-third of a good movie. That third is Frank Wood's beautifully modulated and modest central performance.

Gliding from intimate to surreal, from aurally disjunctive to visually seductive, Rubberband is a languorous ballad of sadness and disappointment.

A well-meaning but inexpertly dramatized account of the roundup of 13,000 Parisian Jews in the summer of 1942.

Anna feels more like a device than a person, a collection of eccentric behaviors (her job involves counting molehills) that support an aesthetic of excessive cuteness.

As an interrogator Ms. Ismailos is no Torquemada; she lobs softballs that her subjects genially accept.

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.

To the informed consumer hoping for greater elucidation, Mr. Seifert’s partisan, oversimplified survey falls short.

Reeking of self-righteousness and moral reprimand, Michael O. Sajbel’s Ultimate Gift”is a hairball of good-for-you filmmaking.

Documents courage, but steers clear of character.

Temperate in tone but screaming with subtext, Jamie Marks Is Dead climbs above the current glut of supernaturally inclined entertainment by dint of a hushed unease that permeates almost every frame.

Swift and amusingly brainless, Hatchet II more than delivers on splatter expectations.

Cramming fantasy and mysticism, faith and history into a single riverboat journey, this dirgelike meditation on China’s painful economic rebirth dispenses with narrative in favor of semiotics.

Roger Spottiswoode directs with old-fashioned style, avoiding the saccharine with realistic depictions of a war-ravaged China (where he filmed) and a cast well versed in stiff-upper-lip.

Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, The Promise is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.

Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.

The actors are so relaxed and personable that the film’s occasional glibness — and its over-reliance on coincidence to further the cross-pollinating narrative — is easy to let slide.

One of those rare ensemble dramas whose actors work toward common goals rather than individual awards, the movie resolves its creeping escalation of poor judgment and reprehensible behavior with surprising emotional force.

This drippy dramedy embraces every inappropriate-oldster cliché with depressing calculation.

Dipping in and out of luminous black and white, Protektor has a distancing glamour that prevents the story from digging in. Burdened by a central relationship so lacking in passion that its fate becomes negligible, the film's narrative feels trivialized by jaunty musical fragments and repetitive cycling and rowing motifs that belabor Emil's metaphorical treadmill of appeasement.

This emotionally manipulative, heavily partial look at the purported link between autism and childhood immunization would much rather wallow in the distress of specific families than engage with the needs of the population at large.

This setup is simple, but what follows is less so: an impressionistic battle between imagination and brute force that too often veers from enlightening to exasperating.

Their narcissism is repellent yet riveting, and Mr. Côté comes at his subjects with an artful, exploratory obliqueness that’s endearingly curious, as if discovering a whole new species.

The Tomorrow Man is a cloying, at times disturbing tale of two dotty seniors whose eccentricities unexpectedly mesh.

A tropical tornado of cadmium and cobalt, magenta and marigold, Carlos Saldanha’s frantic follow-up to his well-received 2011 animated feature, “Rio,” ups the ante on sound and movement but pays scant attention to story.

One part hagiography and two parts psychotherapy. Together they showcase a talent both formidable and erratic, its bright and shining peaks sliding inexplicably into valleys of disaster.

The film’s congeniality, however, in no way dulls its humor or the sharpness of its observations.

Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her.

This smart but uneven horror movie has little interest in fun.

The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature.

The Banishing never finds its groove.

Why, then, do we care not one bit when Pulitzers are won and bullets unsuccessfully dodged? The answer lies partly in Mr. Silver's refusal to elucidate the racial politics or engage with the world outside the film's incoherently chaotic bubble.

Slow to get moving and dramatically slack, Jungle cares only about Yossi, whose solo suffering and speed-enhanced hallucinations dominate the narrative.

Set in North Florida and based on a book by Harry Crews, The Hawk Is Dying is a dreary study of male angst groaning beneath the weight of its own symbolism.

Joyride, a grievously schematic blend of odd-couple comedy and life-affirming road movie, traverses the Irish countryside with a small degree of charm and a boatload of blarney.

By the time the final meal is devoured, you’ll be wanting nothing so much as an antacid.

Gratingly sentimental and simplistic, Julio Quintana’s Blue Miracle, set in Cabo San Lucas in 2014, turns a potentially compelling underdog tale into a sermon. But if you’re in the mood to see Dennis Quaid learning and growing — and engaging in sappy conversations about fatherhood — then step right up.

Belonging more in the realm of tragic melodrama than true crime, The Sicilian Girl is hobbled by sluggish direction (by Marco Amenta, who previously addressed Atria's story in his 1997 documentary, "One Girl Against the Mafia: Diary of a Sicilian Rebel"), and a revulsion to nuance.

More focused on philosophy then feeding, “Kiss” marries a mash-up of undead clichés (I know, let’s have another lingering shot of the moon!) to hilariously stilted conversations.

A charmingly sentimental but ultimately pointless hommage to the sci-fi classics of yesteryear, Alien Trespass proves only that while styles and technology have moved on, the affection for corn is everlasting.

The best thing about Small, Beautifully Moving Parts is its admission that a positive pregnancy test is not always cause for giddy celebration; the worst thing is that, even at a lean 73 minutes, this flimsy road movie feels at least 43 minutes too long.

This first narrative feature from Gabe Klinger seduces with breathtakingly gorgeous visuals that feel both achingly nostalgic and elegantly modern. These often ravishing aesthetics and stylistic quirks act as soft restraints, keeping us watching despite a near-total absence of story and a thinly disguised attitude of male entitlement.

If the 20-odd seconds of blank screen squatting pointlessly amid the opening credits aren't enough warning that you're in for some seriously sluggish storytelling, then the adoption of a snail as one of the central motifs should drive the point home.

For all its flaws — and they are legion — King of Thieves wraps you in a fuzzy blanket of familiarity.

An intermittently interesting but fatally clichéd comedy of personal and professional suicide.

The whole enterprise rests on Ms. Gilsig, who plays Anna with a subtlety rarely required of her crazypants girlfriend on “Nip/Tuck” or her clingy spouse on “Glee.”

There were moments during The Scary of Sixty-First when I was convinced I was watching a botched horror-comedy. But while this witless slurry of onanism and conspiracy theories is certainly laughable, it is never, for one second, even remotely funny.

Dignified to a fault and crammed with historical worthies (like a pre-deportation Emma Goldman), this dry tour of union hall strife and kitchen table sentiment wears its sympathies proudly.

The approach is cheerfully candid and the humor often sly... Yet this midlife confessional could have reached beyond the maternal cravings of highly educated, urban-dwelling singletons had it plumbed people’s heads as thoroughly as Ms. Davenport’s birth canal.

Simon Dennis’s photography is glossy and crisp, and a lengthy foot chase — making excellent use of the National Gallery — is inventively choreographed. And if the villains are little more than fireplugs in balaclavas, the violence they provoke is satisfyingly vicious.

Caught between the harsh demands of a survival story and the emotional beats of a romantic drama, the director, Hany Abu-Assad, grabs hold of neither.

A hodgepodge of pseudoscientific twaddle and variously shifty murder suspects, Rememory satisfies neither as science fiction nor as psychological drama.

The dialogue may be dire, but the dancing is delightful.

The pace is patient, the acting solid and the special effects emphasize craft over flash as the characters rejigger our perceptions from one scene to the next.

The fight scenes have wit and Van Damme delivers his lines with just the right amount of weary good humor.

Oconomowoc has one thing going for it: a running time of just 79 minutes, even if every one of them feels like an eternity.

Dipping no more than a toenail in the philosophical waters surrounding personhood, the movie is at once ideologically vague and maddeningly self-serious.

It's just as awesome as the tv show only bigger and prettier.

This is no splatter movie: spare, suspenseful and brilliantly invested in silence, Bryan Bertino's debut feature unfolds in a slow crescendo of intimidation.

Maddeningly muddled and frustratingly counterintuitive... the story shuttles between Hong Kong and mainland China without a noticeable gain in logic or reduction in decibels.

Leaving no cliché unturned, Coffee Date provides cheesy music, chats about "gaydar" and the obligatory are-you-looking-at-mine? urinal scene.

The writer and director, Mark Goffman, sticks to a no-frills style that makes the film feel longer than its 1 hour 24 minutes.

Offered only hints of life away from the barre or of Sy’s relationship with his coolly poised benefactress, viewers will see either a very fortunate young man or a beautiful protégé, dancing as fast as he can to please everyone but himself.

Adding a fairy-tale cast to a generic horror setup is of no benefit to Hunted, Vincent Paronnaud’s unpleasant merger of slasher movie and survival thriller.

Rapace’s jangly, one-note performance is rendered bearable by Yvonne Strahovski’s warmly natural turn as Lola’s increasingly furious mother.

As cavalier with structure as ever, Mr. Jaglom surrounds himself with familiars who embrace his cheery, disorderly style.

A muddled morality tale more interested in coming of age than getting of wisdom.

Tape, in short, is a terrible movie about appalling behavior.

This spare but potent melodrama revels in the desiccated landscapes provided by South Africa and photographed with dusty purity by Giles Nuttgens. Through his lens, the spectrum of sunbaked skin and parched dunes is as rich as any rainbow.

Green has made a movie that’s less frantic and more intimate than its predecessor, one that unfolds with a mourning finality.

We've heard it all before, if not in the schoolmarmish tones of Glenn Close, whose patronizing narration ("The earth is a miracle") makes the film feel almost as long as the life of its subject.

The film leans almost exclusively on the focused performances of its two leads, who create a credibly barbed chemistry that goes a long way toward distracting us from the film's low-budget deficiencies.

Grim, intelligent and vividly photographed by the director’s father, Philippe Lavalette, Inch’Allah works best when the camera alights on Ava and Rand, whose marvelously mobile faces convey all the complexity that Chloe lacks.

The result is a bleakly hopeless view of human nature that the finale, while cracking the door to a further expansion of the story, fails to refute.

It feels like an artifact from a particularly contentious past, a stale corn chip trampled into Party-convention carpeting.

A gentle, genial dip into a pool of midlife despair.

The story is unremarkable, but its execution zings.

Shot with some wit and considerable speed, its short, sharp beatdowns are a refreshing change from the bloated action sequences favored by some of Mr. Kang’s genre contemporaries.

Sincere performances elevate an underdeveloped script and awkward filmmaking in The Dry Land, a coming-home drama as inexpressive as its traumatized lead.

Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.

Preachy and pretty, Heaven is a classy-looking product with a vanilla flavor and a pastel palette.

Technically innovative but narratively moribund, Metropia is all stasis and shadows. Perhaps Mr. Saleh could have listened to a lighter voice.

The problem with these my-family-was-messed-up-and-I need-to-share projects is that they require an audience of complete strangers to give a damn. And while we sometimes do, it’s usually because the material is inherently compelling (“Tarnation”) or the filmmaking uncovers truths beyond the template of family therapy (“51 Birch Street”). Sadly, Phyllis and Harold fulfills neither requirement.

A soggy string of Hallmark moments designed to interrogate the value of the objects we cherish, the movie is front-loaded with major stars and squelching with sentiment.

Matty Beckerman’s Alien Abduction repackages ancient legend for modern audiences in a found-footage story of streamlined efficiency.

Everything is supersized and preposterous, but Mr. Chu, with two films in the “Step Up” franchise under his belt, is undaunted by crowds and confusion.

What makes the journey compelling is the relaxed chemistry between the young actors and an insistently apprehensive tone that pervades even the most prosaic exchanges.

An awkward merger of wide-eyed innocence and political unrest, Derrick Borte’s sweet, almost sugary picture wants to rock but never finds the gumption.

On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing.

Despite some snappy ideas (an aggressive advertising drone pushing products as answers to the family’s every problem), Bigbug is overdressed, overlong and diminishingly amusing

A play-like trudge through seesawing power dynamics, bursts of violence, perpetual gloom and a ludicrously attenuated finale, The Apology could have doubled its tension by halving its running time.

The best antidote to all the glowering and posing is Eva Green: As Ava, the titular dame, she’s nothing short of a godsend.

Glancing social commentary — like the difficulties of cultural assimilation and the invisible wounds of war — is welcome, but the script (by Ireland and Damian Hill, who died in 2018) is too cluttered for it to resonate and too mired in a muddle of sin and redemption.

This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.

A faux documentary grounded in ethnicity and mired in absurdity, Finishing the Game is a terrific idea still waiting to be fashioned into a real movie.

The Whole Truth plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.

A devilishly entertaining curveball thrown at unsuspecting family audiences.

Offering few solutions beyond a single fair-trade fashion company, The True Cost — whose serene interludes compete with sickening recordings of Black Friday shopping riots and so-called clothing haul videos — stirs and saddens. Not least because it’s unlikely to reach the young consumers most in need of its revelations.

Unlike “Sharknado,” The Meg doesn’t seem to know how dumb it is.

Underwritten and a smidge too long, Caught is marred by an over-excited musical score that browbeats where it should tease. Yet the movie’s bleak and brutal tone works, as does the visitors’ bizarrely unstable behavior.

There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.

Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot. Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness.

More tired than the fantasy it promotes, A Previous Engagement aims at middle-aged women with the subtlety of a pitch for bladder-control medication.

Harks back to the drive-in classics of yesteryear with unapologetic nostalgia and undisguised affection.

Creepy, silly, startling, irritating, and black-vomit-and-multicolored-urine disgusting, The Oregonian wears out its welcome within 30 minutes.

We get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.

What could have been a moderately entertaining short film is yanked to intolerable lengths in Killing Bono, a shapeless rock-music caper that, like its deluded antihero, just doesn't know when to stop.

All right, then, let’s rip off the Band-Aid: Destination Wedding is torture. And not just because this would-be romantic comedy is grating, cheap-looking and a mighty drag: it also turns two seasoned, likable actors into characters you’ll want to throttle long before the credits roll.

Any comedy that can combine death, abortion, Jewish ritual and a mariachi band without curdling into complete lunacy deserves a modicum of respect. In the case of My Mexican Shivah, more would be pushing it.

With slapstick smothering the scares, [REC 3] is further marred by a plot in which the muted Catholicism of its antecedents is turned up to full blast.

At once comic, tragic and goofily romantic, and resting too often on Odd’s clarifying narration, this young-adult lark breaches the nonsense barrier with some regularity.

Proceeding in a tone of unrelieved misery, Coldwater is a punishing, predictable drama that’s almost rescued by strong acting and good intentions.

The Tomorrow War is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity.

A raunchy romantic comedy that, like its heroine, rarely has both feet on the ground.

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.

Tasteful to a fault, Berlin 36 turns real-life controversy into disappointingly tepid drama.