Jeannette Catsoulis

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

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.

Falling with a thud between two stools, it has neither the zip nor the zaniness of farce nor the airy vivacity of the best romantic comedies.

Ms. Nichols is consistently appealing in the kind of role Zooey Deschanel has pretty much cornered, and Philippe Rousselot's nighttime shots of highway tragedy are dreamily atmospheric. If only Roger Towne's screenplay had focused less on the metaphysical import of Lyman's savior impulses and more on the physical rewards of his salvaged life.

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.

The Citizen is a heartfelt plea for charity, tolerance and all-around loving kindness — admirable aims sadly shackled to Sam Kadi’s inexpert direction.

Belaboring the cartoon connection, the director leaves the family struggles that enrich Mr. Suskind’s 2014 book of the same title stubbornly veiled.

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.

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

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.

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.

Has plenty of humor but no satirical bite.

What we need is for the writer and director, David Pomes, to wallow less in aimless dialogue and lowlife sordidness. What we need is a point.

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.

Ms. Bledel works her “Gilmore Girls” charm to the hilt, but no amount of cerulean-eyed sparkle can transcend this level of thudding mediocrity.

More successful at conjuring atmosphere than at plot, We Go Way Back is nicely acted but frustratingly slight.

Essentially the story of a young woman coming into her power, Gretel & Hansel is quietly sinister, yet too underdeveloped to truly scare. Together, Jeremy Reed’s production design and Galo Olivares’s photography weave a chilly spell that’s regrettably undermined by the opacity of the storytelling.

The romance may be risible, but the scenes of mass panic and political desperation are slickly disturbing.

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!)

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

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

Slow and sincere, The Debt bites off more plot than it can dramatically chew, its characters — especially the go-between played by the excellent Argentine actor Alberto Ammann — diluted by political maneuvering.

Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.

Well acted and sporadically amusing - especially when Olivia Wilde's profanity-spewing stripper is around - Butter alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values.

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.

This saga, set in Berlin, is more committed to its bloodletting than to any of its characters.

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

Propelled by an eccentric cast of characters and increasingly seamy locations, Fix dashes headlong through Los Angeles with a little charm and a lot of verve.

The film's sweetness is endearing but too featherweight to engage.

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

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.

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.

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

With its oversimplified emotions and dumbed-down depiction of the creative process, this inoffensive time-filler dissolves in the mouth like vanilla pudding.

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.

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.

The Little Hours is saved from ignominy by two brief standout performances.

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.

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.

It’s all very heady and voluptuous, but it’s also painfully superficial.

On one level, a stereotypical mash of Greek cruelty, queer poetry slams and rabid activist rhetoric. But beneath the tired crudeness and college-romp clichés, the movie is gently perceptive about the malleable nature of sexuality and the barriers we construct to hide our confusion.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A disappointingly shallow story in which only the dead are named, and the living are reduced to stereotypes.

Roth is never less than a treat as a woman whose veil of class and privilege is being slowly lifted to reveal her misplaced loyalties. The Crimes That Bind might feel leaden, but Alicia’s transformation feels lighter than air.

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

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

The movie’s biggest entertainment, however, is not the market-share rivalry between MakerBot Industries, in Brooklyn, and the younger Formlabs, in Boston, but its fearless dive into dweeb-culture head space.

Despite excellent stunt work and a too-brief appearance by Orlando Jones as an unflappable cop, the movie -- unlike Mr. Douglas’s hairdo -- never rises above mediocrity.

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

Embracing outraged victimhood the way Angelina Jolie embraces a close-up, Ms. Basinger, doing double duty here as an executive producer, appears oblivious to the script's idiocies.

As a sales pitch for an undeniably popular program, Q Ball (filmed in 2018) builds a crescendo of hope and good will. Anyone seeking a more substantive conversation on life beyond the basket, however, will have to look elsewhere.

Brooklyn 45 is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.

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.

The style is stilted, the look rudimentary, with Abhilasha Dewan’s cheeky animation supplying an occasional visual lift. Yet as Wilson’s former errand boy guides us around her onetime fiefdom — conjuring an area fizzing with smut until doused by Giuliani — we may sense the milieu, but its matriarch remains stubbornly indistinct.

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.

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

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.

Placing sex and gender identity at the center of almost every conversation, the writer and director, Eric Schaeffer, is so keen to demythologize that the film’s potentially most affecting moments are too often smothered by the hackneyed characters and setups that surround them.

Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.

Having devoted much of their lives to combating lupine myths by introducing Koani to wonder-struck schoolchildren, Mr. Weide and Ms. Tucker are ill served by a director who reduces the anti-wolf lobby to caricature and the debates over reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies to grossly biased clips.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s Mondocane is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.

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

Relies less on the novelty of its premise than on the positioning of solid actors in minor roles (including Melissa Leo and Martin Donovan as the tortured parents of a murdered child) and the intelligence of its star.

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.

Featuring the usual fractured visuals, generic victims and pinballing cameras — both hand-held and mounted on bike helmets — Exists nevertheless has an unusually dreamy opening and a few surprisingly entertaining tweaks.

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

An unabashed sales pitch for international adoption, Thaddaeus Scheel’s Stuck aims for the heart much more than the mind.

Radiating a distinctly retro vibe, this throwaway thriller from the German director Christian Alvart tosses a bone to Renée Zellweger, who chews it to a nub as Emily Jenkins, a harried social worker.

While Silverstein’s commitment to authenticity is admirable (she spent years visiting backyard rodeos across Texas, talking with the participants), her narrative is too tamped-down and languorous to catch hold.

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

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.

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

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is loud, lazy, profane and well nigh incoherent. It’s also at times quite funny, with a goofy vulgarity that made me giggle.

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

Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events.

Fat, Sick may be no great shakes as a movie, but as an ad for Mr. Cross's wellness program its now-healthy heart is in the right place.

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

Existing outside of time and place, The Other Lamb is a gorgeous revenge fable with an excess of atmosphere and zero subtlety — a mallet wrapped in gauze and girlish laughter.

Has a friendly, blue-collar vibe (Cody is an ex-fish-sorter from the Shiverpool, Antarctica) and some sly, low-key humor. Nevertheless, a moratorium on penguins might be called for, despite the inevitable anthropomorphic void.

Free of blood, bruises and visible trauma, DOA revels in its fakery. And though the film presents more exuberant female flesh than hiring day at Hooters, it's strictly for titillation.

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.

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.

A gay tragedy in three acts and more than a dozen excellent songs, House of Boys conveys an emotional honesty that overrides its dated style.

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.

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

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.

There is something cozy and a little claustrophobic about Henry Jaglom's indulgent Hollywood satires.

Clogged with court transcripts, medical records and repetitive (if moving) patient testimony, Burzynski tickles the mind only at the cost of trampling the eyes.

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.

Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait.

Little more than an archipelago of historical set pieces linked by a syrupy causeway of sentiment, JK Youn’s Ode to My Father may have slain them in South Korea, but its packaged pain and bullet-point structure are likely to leave Western audiences cold.

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.

A minor chiller and major downer from the talented Alexandre Aja.

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

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.

Despite the film’s sketchy aesthetic and barely animate lead, its tone is carefully contrived: I’ll wager no one in your circle is as dryly funny or spontaneously surreal as Harmony’s nonsupport group.

She’s Missing is slow and dreamy and frustratingly opaque. Yet it has a potent sense of place and an ominous atmosphere of impermanence.

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

With its bleak, yearning tone and defiantly cloudy color palette, “England Is Mine” has a pleasingly granular feel for its era and location. But its imagining of Morrissey as a self-pitying narcissist, a curiously passive intellectual who can’t get out of his own way, soaks the movie in a wearying inertia.

Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it.

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.

A documentary that purports to chronicle the sober and urgent work of those who ferret out human-rights abuses, but instead plays like a portrait of a rather glamorous marriage.

Everyone’s sorry about something in Forgiveness, a glum drama about the way repentance can do more damage than the sin that precedes it.

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.

A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.

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.

Though Jessie Buckley, as Wynne’s suspicious wife, and Rachel Brosnahan, as an amusingly pushy C.I.A. operative, add welcome jolts of female energy, The Courier is essentially the story of an extraordinary male friendship. The men’s mutual compassion peaks too late to save the picture, but is no less moving for that.

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

A minimalist mood poem to loss and alienation.

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.

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.

A lesbian-foodie fairy tale that keeps its appetites well under control. The title may hint at naughty pleasures, but the director, Pratibha Parmar, is more interested in pappadams than passion.

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.

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.

Narrated, rather annoyingly, by the Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, Huntwatch feels dismayingly one-sided. Yet as we hear of animals being skinned alive and see a bludgeoned pup linger in agony, any pro-hunt argument seems emphatically beside the point.

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.

Though the spaces between the funny voices are filled with verdant hillsides and vanilla beaches that stretch the length of the frame, there’s an occasional sour edge to the comedic sparring.

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

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.

Ms. Weisman offers a deluge of information. But for those not already versed in the lingo or the people involved, the movie plays like a blurry primer to an anarchic, mysterious world.

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

Feels passé and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.

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

In a movie as happy to resurrect characters as rub them out, nothing is of consequence, and the glibness grows numbing.

Korean director Hong Sang-soo unleashes yet another emotionally stunted antihero in Night and Day, a rambling study of male arrested development.

A brief appearance by Joey Lauren Adams adds a welcome warmth to the standard therapist role, but otherwise all is bewilderment and repetition.

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

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

A mildly engaging lowlife odyssey that struggles not to choke on its own style.

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

For all its many irritations, You Wont Miss Me has undeniable punch, a frayed energy that feels janglingly unstable. Is Shelly crazy or just a pain in the neck? We're not really sure, and neither is she.

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

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

The film takes 70 minutes and a lot of silly chatter to conclude what every woman well knows: wearing hooker heels will have most men eating out of her hand. Or, if she's lucky, licking her aching feet.

Ms. Basinger commits to her disturbed character. But the script (by the director, Anders Morgenthaler) makes Maria’s behavior so reckless — at times, she’s practically begging to be mugged or worse — that we have no chance of sympathizing with her.

While there is much to admire in this scrappy, micro-budgeted debut feature, its sci-fi shenanigans are too convoluted and its visuals too claustrophobic to sustain interest.

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.

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.

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

Fans typically expect well-executed jump scares, fun plot twists and the occasional rubbery monster. What they probably don’t expect is the sophisticated allegory that Imaginary appears to be flirting with — and comes close to pulling off — before losing its nerve.

At its best when merging shocks with social commentary, this halting compilation improves significantly as it nears the end of the alphabet.

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.

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.

There’s a pleasing humility and introspection to this Bruce — a ruler no longer sure if his patriotic purpose is worth the carnage. His joints may be stiffer than his resolve; but, in placing the warrior temporarily aside, Macfadyen and his director have helped us more clearly to see the man.

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.

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

The Milk of Sorrow is constrained by a rarefied screenplay and a near-mute central performance.

This stylistic restraint may help deflect accusations of exploitation (though the film's two pivotal sex scenes both feel uncomfortably extended, the initial crime lasting a squirm-inducing six minutes), but it also impedes our connection with the victims.

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

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

A circular firing-squad of full-on crazy, Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come barges into American counterterrorism tactics with sledgehammer satire and a numbingly repetitive plot.

Documents courage, but steers clear of character.

At least 30 minutes and several scams too long, the plot passes from amusing to confounding long before the final double-cross.

In “Chapter 3,” the violence has been supercharged, and so has the virtuosity. At a certain point, though, the carnage becomes deadening, its consequences no more than soulless tableaus of damage that encourage disengagement.

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

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

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.

Saw IV is bloody proof that Jigsaw may be dead, but his well of corporeal abuses has yet to run dry.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What some may see as an examination of loss and legacy, others will view as a portrait of psychological coercion: overbearing men riding roughshod over the wishes of a grieving woman.

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.

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

The result is a frustratingly superficial look at a smart, driven and sometimes frightened young man who always felt as though he were "racing against time."

Freeman, never the most animated of performers, gives his specific brand of passive British miserabilism free rein. But it’s Melissa Rauch, as Charlie’s safely dull, place-holder girlfriend, who steals the show.

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.

However crucial and opportune in its truth-seeking and depictions of political trickery (Burns could hardly have known his film would plop into theaters alongside the impeachment hearings for President Trump), The Report is too often dramatically frozen, its emotions stubbornly internal.

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 muddled mélange of black comedy, revenge thriller and feminist lecture, Promising Young Woman too often backs away from its potentially searing setup.

The combined skills of the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, and his cinematographer, José David Montero, can’t surmount a story that gives us no one to invest in.

Though not without its charms -- the scenes in Mumbai are comically chaotic -- Offshore might have raised more chuckles when it was made, in 2006, than in the economic chill of 2009. And not only in Michigan.

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

The characters don’t have conversations so much as helpfully recite their back stories, and the long-buried secret is soon so obvious that the movie’s last-act hysteria feels forced and a little ridiculous.

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.

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

The plot of Mars owes at least as much to bodily fluids as it does to science fiction.

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

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.

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.

Working with four interchangeable Deweys, the filmmakers create a sufficient number of lively stunts to keep the kiddies amused, though the film's wittiest moment -- a canine parody of Dudley Moore's first glimpse of Bo Derek in "10" -- will be appreciated only by their parents. In trying to straddle both age groups, however, Firehouse Dog proves decidedly less nimble than its furry star.

Audiences will be either captivated or irritated, depending on their tolerance for high-concept whimsy and high-energy theatrics. By the end of the wake itself, they may be wishing Binew’s illness were running ahead of schedule.

Vaughn and Newton prove remarkably effective at selling the benefits of their alternate packaging. Their efforts, however, are too often diluted by the film’s lazy plotting and Millie’s hackneyed emotional baggage.

Hectic and harebrained, this galloping French thriller tosses a potpourri of plot points - crooked cops, sleazy gangsters, stolen drugs and an underage hostage - into a packed-to-the-gills nightclub, and stirs. Repeatedly.

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

Like most of LaBute’s work, Out of the Blue is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine.

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.

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

Playing like a mashup of tropes from far superior small- and large-screen entertainments (Scandal, House of Lies, Ides of March), this clunky feature from Bill Guttentag is satire at its most soft-bellied and toadying.

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

You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition.

Too leaden for adults and too baffling for kids.

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

Even those viewers who share the film's conviction that preparing a collection for New York Fashion Week is inherently fascinating may lose interest long before the final frock is fitted.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Neither educational nor engaging.

Filmed in and around New Orleans, “The Visitor” isn’t a terrible movie, just a tired one.

Burdened by a ludicrous script and messy direction, Ms. Kirkland — a headstrong veteran performer who is nothing if not game — has proved that she can play this kind of role in her sleep. If only the movie around it were worthy of her efforts.

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

Hyett proves more successful with atmosphere than plot.

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.

In trying to have it both ways, Brice has created a messy, overstuffed parody of moral policing that squanders the promise of its cleverly executed opening.

Favoring the superficial over the substantive, The Gospel of Eureka keeps skirting opportunities to excavate experience.

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

This archipelago of maneuvers, however jaw-dropping, never coheres into a real movie.

A Michael Keaton outing is always cause for celebration, no matter how ramshackle the vehicle ("First Daughter," anyone?) or paper-thin the role.

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.

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.

In David Blue Garcia’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably.

Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition.

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

Law (and his director, Karim Aïnouz) might be laying it on thick, but his grotesque tyrant is the only thing lifting this dreary, ahistoric drama out of its narrative doldrums.

Despite solid acting (including John Cusack as a plainclothes detective), Arsenal is hobbled mainly by its director’s histrionic tendencies.

Windfall is dramatically flat and logically wanting.

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.

Torn between the maternal and the cosmic, the tactile and the unearthly, Proxima feels as unsettled as its heroine.

Mr. Banker teases us with a dizzy, dislocating shooting style that throws up a succession of eerily arresting images. Even so, his film never overcomes the fact that watching drugged-out wastrels is rarely interesting — unless, of course, you’re one of them.

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.

Even more inadvisable was the decision (whether made by Mr. McLean or his backers) to transform the mercurial psychopath Mick Taylor (a truly menacing John Jarratt) into a roguish cartoon.

Another ruin-and-rehab tale, one that initially tantalizes then flatly disappoints.

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

This poor-surfers-make-good drama from Morgan O’Neill and Ben Nott relies more than it should on toned thighs and taut gluteals. Be grateful; there’s nothing to see on dry land that’s anywhere near as compelling.

Playing characters with no real substance, the actors struggle to develop a sense of shared peril.

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.

It’s all a bit precious and predictable.

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.

Crisply shot and surprisingly well acted, Mother's Day suffers from an overly long script (a tornado hovers off screen to no apparent purpose) and annoying glitches in continuity.

Smothering insightful moments in verbal and musical treacle (courtesy of Harriet Schock’s sticky songs), Mr. Jaglom displays an endearing lack of cynicism but an equal lack of discipline.

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.

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.

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

Despite Ms. Janssen's fine taste in music - it's lovely to hear Jorma Kaukonen's "Genesis" on the soundtrack - her film's downfall was ensured by a leading lady who will always be more credible chasing zombies than the American dream.

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.

Essentially, we’re watching dead people refuse to lie down, yet the acting isn’t terrible, and Scott Winig’s photography is satisfyingly bleak and grimy.

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

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

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.

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

Written and directed by Brit McAdams, Paint is a comedically inert parody of male privilege that’s all sight gags and very little substance.

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

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.

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.

Offsetting its outlandish premise with believable performances, Rage (Rabia) delivers a heavy-handed metaphor for immigrant invisibility.

The audience, given not an ounce of human warmth nor one person to care about, finally has no choice but to cheer for the anonymous cyberbully who wants them all dead.

Whether on a Middle Eastern battlefield or the streets of New York, characters converse in stilted, expository mouthfuls that smother emotion.

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.

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

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

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