Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

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

Some scenes scrape your senses like sandpaper, while others are so tender they’re almost destabilizing. Together, they shape a picture that’s tragically specific, yet more comfortable with mystery than some viewers might prefer.

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.

Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud, the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.

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

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.

Predictable to a fault, the movie coasts pleasurably on Neeson’s seasoned, sad-sweet charisma — an asset that’s been tragically imprisoned in mopey-loner roles and generic action thrillers.

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.

Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing style that allows the actors to shine, My Little Sister offers neither false uplift nor dreary realism.

Dopey dialogue and less-than-scrupulous continuity augment the ramshackle vibe of a movie that’s too inept to qualify as camp or cult.

Set over eight harrowing months, Pieces of a Woman is a ragged, mesmerizing study of rupture and reconstruction. The ending is ill-judged, but the movie understands that while we love in common, we grieve alone.

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

Wordy and stilted (it was derived from a stage play), this low-budget debut nevertheless benefits from a mesmerizing central performance by Suzan Anbeh.

This extraordinary woman, seemingly incapable of despair through roughly two decades of struggle, remains elusive. There’s something daunting about this degree of implacable selflessness, and it has a curiously flattening effect on a movie that feels less emotionally complex — less enraged — than it ought to.

Electric and alive as few films are, Lovers Rock will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.

Some of Red, White and Blue is hard to watch, but the film is eloquent on how an institution will resist change, perhaps especially from inside its own walls.

A film in which violence and stillness alternate with queasy regularity.

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

Despite a script (by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian) that sees no need to flavor its tension with flashbacks or character-fleshing, Run has fun with its ludicrous plot.

Propelled by a distinctive style and a potent lead performance, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal builds a singular tension between silence and noise.

Cemetery is primarily a slow and lovingly detailed immersion in the sights and sounds of the jungle and the mahout’s devoted attention to his animal.

The movie needs Winslet and Ronan’s skills, their ability to semaphore more with sliding glances and tiny gestures than many actors manage with pages of dialogue. There’s pleasure in deciphering these signals.

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.

Waffling between anger and pathos, dry humor and dead-eyed violence, Fatman feels tonally befuddled.

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

Pitiless in its intent, and hopeless in its sense of sorrowful dereliction, The Dark and the Wicked fully earns its horrifically distressing final scenes.

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

The most polished superpower on display in the defiantly unexciting Secret Society of Second-Born Royals is the ability to say its title without spitting.

Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, Kajillionaire is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence.

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

The movie observes collective pain with endearing absurdity.

This minimalist survival thriller unfolds with such elegant simplicity and single-minded momentum that its irritations are easily excused.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Critical Thinking does little to detach itself from genre cliché; yet this heartfelt drama about a rough-and-tumble group of high-schoolers who claw their way to a national chess tournament has a sweetness that softens its flaws.

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

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

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

Restructuring some story arcs and jettisoning others, Iannucci and his collaborator, Simon Blackwell, have created a souped-up, trimmed-down adaptation so fleet and entertaining that its cleverness doesn’t immediately register.

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.

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

While Derrick Borte’s filmmaking is bluntly efficient — and the vehicular stunt work impressive — the character is a windup toy, a dumb and dirty symbol of male grievance.

Sultry, but never sleazy, observant yet nonjudgmental, An Easy Girl is more than just a tale of innocence and experience. Taking a nuanced look at sexual awakening and, to a lesser extent, class distinction, the movie has a charming flightiness that builds to an unexpectedly touching climax.

Coarsely merging social-media critique and slasher comedy, this shallow take on the evils of internet addiction is as unoriginal as it is unfunny.

By the end of Howard, it’s the songs we’ll never hear that may haunt us most.

LaBeouf, like his castmates — in particular, the talented Chelsea Rendon from the STARZ drama, “Vida” — is constrained throughout by the weight of the stereotyping and dialogue that doesn’t stand a chance against the violence.

Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely.

The cliché of the volatile chef riding roughshod over his subordinates receives a thorough airing in Nose to Tail, a resolute but finally punishing wallow in self-destructiveness and obnoxious male behavior.

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

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

Burdened by a silly R rating that may deter the very youngsters who are likely to enjoy it most, Yes, God, Yes (written and directed by Karen Maine) fights back with an appealing lead and an overwhelmingly innocent tone.

A gossipy portrait of a charmingly naughty boy whose genius is perhaps best appreciated on a second viewing with the sound off and the eyes wide open.

There is so much recycled material in “Fatal Affair” that its carbon footprint must have been zero.

Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.

Breathtakingly photographed by Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, Widow of Silence is a movie with a cool head and a sharp eye — one that sees greater hope in the flamboyantly jeweled tones of a carmine head scarf than in the entrenched absurdities of a broken bureaucracy.

Smart, noisy and flashily assured, We Are Little Zombies is entirely, gleefully its own thing.

Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.

Unspooling over the course of a few lazy summer days, the film offers an enigmatic examination of youthful alienation, its plot irresolute and unpredictable.

Welcome to Chechnya is a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.

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

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

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

Neither bitter nor maudlin, The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie about filmmaking and soul-searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both.

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.

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.

The movie accumulates a rueful nostalgia. Soft black-and-white cinematography (by Bill Otto and Carl Nenzen Loven) and low-key humor help offset the limitations of its partly crowd-funded budget, as does the naturalism of the partly improvised performances

Marked by a fierce vitality and vivid emotional authenticity, Papicha thrives on the heat of Nedjma’s anger and the glorious bond among the mostly young female performers.

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

The result is an exceedingly well-made first feature, a simple genre movie elevated by strong visuals, potent performances and a mood that falls somewhere between resignation and guttering hope.

More curious and combative than the movie around her, Kennedy is as much anthropologist as chef, her deep love for her adopted country palpable.

Despite the ripeness and flammability of its material, the movie feels oddly distant, the screenplay marred by weak scares, graceless plotting and dashed-off characters.

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

As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, Blood and Money suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses.

While the movie barrels toward a final act that’s more feminist fantasy than credible conclusion, Bolger’s phenomenal performance locks us tightly on Sarah’s side.

Like a stone skipping on water, How to Build a Girl leaps from raunchy to charming, vulgar to sweet, earthy to airy-fairy without allowing any one to settle. Yet it’s so wonderfully funny and deeply embedded in class-consciousness . . . that it’s tonal incontinence is easily forgiven.

Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.

A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, Deerskin (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The writing might be a tangle of limp clichés, but the actors — especially Woodley and the terrific Wendie Malick as Daphne’s mother — sweat to sell every line.

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

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.

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.

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

Resistance feels disjointed and dated.

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

With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, Saint Frances weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance.

Oppressively dark and unrelentingly intense, Blood on Her Name packs down-and-dirty performances, and a few surprises, into a tight 85 minutes.

Woods, remarkably comfortable in her first film role, gives Goldie a steel spine and a feisty resourcefulness, her moments of vulnerability rare, but essential.