Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

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.

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.

Matt and Mara is less a movie than an idea for one. It doesn’t help that neither character is likable, or that the director and writer, Kazik Radwanski, fills the screen with close-ups in lieu of information.

At once polished and punky, Poser is about the maturing of a vampiric personality. Like its music, the movie feels exploratory and raw-edged, yet with a persistent pathos that clings to Lennon and isolates her.

As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces.

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.

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.

Banishing showy effects and cheap scares, the Ecuadorean director Sebastián Cordero has meticulously shaped a number of sci-fi clichés — from the botched spacewalk to the communications breakdown — into a wondering contemplation of our place in the universe.

A movie that feels more like an encomium than a thoughtful probe of a brilliantly mutinous mind.

That stink, like iffy contracts and child labor laws, remains unexplored. Filled with blind eyes and unspoken agreements, Girl Model opens a can of worms, then disdains to follow their slimy trails.

Hancock is wasted here, as are the meaty dramatic threads that Elizabeth O’Halloran’s formulaic screenplay never bothers to pull.

Harboring few ambitions beyond knock-your-socks-off action sequences, this crafty revenge thriller delivers with so much style — and even some wit — that the lack of substance takes longer than it should to become problematic.

In this visual caress of postindustrial blight, disintegration has never looked so gorgeous.

The movie’s ability to express, with directness and humor, the insecurities of intimacy — most remarkably during the couple’s first night together — is a delight.

There may be little to give you the collywobbles, but there’s quite a lot to enjoy, with Ms. Morton heading the list. Swaddled in thick cardis and shapeless scrubs, she makes Katherine a well of overanxious care and castrating comments.

Evincing more visible intelligence than any of his human co-stars aside from Lithgow, Caesar is disquietingly lifelike.

Though hobbled by an obviousness that dampens any suspense, this sensitive, environmentally concerned movie is most successful when steeped in the particularities of its location.

The Spanish writer and director Nacho Vigalondo has audacity to spare. Constructing a looping, economical plot and directing like a fire marshal in a flaming building, he conjures urgency and disorientation from the thinnest of air.

Unfolding entirely in a fictional language (which the actors deliver with fluid conviction), and enriched by lovingly rendered practical effects, this first feature from Andrew Cumming pairs its minimalist narrative with the maximum of atmosphere.

Memories of Tomorrow finally understands that the real victim of this terrible affliction is the partner left behind.

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.

Managing to feel at once painfully slow and bafflingly truncated, this creaky triptych of not-so-scary tales is a tame curiosity of movie nostalgia.

Ms. Richen elucidates an entire spectrum of views, from actively egalitarian to reactively homophobic.

Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.

Patiently and delicately, Ms. Trachtman teases out the tricky dynamics of a family dealing with a disabled child.

Highlighting the wacky while playing down the distasteful, Marie Losier's playful profile of the English musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his second wife, Lady Jaye, takes a lighthearted look at the things they did for love.

Turning black-white conflict into a laudably complex wash of gray, Mr. Green (inspired in part by a conversation he had with a police officer about the 2014 death of Eric Garner) favors reason over outrage. The political heat rises but the movie stays cool, its smooth, smart climax in keeping with its levelheaded tone.

Without these balancing voices, I Am Jane Doe coalesces into a steamroller of pain that squashes our ability to see beyond its wounded families.

The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.

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.

Marveling without questioning, the movie is content to package the phenomenon and coast on its feel-good wave. Yet, somewhere around the midpoint, I began to wonder who was most thrilled by all this fuss.

Mr. Siegel is no Cassandra: retaining the waggish tone of his previous documentary, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" (released in 2007), he balances the doom-talking heads with cute animation and characters like Yvon Achard, a French "bee historian" who caresses the swarm with his elaborately styled facial hair.

"Section 31,” bravely directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, is a dog’s dinner of head-snapping reversals and explanatory dialogue — a movie with little on its mind but mayhem.

An adamantly linear, myth-busting stride through a prodigiously talented life.

Playing with memory — the characters’ and our own — allows Mr. Boyle and his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, to conjure some of the movie’s loveliest, most melancholy images.

Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.

This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.

Garbage Dreams records the tremblings of a culture at a crossroads.

Advocating freedom from a system that "doesn't want you to die and doesn't want you to get well," this hard-hitting film leaves us finally more hopeful than despairing.

Teasing and shrewd, Rabbit à la Berlin is a floppy-eared fable about the uneasy trade-offs between liberty and security.

Unfolding with a reticence that’s occasionally confusing, Les Cowboys presents a suggestive, almost abstract take on terror and the generational toxicity of bigotry.

Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, Tales of the Rat Fink will convince you that Mr. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth.

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

Neither slick nor propulsive, The Loneliest Whale gently combines aquatic adventure and bobbing meditation on our own species’s environmental arrogance.

A fascinating profile of the online pornography provider Kink.com.

The writing (by Micah Bloomberg, a creator of the 2018-20 TV series “Homecoming”) is so sharp, the acting so agile and the cinematography (by Ludovica Isidori) so inventive that what could have been a stuffy experiment in lockdown filmmaking is instead a vividly involving battle of wills.

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.

Irena Salina's astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests.

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.

Chico Teixeira’s languid, libidinous Alice’s House is the best argument against marriage and motherhood to appear in many a year.

Mr. Tyrnauer surreptitiously hoses away the layers of dirt to reveal the fragility of his subject’s anything-goes hedonism.

Alternately sexy and silly, galvanic and gentle, MA is best enjoyed as a slide show of visual blessings and, sometimes, bafflements.

Fetishizing the tired tokens of the American gangster movie, The Connection is a slickly styled, overlong pastiche. Yet its denizens have a retro glamour and the soundtrack a shameless literalness that’s rather endearing.

Self-pitying or smug, jaunty or crestfallen, callous or contrite, the movie’s fitful tone is fully yoked to Joaquin Phoenix’s sodden-to-sober lead performance.

Somewhere Between presents an effortlessly moving but superficial profile of four bright Chinese girls and their adoptive American families.

Even were it not so delightful, Damsels in Distress, set at a fictional upper-crust college, would deserve a watch for its dialogue alone.

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

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.

What’s left is a strange, sour tale that’s neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine’s hood.

The movie’s cinematographers may hog the limelight, but it’s the sweat of the sound engineers that brings their work to life.

Unfailingly modest and profoundly humane, The Way We Get By profiles three people over 70 whose lives have been changed by a simple act of service.

A granola ode to natural childbirth that makes you want to hop into a tub of warm water and start pushing.

Its ideas aren’t new, and at times Ruby and Gensan can feel like recognizable symbols of societal failure. What’s different, though, is the performers’ skill in portraying characters whose extreme mutual dependence is touchingly believable, giving no hint of the damage later revealed.

This wonderfully weird documentary pinpoints the desire to preserve fleeting glories.

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

Johanna Schwartz’s miraculously hopeful documentary, They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile, delivers a vibrant testimony of resilience under oppression.

A droll Nietzschean fable that's fully aware of its lapses into absurdity.

That assured style is the spackle that holds Kill List together: when the plot doglegs into insanity, and the characters follow suit, this brutal fever dream refuses to fall apart.

Rising above a minuscule budget with ladles of charm and a tender poignancy, Little Feet is a quixotic poem to youthful resourcefulness.

A low-key character study whose gently repetitive rhythms mask an unusually keen sense of nuance and subtlety.

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.

The movie’s most striking aspect, though, is Lyn Moncrief’s arresting cinematography, which turns the vast vacancy of the plains into both hostile observer and hellish metaphor. The story might finally slip its leash, but the baleful mood holds firm.

As tables turn and turn again — nudged along by a wolfish impostor (Ward Horton) and some creative torturing — the movie allows scant time to ponder each new tack.

Softened by some sweet, low-key moments between Vince and a fellow acting student (a very good Emily Mortimer) and by Mr. Garcia’s embodiment of disappointed middle age.

The direction, by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, is sure and unfussy, spinning a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection.

Ms. Enos is a credibly fraying voyeur, all anxious looks and nervous starts, but “Never Here” is too emotionally antiseptic to engage.

Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, Cordelia offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche.

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

Though leaving us with many more questions than answers, this well-intentioned blur of accusations, advertising clips and pink-washed events nevertheless deserves to be seen.

With a likable cast and a wholesome message about the true meaning of success, The Tiger Hunter might balk at the harsher details of immigrant life, but it has a generosity of spirit that lifts everyone up.

Gently discursive and virtually plotless, The Civil Dead is a walking-and-talking movie that finds uncommon humor in Whit’s need to be seen and Clay’s extreme discomfort with that responsibility.

Surrender to its shaggy rhythms and you’ll find this sometimes tiresome portrait of a family of mythical beasts is not without intelligence and a strangely mesmeric intent.

Taking a coolheaded approach to hot-button issues, Fly Away overcomes its neatly bow-tied ending with strong performances (including Greg Germann as a sensitive neighbor) and a spare, intelligent script.

Generous in spirit and nimble in technique, this riveting documentary about the Republican operative (who died of a brain tumor in 1991) reveals a scrappy genius rife with contradictions.

Dinosaur 13 may not be the best documentary, but as a scientific soap opera, it’s a doozy.

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.

Touching on issues of artistic survival and the porous boundary between work and pleasure, Ms. Subrin, an accomplished visual artist and filmmaker, sifts addiction, celebrity and the plight of the aging actress into something rarefied yet real.

Though voices both welcoming and hostile to women judges are represented, Ms. al-Faqih’s likely Sisyphean battle to reach her position feels insufficiently underlined.

Economical in the extreme — but without appearing cash-poor — this tightly wound thriller proves that minimal resources can sometimes produce more than satisfying results.

At heart an unlovely love story illuminated by sudden flares of violence, the film reeks of hopelessness and moral destitution, offering its lovers few means of escape.

Giving "inspirational" a good name, Matt Ruskin's vibrant and soulful documentary The Hip Hop Project sets its universal message to an inner-city beat.

A perceptive and beautifully acted drama.

Sensible and unnerving, Stink! is likely to incite, at the least, a purging of Axe body spray from adolescent boys’ bedrooms.

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

Screwy and strange, Perpetrator is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun.

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.

This scrappy-slick confessional is a fascinating study in dualities.

Not until the film's surprisingly touching finale do we learn the source of that friction, in a delicately handled sequence that retroactively floods the story with satisfying context.

The Snowtown Murders reminds us that sometimes evil is immediately recognizable, but at other times it comes bearing bacon and beer.

Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, Skinamarink sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget

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

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.

The two leads are mesmerizing, hurling themselves into their physically demented roles with ferocious commitment.

This unusually taut sophomore feature from Jim Mickle is more abnormal than most in that its creatures are capable not only of evolving but also of embracing religious fanaticism.

The film's greatest accomplishment is its ability to change tone at least three times without losing the audience.

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

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

Leavening the rather grim atmosphere with luminous earth tones (photographed by Suzie Lavelle) and a smidgen of wry humor, this low-budget beauty draws you in.

A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity and dead-eyed manipulation, Cold Fish charts the twisted alliance of two tropical-fish salesmen with baleful glee.

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.

Less an epic poem than a showcase for two of cinema’s finest actors, The Return is visually bleak and emotionally gripping.

Mr. Mills (drawing on his own experiences and doing triple duty as the director and screenwriter) gives a performance of rancid single-mindedness. It’s a fearlessly unsympathetic role that provides plenty of space for train-wreck humor but almost no wiggle room for redemption.

Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity.

Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty.

Respectfully and without dramatization (the ideas are electric enough), the directors observe a cross section of articulate evangelicals and accompany a Christian group on a revealing trip to Israel.

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

Coming out has rarely looked so pretty.

Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, What Now? Remind Me is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence.

Like a bedtime cup of cocoa, Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle has a soothing familiarity that quiets the mind and settles the spirit.

An unexpectedly gripping thriller that seesaws between comedy and horror, I Care a Lot is cleverly written (by the director, J Blakeson) and wonderfully cast.

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

Tiny advances in seduction — like a direct gaze, or the eventual removal of that wig — assume the power of full-on sexual collisions, and Ms. Yaron, with her restlessly darting eyes, easily conveys Meira’s sensual deprivation.

Mr. Nooshin stirs a mystery that’s light on special effects and bravely uncomplicated. He may not have much money, but his feel for age and class dynamics is sure, and his actors respond.

Adam Wingard’s You’re Next strays just enough from formula to tweak our jaded appetites. That it does so without spraying the gore to geyserlike excess says a great deal about Mr. Wingard’s sensibility.

The music is lovely, and the animation is soft and imaginatively detailed. Patema and Age may not know what’s upside down or right-way up, but their director is never in any doubt.

Part career profile and part psychological exploration, “Panico” smoothly accomplishes the first but teases gold with the second.

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.

A seductively fluid and tactile drama from the writer and director Karin Albou, explores love and identity through the prism of the female body and the rights of its owner.

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.

Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for Last Night in Soho, its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career.

It's brilliantly silly entertainment whose flaws are glaring only in hindsight; in the moment, you'll have much more fun if you stop looking for holes in the script and join Paul in looking for a way out.

Captured mostly in gorgeous black and white, The Love We Make is alternately trite, touching, funny and fascinating.

A clear-eyed and utterly ruthless dissection of the battle for Ohio in the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election.

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

Remarkable as much for its insights as for its audacity, The Dirties approaches school violence with a comic veneer that slowly shades into deep darkness.

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.

Not even John Newman’s distressingly awful dialogue can slow Cage’s roll to a histrionic finish.

More an infomercial than a movie, Rollin Binzer’s awed documentary is, at best, a well-earned tribute to one man’s unwavering vision and unrelenting hard work.

Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.

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."

This astonishingly effective environmental nightmare is based on reasoning that, if you've been following the science, seems all too possible.

The film produces moments that catch in the throat.

The filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.

The light is menacing, the mood watchful and the action scenes have a crude, desperate energy that gets the job done. Here, violence is neither weightless nor glorified, but just another obstacle on the way to a better future.

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

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

Landing lightly on the loneliness of fame and the ravages of aging, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a fond farewell to a distinctive talent. Yet I couldn’t help wishing it had spent less time anticipating Grahame’s death and a little more illuminating her life.

Tom Shepard's quietly observant documentary tracks its stressed-out subjects through an array of personal and scholarly challenges.

Repackaging the revenge thriller in parakeet colors and distinctive African beats, the Congolese writer and director Djo Tunda Wa Munga gives Viva Riva! a playful sensuality that goes a long way toward disguising formula.

Subtly rebellious and defiantly optimistic, “Speed Sisters” masks the sound of gunshots with the roar of revving engines. For these women, driving symbolizes a freedom they can otherwise only imagine.

My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson's sensitive study of gentrification in her home borough, is as much personal essay as urban-policy survey.

Letters transforms a picture-postcard location and odd-couple narrative into a pretty, and pretty predictable, snooze. Yet the acting is flawless, the tone gentle and observational, and Leila's transformation, when it occurs, is unforced and unaccompanied by pious lecturing.

Sweet, generous and tonally sure, Patrik, Age 1.5 has a nostalgic feel, and not just because of a soundtrack skewed toward last-millennium tunes and a hyperreal suburban setting lifted straight from "Pleasantville."

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.

A lean, low-budget debut that taps into newlywed anxiety with subtle wit and no small amount of style.

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.

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.

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.

The director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature.

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.

Mr. Alverson jacks up the tension with exquisite restraint.

The filmmaking is rough and rather clumsy, but by ceding the floor to his open, highly articulate sisters, Mr. Colvard has created a fascinatingly raw study of ferociously wielded male power.

Drop is pleasantly silly and minimally suspenseful.

In place of gouting gore and surging fright, this enjoyable adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2005 short story has an almost contemplative tone, one that drains its familiar horror tropes — a masked psychopath, communications from beyond the grave — of much of their chill. The movie’s low goose bump count, though, is far from ruinous.

What emerges is a poignant commentary on the uneasy commingling of love and fame.

Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.

For all its enthusiastic vulgarity and truly terrible punk rock, We Are Mari Pepa is a gently endearing portrait of four amiable Mexican teenagers feeling their way toward adulthood.

While occasionally unpleasant, the film never crosses the line from bearably chilling to unbearably gruesome, keeping its characters credible and its events explicable.

Delivers a brave, head-spinning commentary on the potency of advertising and the seduction of the soul.

Mr. Hardy, however, would rather busy himself with reminders of earlier creature features.... Luckily, John Nolan’s old-school effects are wicked good, and Martijn van Broekhuizen’s mossy photography is pleasingly sinister.

Bolstered by animated re-enactments and Bob Richman's frosty cinematography, Unraveled is a mesmerizing one-man dive into narcissism, entitlement and unchecked greed.

Gruesome without being gory, The Autopsy of Jane Doe achieves real scares with a minimum of special effects.

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

Don’t Leave Home is a frustratingly befuddled movie that’s nevertheless fascinating.

This ghastly scenario of poor preying on poor is, like the film's gray-green palette, profoundly depressing and entirely pitiless.

Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.

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.

Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, Ever Since the World Ended features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones.

Like Douglas Sirk without the throw pillows, Sunflower is a shamelessly old-fashioned melodrama performed with such sincerity that resistance is futile.

Packed with illuminating interviews and lyrical movement, Breath Made Visible portrays a woman with angels in her feet and innovation in her blood. Long may she rock.

Assassination has sprinkles of wit and a nicely restrained anchor in Lee Jung-jae.

While Jorgen Johansson’s windswept photography creates a credible sense of isolation (he filmed in part at the Mull of Galloway lighthouse), we sense the ominous rhythms of impending calamity.

Disconnect is naturally gripping. Using unforgiving closeups, Rubin pokes into unexpected corners— not least the different ways in which men and women respond to calamity — and never forces his story's social-media scares to improbable heights.

Darker, moodier and altogether nastier than its predecessors — “X” (2022) and, later that same year, “Pearl” — this hyperconfident feature is also funny, occasionally wistful and deeply empathetic toward its damaged, driven heroine.

One of the most entertaining documentaries to appear since "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film similarly obsessed with role playing and deception.

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

West's throwback style and disdain for excess allows his characters to shine.

That space between reality and mirage is where Ms. de Van’s strength, and this movie’s true horror, lies.

Explores the link between female sexuality and corporate profits with a style that's as entertaining as it is revelatory.

Funny and feisty, gritty and sometimes grim, this first feature from the photographer Elaine Constantine delivers a sweaty snapshot of a very specific time and place.

Moody and strange, Fast Color has a solemnity that haunts almost every frame.

At best ambiguous and at worst unfathomable, Mimosas, the sophomore feature from the Spanish director Oliver Laxe, merges harsh reality and offbeat mysticism into a reflection on the tug between our higher powers and baser instincts.

Always Be My Maybe feels a lot like a movie propped up by a stunt, a high-gloss romantic comedy so mired in triteness and unconvincing emotions that its main recommendation is the appealing diversity of its cast.

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.

The movie is most effective in its early scenes of prickly menace, and while the Dolphin is no Overlook (the haunted hotel in "The Shining"), its old-world creepiness is exactly right.

Stingingly attuned to the tension between long-term love and last-minute misgivings, Between Us makes a familiar situation feel remarkably fresh.

Impossible to categorize, this stunningly original mix of the macabre and the magical combines comedy, tragedy, fantasy and love story into an utterly singular package that’s beholden to no rules but its own.

A mournful Midwestern ballad devoid of grace notes.

It’s Weaving who gives this blunt satire of class warfare a heart.

All the more disappointing, then, when what has been a celebration of last-ditch passion slides abruptly into a cautionary tale. Until that point the movie's refreshingly unbiased tone allows us to make our own moral judgments, teasing us with the possibility that, occasionally, the scarlet woman can escape unbranded. I, for one, was rooting for her.

Ray Meets Helen has a wistful, whimsical sophistication that has all but disappeared from movies. Filled with imaginative visuals populated by the ghosts of the gone and hopes for the future, the movie is wonderfully, magically humane.

Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, The Lost King isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones.

Anyone looking for some idiosyncratic, visually stimulating entertainment this week could do worse than Where Is Where?, an intriguing narrative experiment by the Finnish artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Portrayed entirely without sentiment, everyone here is equally abject, from the crushed victim of a human stampede to the starving baby playing in its own feces. The mood of scrambling desperation can be exhausting, but the filmmaking is never less than exhilarating.

Coming in at a tight 75 minutes, this strikingly original travelogue glides on the lovely lilt of Mr. Santos's Portuguese narration.

Hyett proves more successful with atmosphere than plot.

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.

Absurd yet bold, lurid yet a tiny bit touching, Come to Daddy drags poor Norval from hopefulness to horror to a wickedly literal form of closure. More than a few audience members might even be happy to accompany him.

Suffused with a sentimentality that Wilde himself would have deplored, The Happy Prince is narratively mushy and meandering. Yet, beneath the prosthetics, there’s genuine pathos in Mr. Everett’s portrayal of a man bitterly aware that his talents are unreliable armor against the perceived sin of his homosexuality.

The Almost Man may be slight, but how many films can pack equal amounts of emotional nuance and inappropriately sprayed urine into just 75 minutes?

An intimate, elusive drama about the boundaries of friendship and nationality, Fräulein presents immigrant lives with significantly more empathy than detail. For some, though, the movie’s narrative shorthand will be enough.

The movie’s stunning underwater photography (fearlessly captured by Mr. Ravetch) effectively dilutes the saccharine tone.

From its spectacularly detailed aesthetic to the characters’ march down well-worn personality paths, Downton Abbey argues insistently for the status quo.

Capturing the poetry of bodies at rest and a landscape frozen in time (filming was done primarily in the Santa Clarita area of California), Chayse Irvin’s exquisite 35-millimeter photography is dreamy and sometimes devastating.

As slick as a blood spill and as single-minded as a meat grinder, Nobody hustles us along with a swiftness that blurs the foolishness of its plot and the depravity of its message.

The film is not a primer on this heartbreaking condition. Instead it recounts a deeply personal, highly subjective and inarguably thought-provoking story of one family’s quest for a certain kind of peace.

Like Alverson’s 2015 character study, “Entertainment,” The Mountain sets forth a profoundly anhedonic vision of America — and humanity — that’s simultaneously upsetting and mesmerizing.

Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.

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.

Despite its visual flair and unrelentingly taut atmosphere, The Lodge is more successful in sustaining unease — like the eerie, unexplained shots of a spooky dollhouse — than in building a convincing narrative

Seoul Searching is rude, funny, silly and poignant. Above all, it’s kind; Mr. Lee understands that belonging is a feeling that many of us may never experience.

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

Monsters effortlessly compels. The ending may be pure sci-fi schmaltz, but it's schmaltz that this viewer, at least, could believe in.

Candid and empathetic, the movie’s segments can feel rushed and unfocused; yet they have a ragged intimacy that argues implicitly for an individual’s right to choose, without interference or condemnation.

The movie’s emotional potency is undeniable, its slow crescendo of wounded feelings and shimmering photography leaving unexpected imprints on the eyes and heart.

Mr. Murray creates a beguiling, visually rich canvas.

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

Essentially a one-man show, The Guilty necessarily vibrates to the rhythms of its lead.

A kooky, affectionate tribute that’s happily superficial.

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

Buster’s Mal Heart is about the making of a madman. It also aspires, with less success, to philosophically query the void at the center of modern life and Christianity’s failure to fill it.

This fairly rote tale of rural ghouls and their passing-through prey has its own hick charm, mostly because of performers who never overplay their hands.

Infused with an infectious love for its subject, Symphony of the Soil presents a wondrous world of critters and bacteria, mulch and manure.

The tone is unabashedly partial, yet the women are such entertaining company it’s hard to mind.

Mr. Wood has created a poignant portrait of an artist unable to escape the stamp of her class or the burdens of aging.

Sweet, funny and ultimately rather touching.

An unusually restrained and genuinely eerie little movie perched at the intersection of faith, folklore and female puberty.

Unfolding with a minimum of dialogue, Francisca’s maturation from watcher to doer would be laughable if performed with less nuance or photographed with less originality.

Though the film’s ice-cold blend of the cerebral and the atavistic can be off-putting, it enables a queasy portrait of moral disengagement that lingers long after Simon has slipped from the screen.

For those who care about the winning and losing of championship belts, the film's slow-motion attention to pugilistic style and powerhouse punches is thrillingly instructive.

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

Vividly painting Queens in the early 1990s as a landscape of crack and graffiti, the filmmakers go on to smother any menace with a swoony-upbeat soundtrack and an “oh, those kooky kids” tone.

Assembled without frills or fuss, A Man Named Pearl is as much a portrait of a small Southern town as of an unassuming black folk artist.

Rigorously structured and glacially paced, this sophomore feature from Andrea Pallaoro (after his 2015 family tragedy, “Medeas”) is a minimalist portrait of brutal isolation and extreme emotional anguish.

Damsel may feel 20 minutes too long, but it fills them with attitude and cheek. Here, the frontier is not just a crucible of reinvention, but a wilderness that can make you more than a little crazy.

It’s a vintage flashbulb moment of two men at the peak of their talents, one on his way to securing his second world championship, and the other between the twin triumphs of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.”

Marrying fact and fiction, Jane Goldman’s seamy screenplay is wildly overstuffed; but the director, Juan Carlos Medina, gives the music hall scenes a rowdy authenticity.

Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.

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.

Pim's withdrawn demeanor and inability to verbalize his emotions - the character is basically one big ache - make it more challenging than it should be to immerse ourselves in his journey.

This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.

Despite the strange, echoing beauty of its images ... "Luz" is, as a whole, visually numbing and mentally taxing.

A picture so modest and minor-key that the emotional bruise it leaves may take days to develop.

Appealing, partly because it’s so unembarrassed by its genre's done-to-death social-injustice themes, this undercooked blend of science fiction and family drama virtually dares you to turn up your nose.

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

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.

In Kit’s world the absent father (a familiar theme from girls' novels including "Little Women" and "A Little Princess") is an epidemic, and the picture makes this the impetus for children's resourcefulness and emotional development.

Has plenty of humor but no satirical bite.

A limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous.

"How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.

Somehow the happy screams of children whirling above a neutered reactor sound a lot less comforting than they should.

Photographed in crisp black and white by Nat Bouman, this enormously likable movie keeps sexual politics on the back burner and the universal search for connection front and center.

A sad chronicle of absent fathers and messed-up mothers, drugs as currency and violence as the period at the end of every argument.

Moments of insight flare like fireflies and disappear, whether from underfinancing or overambition is unclear. Either way, this maddening mind game is likely to be more enthusiastically received in philosophy classrooms than in the multiplex.

The director, Joe Lynch, concocts an uneven blend of video game setups and corporate satire.

Never forgetting the rush of the game, the directors regularly serve up fleet footage of the team’s highs and lows, allowing the rhythms of the field to set the film’s volatile beat.

A lively romp through terrain less traveled than you might think.

Augmented by a trove of archival footage reaching back to the 1930s, Jesse Feldman's buoyant cinematography merges political history and sports mania into a triumphant timeline.

A wry, mournful study of midlife crisis.

Mr. Goldthwait exercises so much caution that you want to get behind his characters and push.

A sterile drama about state-controlled procreation, “The Assessment,” the first feature from the French director Fleur Fortuné, is visually stark and emotionally chilling.

With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.

The film’s escalating violence frequently smothers its sweeter, more haunting moments, such as Night using the game to ease Apolline’s fear of losing her brother.

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.

Unearthing a decent sample of these former members, as well as a wealth of archival film and photographs, the directors elicit testimony that’s diversely sharp, spacey, nostalgic and heartbreaking.

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

Blessed with natural performances and brisk pacing, this unusual little movie would like us to know just one thing: Passion is fine, but a pal is priceless.

This emphatic and empathetic documentary (directed by Sanjay Rawal and narrated by Forest Whitaker) presents the plight of our farm laborers as modern-day slavery.

Merging old-fashioned comedy routines with up-to-the-minute politics - all of it enabled by fun-loving personalities and a gift for rousing original songs - the ladies emit a genuine warmth that reels audiences in.

None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.

Inert yet strangely compelling film.

Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer.

The result is a lovers-on-the-lam blast of pure pulp escapism, so devoted to diversion that you probably won’t even notice the corn.

Low-key and low-tech, Lunch coasts on the earned wisdom of pros who know how to work a room. Right up to the arrival of their separate checks.

A story that, though sickly fascinating, is as crudely rendered as its images.

The movie observes collective pain with endearing absurdity.

Beautiful Boy is the antithesis of melodrama. Painfully perceptive and relentlessly raw, this intimate observation of a couple in extremis plays out with such subdued intensity that, by the end, audiences will very likely feel as wrung out as its embattled stars.

Wistful but never sentimental, it quietly turns the fortunes of one little store into a comment on the fate of many.