Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Battling a preposterous plot and second-tier performances that are, at best, serviceable, this roll-along thriller from Scott Mann works its keister off to turn beef jerky into chateaubriand.

The shocks are short and sharp, the acting is strongest where it counts, and the director of photography, Adam Marsden, washes everything in a swampy green that makes spooks pop.

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

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.

Love + War chooses to go wide rather than deep, resulting in a movie that, while pleasingly dynamic, offers less psychological insight than the photographs she has gambled everything to take. And perhaps that’s as it should be.

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

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

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

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

The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.

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

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

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

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

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.

If the twisty finale underwhelms, Mr. Carreté’s enigmatic style and textured images offer their own doomy rewards.

The violence is quick and occasionally inventive, with little of the attenuated nastiness that characterizes so many genre pictures, and the photography ranges from brightly sun-kissed to down-and-dirty.

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

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

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

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.

That it eventually - if barely - succeeds is due more to the resilience of its actors than to the discipline of its makers.

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

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

It may leave many bases uncovered (a section on groundbreaking European legislation is inadequately explained), but it will also leave you looking a lot more closely at what you put on your skin, in your mouth and underneath your sink.

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

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.

It’s all a little silly, but Mr. Mickle’s restrained gravity stifles the impulse to laugh.

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.

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

Ms. Howe is frequently riveting: a scene in which she repeatedly, and with waxing abuse, drunk-calls her former husband (an excellent Keith Allen) may make more than a few viewers squirm in recognition.

Such an uncommon artist warrants a less conventional survey than this one.

Mr. Kaufman’s talent can be debated, but his love for his job is stamped on every garish, oozy frame.

The film’s loose naturalism and strong acting — Chris Browning, as a liaison between the F.B.I. and the reservation, is especially enjoyable — are slyly seductive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Imaginatively filmed by Peter Sova, Push has a dizzying, chaotic energy that pulls you along. Paul McGuigan directs with maximum efficiency and minimum use of computers, creating effects that feel satisfyingly tangible.

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

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

While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.

A familiar underdog story told with unusual sensitivity.

An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film’s near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.

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

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

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.

Probes class consciousness with rather more sensitivity than originality.

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

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

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.

Though speckled here and there with uneasy comedy, Toll Booth is a psychological pressure cooker that could blow its lid at any moment.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The splatter is deployed cautiously and sometimes wittily, the story moving briskly from wishes granted to costs exacted with the help of familiar faces (including a warm Sherilyn Fenn as Clare’s surrogate mother) and a sympathetic lead.

Vividly depicting the indignities of the flesh, Porfirio offers a harshly sensual portrait of a man imprisoned by paralysis and the callousness of the state.

These drifting, unresolved stories may lack dramatic punch, but Mr. Nikolic, who teaches film at the New School, draws lovely performances from his cosmopolitan cast and oodles of atmosphere from a spare piano-and-strings soundtrack.

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

In images veering from literal to cryptic to surreal, the movie presents a society where the weak are exploited and the vulnerable unprotected.

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

The Inner Cage isn’t exactly a feast for the senses. Even so, if you’re in the mood to listen, the film’s careful conversations occasionally serve up food for thought.

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

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

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.

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

Before our eyes, Laura’s lengthening limbs and deepening introspection become the point of a movie that begins with a child and ends with a young woman.

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

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.

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

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

Bathed in a funk of testosterone, and heaving with homophobia and misogyny, My Father Die is a trashy jewel.

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

Splinterheads gains traction from an eclectic cast that knows how to work a line.

To enjoy The Devil’s Candy, then, one must tolerate slapdash writing (by the director, Sean Byrne) and profoundly irritating adult behavior. Yet Mr. Byrne...somehow whips his ingredients into an improbably taut man-versus-Satan showdown.

Reveling in the vivid Bangkok locations, Geoff Boyle’s photography is crisp and bright, and Dion Lam’s action choreography unusually witty.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Tobias Lindholm’s screenplay sacrifices credibility for quirkiness.

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.

In stark contrast to their furry, blundering star, the makers of Paddington have colored so carefully inside the lines that any possibility of surprise or subversion is effectively throttled.

Now and then, brisk restaurant visits and slow strolls through a cemetery (an unnecessary foreshadowing, given the movie’s title) ventilate the film, but Final Portrait (adapted from Lord’s 1965 book, “A Giacometti Portrait”) is pretty thin on drama.

The result might feel overlong and overwrought; yet thanks to Bader’s clever plotting and fruity dialogue — as well as strong supporting players — this grimy picture climaxes more satisfyingly than expected.

Perhaps stifled by the cultural and commercial clout of its source material (a multimedia juggernaut of books, movies, television shows and a stage musical), Death Note feels rushed and constricted.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

This first feature from Ari Issler and Ben Snyder (who both wrote the script with Mr. Almanzar, a military veteran) refuses to revel in violence.

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

Swift and stealthy P2 is a canny exploitation of one of the urban woman’s greatest fears: the after-hours parking garage. Throw in a car that won’t start, a creepy security guard and a filmmaking team with perfect synchronicity, and the result is a minimalist nightmare.

Though in many respects an exemplary piece of filmmaking, “Part II” remains hobbled by a script that resolves two separate crises while leaving the movie itself in limbo. At least until Part III.

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.

The movie's lack of subtlety is countered by an unswerving commitment to impartiality.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Female-empowerment fantasy or just plain prurience, "Grave" is extremely efficient grindhouse. If there is any message here at all, it's don't mess with a novelist: being creative is her job.

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.

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.

Bunnylovr, the first feature from Katarina Zhu, touches on various themes, none of which feels fully realized. Yet there is such a sweet symbiosis between Zhu’s intimate, easy directing style and her unselfconscious performance in the lead role — beautifully illuminated by Daisy Zhou’s gentle cinematography — that the movie’s aimlessness rarely grates.

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

Methodical and efficient, the script (by Mr. Young and Adam Frazier) gets some mileage from its generic setting and zombie-infection theme, even if the croaking order is easily predicted.

Sharp yet overdetermined, Blumenthal doesn’t breathe naturally — it’s a comedy in a box. Just not a box that everyone will want to open.

The story is unremarkable, but its execution zings.

Claiming inspiration (in the film’s press notes) from Terrence Malick and others, Nash has attempted an ambitious blend of art house and slaughterhouse whose rug-pulling ending will polarize, even as its moody logic prevails.

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

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

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

Drawing much of its energy from an eclectic and fully integrated soundtrack, Skills Like This gazes indulgently on 20-something aimlessness and the comfort of assigned roles. In Mr. Miranda's hands sloth can be more appealing than you might think.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The rambling, uncertain tone engendered by Ms. Sichel’s striving to align her Buddhist beliefs with the harsh realities of terminal illness also weakens her story’s gravitational pull.

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

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

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.

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

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

This disorienting, dippy documentary makes one thing abundantly clear: for the Hubers, the toughest climb may be into their own heads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the film's geometrists who enthrall most, revealing that many of the shapes - one of which famously made the cover of a 1990 Led Zeppelin album - hold entirely new answers to Euclidean problems.

The role played by her camera in exacerbating Avery’s natural, adolescent self-absorption continues to nag; in the end, I was less concerned for the wildly indulged Avery -- whose own narration reveals a charismatic and extremely fortunate young woman -- than for the hearts breaking around her.

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

Automatons is driven less by its hints of suicide bombers than by its rigorous adherence to a time when robots were played by inverted dustbins and battles were represented by dots converging on a crackling screen. This lack of sophistication is enormously endearing, leaving us with the comforting notion that the end of the world will look a lot like the beginning of television.

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

Willets Point may not be the slickest of movies, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in heart.

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

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

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

Cam is more successful as an oddly feminist tale of gutsy self-reliance than as a fully developed drama.

While the movie is rightfully more interested in lauding her bravery than highlighting her sometimes abrasive personality, these small moments help to humanize a portrait that can at times seem more awestruck than enlightening.

The durable director Lloyd Kaufman lobs multiple notions at the screen to see what sticks. In a movie held together with this many slimy fluids, pretty much everything does.

A documentary that yearns to be an adventure movie, Stolen Seas can't resist drowning its invaluable insights in thundering, drum-heavy music and flashing visuals. Magnificent in its thoroughness and nuance, this dense, multifaceted study of Somali piracy really needs to settle down.

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

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

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

Drop is pleasantly silly and minimally suspenseful.

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

The effect is by turns comical, maddening and endearing as Escobar reaches for more ambitious ideas about the political appeal of the authoritarian hero; but “Leonor” is finally too mired in its film-within-the-film frolics for more serious themes to gain traction.

Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.

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.

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

There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler Infested, yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable.

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

The inescapable impression is of a picture buckling beneath the weight of its subject’s achievements. Yet there are moments when the focus shifts and the movie shrugs off its hagiographic shackles.

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

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

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

Bathed in a nostalgic glow that just avoids maudlin, the group’s problems — a sexless marriage, an unexpected job loss — bark but don’t bite. Scenes flirt with cliché, yet the writing has spark.

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.

An overwrought, undercooked tale of crazy love and crazier revenge.

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

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

More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.

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

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.

Before Silver hijacks the plot, Rodrigo Cortés's smart, talky screenplay and tense direction hold our attention, as much for the unpredictability of the story as the ease with which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy slide into their roles.

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

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

Taking a credibility-straining premise and running with it, the Dutch director Arne Toonen gives Black Out way more energy than sense. Luckily, his antihero, Jos (Raymond Thiry), lacks neither.

Though the directors, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, smartly choose examples from among the working poor — reframing obesity as chronic malnourishment in areas where it’s easier to find a burger than a banana — they’re reluctant to get down in the political dirt.

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

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

A serviceable burst of high-end hokum, Devil classes up a flimsy, religion-themed plot (by M. Night Shyamalan) with the kind of limber cinematography only someone like Tak Fujimoto can deliver.

This one is for Hank Williams fanatics only, and Mr. Thomas puts a dark and subtle sheen on a disappointingly watery script. Cover versions of Williams's songs - several sung by his daughter, Jett - remind us why he mattered, even as the movie fails to do the same.

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

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

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

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.

It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working a low body count and a slow burn, Desolation is a decent short film that’s been unwisely expanded to feature length.

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

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

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

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

The result is a sometimes punishingly theatrical experiment that teeters on the verge of surreality, transfixing us with the promise of something terrible lurking just beyond those ratty curtains.

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

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

A homage of sorts to the low-budget trash of the period — and a mordantly humorous jab at its excesses — Censor gazes on movie history with style and commitment, but little apparent purpose beyond simulation.

Roiling with jealousy, suicide and latent lesbian urges, The Moth Diaries dances on the border between hallucination and reality without fully committing to either. Yet the film's narrative frailties are offset by impeccable performances and a consistently eerie tone, helped along by a location as forbidding as the "Overlook."

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

Despite a female-empowerment theme and an adversary fairly bristling with fancy weaponry, Prey never builds a head of steam.

Cinematographer Du Jie delivers moments of visual ecstasy that almost make us forget that they’re framing a reckless cipher.

Tame and inoffensive, The Haunting of Molly Hartley is no more than a big-screen lasso for the "Gossip Girl" and "Supernatural" demographic.

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

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

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

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

Alternately tedious and illuminating, this deeply honest and scattered movie revels in its lack of purpose.

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.

A sedate chronicle of the highs and lows of the environmental movement, Earth Days is less a rousing call to action than a bittersweet stroll down memory lane.

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

Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.

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

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

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

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

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

The Banishing never finds its groove.

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

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

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

A beautifully filmed and patiently explained assessment of a proposal to build five hydroelectric dams in the Patagonia region of Chile.

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.

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

The director, Marc Forster (who wrote the script with Sean Conway), fashions such a languid, tipsy aesthetic around the seemingly happy marriage of Gina and James (Blake Lively and Jason Clarke) that it’s easy to keep watching.

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.

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

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

13 Sins is occasionally inventive but mostly uninvolving.

By turns alarming and poignant, Alex Parkinson’s infuriatingly deferential film recounts how Carter — passionately attached to Lucy and admittedly clueless about how to facilitate her adjustment — abandoned her life to live with Lucy on a remote island. Her devotion is extraordinary, but her obliviousness is shocking.

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